GREEN PEAS STEW (BAZELLA)
This Middle Eastern one-pot dish usually called "bazella" requires very few ingredients and is incredibly easy to make! Everyone I know makes this stew with ground beef or cubed beef, but growing up my mom always made this dish with chicken, and that’s how my own children eat it now.
INGREDIENTS
1 tablespoon olive oil
2 garlic cloves, full
1 onion, thinly sliced
500g chicken parts, skin and bone-on
2 tomatoes, chopped
One bag frozen green peas
2 carrots, chopped
2 potatoes, peeled and chopped
2 tablespoons tomato paste
1 tablespoon lemon juice
Salt and pepper, to taste
2 garlic cloves, minced
2 tablespoons coriander, roughly chopped
PREPARATION
1. In a large cooking pot, over medium-high heat, sauté the garlic cloves and onion slices until soft and translucent.
2. Season the chicken parts with salt and pepper then add them to the pot, searing them until they’ve slightly changed color on both sides, then add the tomato paste and chopped tomatoes, moving them around until they’ve softened.
3. Next, add the carrots, potatoes and green peas, and pour boiling water over them until the chicken is submerged.
4. Add the lemon juice, salt and pepper and stir to combine all the ingredients. Taste as you go, to make sure the flavor is to your liking. Add more lemon juice if you like it tangy or more seasoning if you like it to stand out more.
5. Allow the water to come to a boil, then cover, reducing the heat and bringing it to a simmer for approximately 40 minutes. Check on it after half an hour, to make sure the water hasn’t completely evaporated and the chicken is tender. If you feel the water volume has reduced tremendously, add more water, cover, and let it continue to cook. The idea here is to have enough sauce remaining for it to be a stew, so water is important.
6. Once the time is up, in a separate frying pan, sauté the coriander and minced garlic until fragrant, then immediately add it on top of the stew without mixing.
7. It is now ready to serve, and you can choose to have it with a side of rice, bread, salad or all three.
Notes:
Green peas are resilient, that is why they can be added to the stew early on in the process to cook with the meat. Other vegetables, such as okra or cauliflower are more likely to fall apart and would have to be added towards the end of the process for a quick boil before serving.
You can use canned tomatoes, instead of fresh tomatoes, or even peel and blend your tomatoes in a blender, which then allows you to eliminate the use of tomato paste.
