Weeknight Beef Kebabs, Yellow rice + Salad plate.

These kebabs, yellow rice and salad plate are the perfect weeknight prep item.

Baladi Salad & Beef Kebab Rice Plate: https://www.cookwell.com/recipe/za-atar-kebab-yellow-rice-baladi-salad
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today I’m going to show you how I like to prep some yellow rice a little kind of Egyptian inspired baladi salad some beef kebabs and then a little white sauce to top it all off so let’s [Music] cook okay so one of the best lifestyle skills I think a lot of homecooks need to learn is not to only cook when you’re hungry but to actually find those times and gaps in work or the day or the week weekend and figure out how to make meals you know when maybe you’re not necessarily hungry but you can prep some of these components ahead of time and set yourself up for Success when you do ultimately get hungry because I know for a lot of us you know life can just hit us fast and it’s like oh my gosh at 7 7:30 and you’re like I have no idea what to make for dinner but if you can learn how to maybe prep just one component or a couple components ahead of time it then sets you up and makes the rest of the process easier and you know a dish like this or kind of a recipe like this all of these components could be prepped ahead of time you could maybe just do the salad first we’re going to do all three in this video you could do the kebabs first and then cook your rice later so really figuring out those style of recipes I think is really important and not only cooking when you’re hungry but learning how to set yourself up up for success for those other little gaps throughout the day like you know maybe you maybe when you first get home you have 30 minutes and it’s like like okay well I’m just going to start my rice or whatever and get the rice done and then I’m going to go about the rest of my night cuz I’ve got some other things going on and being able to bring those things up and think about them as they going throughout your day is is really really important again more of a lifestyle skill of homecooks which are are kind of those harder skills to learn because they’re all very unique you know based on our our constraints so I’ve got the garlic chopped up also this is for the rice I’m just going to quickly sauté everything in here so so I’ve got this over like high heat um we’re going to do some rice as well this is just jasmine rice really any rice Works um I do want to do some testing on different rice varieties eventually you know so many so many different things to do but for purposes of this I’m just going to do volum metric so this is I’ll add a little bit more water so throwing in toasting the garlic and the rice together and then additionally I’ve got two ingredients that are going to turn this into the yellow rice so a little bit of turmeric this is going to give it most of the color and again you don’t really need much to make it yellow and then um chicken bullan seasoning or like chicken seasoning very common addition that a lot of like restaurants and stuff we use um and used in a lot of different Cuisines as well you’d be kind of surprised but this is mainly a salt and MSG uh source and then it also you can see it’s a little bit yellow as well on my fingers so it’ll give it a little bit of yellow color not much but really I’m using it for the salt and kind of that MSG and then this has got like onion powder and some other things in it like that and then you could do this on the stove top in a saucepan I just like toasting it um ahead of time in a pan and then I’m going to throw it in the rice cooker back there again more of a lifestyle thing like if you don’t you know I’m going to like this pan takes 2 seconds to wash and then I’ll just keep it in my rice cooker just cuz I know it comes out pretty much perfect every time okay so I’m going to put my ingredients away okay then next up we’re going to quickly make this um again kind of it’s like an Egyptian inspired baladi salad so there’s this place in um in Austin kg barbecue they always have this as a side it’s kind of just like red onion tomato um cucumber and then I think they add parsley to theirs I don’t have parsley I’m going to add a little bit of Aleppo pepper little bit of cumin lemon juice and uh a little bit of olive oil just a really nice kind of make aead salad holds up well in the fridge all right and then like I said just going to toss this all into oh spilled some no worries going to toss this into the rice cooker and then adding probably this is probably 1.25 or about 1.5 Parts water and then just like that Rice done and out of the way great example of like you know Take 5 minutes just throw it on the counter get it done okay so next up very simple salad also this tomato believe it or not is from my little garden outside um I I decided to see if I could plant some just because it is you know pretty warm in Texas and we got really lucky with the weather that a frost did not kill it but so yeah this is this is literally from my garden um another reason why I was like man I’ve got some I’ve got some fresh tomatoes um if you are just buying tomatoes from the grocery store I would probably look for some cherry tomatoes um just because this time of year you know the like you’re not going to be able to really find many great tomatoes um but cherry tomatoes are definitely still pretty good especially in a salad like this also my puppy is still working on his filming etiquette so you guys hear some whining apologies we’re we’re working on it and then for me I’m just going to throw everything into this container which this is just what I’ll use to throw in the fridge um roughly going to do equal parts tomato cucumber and uh onion so we’re going to do kind of cut these halves into three roughly trying to match the size of those tomatoes in there kind of going for that chunkier salad but I mean you could make these any size you want so cucumber and then lastly do about a quarter of an onion here all right then next up we’ll do some lemon juice very basic vinegarette of lemon juice and then some olive oil so half a lemon going to do a little bit of Aleppo pepper just a little sprinkle little little touch of uh little touch of color and then also a little bit of little hit of spice and then I’m actually going to grind up this cumin seed Just a Touch man love that fresh grounded cumin okay then last just little Spritz of oil in there you know that’s really probably about 15 grams worth just like a nice fresh aromatic salad and man like all these flavors too like they’ll sit really nice so there you go component number two done rice done the Bal salad done going to throw this in the fridge and then last up are kind of the the kebabs which also I’m going to keep ridiculously ridiculously simple I’ll actually keep out this I’ll just use up the rest of that lemon why not wipe this surface a little clean okay so this is this is 937 lean ground beef kind of going for a little bit of a you know lower calorie variant here um if you use higher fat like 8020 or 8515 or something definitely will be able to get better Browning I mean there’s just no way around it um but you know this is still going to be great with uh 937 then um for salt purposes again you can eyeball this I generally like using 1.5% um salt by weight so this is you know a pound 450 G so 5 to 6 G of salt normally pretty good for me then where is it again I just love zitar it’s a mix of Sesame thyme what else sumach it’s kind of like already made to go so I like keeping these very simple We’ll add let’s call it got seven grams of that so that’d be about you know a little over almost 2% and then we’ll use that that uh other half of the L lemon in there give it a little bit of Tang and then all I’m going to do is just grade up um this other half of an onion so if you have if you have like half of an onion laying around just grating it up throwing it in ground beef one of the greatest ways at least in my opinion to to use it up all right and always be careful with box graders um I know like people I feel like I’ve had the most cuts from box graders not like I don’t think I’ve really hardly ever cut myself with a knife but I have definitely cut myself with a box grader and micro grader several times so always be very careful with these guys so just go slow get it down to the nub and you know don’t let that on your go to waste so there in goes our onion and all we got to do is mix everything up crying a little bit from these guys okay and then all that’s left to do I mean form these into any shape you want again you could put these on SK skewers over charcoal like during the summer I think that is the move for this like I do love that what I’m going to kind of do is I’m going to do them in logs but I’m going to kind of flatten them a little bit um which will just give us a little bit more surface area when we go to Brown These and then just being I’m not trying to make these like look perfect or anything I mean they’re just going to get fried up anyway and they’ll they’ll just taste really good regardless so loosely Loosely portioning these all right and also another example of like another stopping point where like you don’t actually have to cook it you could just make the meat throw that in the fridge and then come back to it whenever you want to so what I’m going to do is actually I’m going to do these back on the stove here so let me switch up the camera angles then we’ll finish everything and put it all together okay so we’re ready to I had this preheating while I moov stuff around and I think this is another key I think a lot of homecooks Miss is like not letting their pans fully kind of preheat and get hot enough so right now I’m trying to get this above 400° f um so we kind of get that really quick sear and then just going to throw a little bit of oil down and then we’ll lay our kebabs kind of go up and down and again I have this positioned weirdly in the center like this just for filming purposes um normally I’d want to have it over two burners in here and then as always this would be a great time to continue cleaning up some stuff um so I guess that’s what I’ll do just cuz I’m literally waiting on this so just going to quickly rinse out that onion grater over here clean off the uh uh stainless steel pan that I use for the rice and I’ll even do my container that I use for the ground beef for okay so quickly got my dishes done and then we’ll go ahead and start scraping and flipping you can see we got some nice like sticking browning points that’s exactly what I’m looking for little bit of color on there for so you can really see I mean if you like start to think about all the components like involved like cooking does not have to be this stressful thing where again like I’ve got nothing to do i’ I’ve cleaned my dishes I’m just waiting for this to sear um you know I’m not like I didn’t wait until the last minute to do my cooking again not always avoidable but I think the more we ask ourselves as homecooks like what does my whole day look like like when am I going to find the time to cook um and kind of have those conversations with yourself about you know whatever your situation is whether you’ve got to cook for the family uh for yourself or you’ve got a busy day at work like trying to anticipate some of these things ahead of time really can set yourself up for for so much success and then you can make dishes that you really like too obviously um but yeah this is like one of the problems I think about a lot with home cooking where it’s not really a lot of the skills you you miss out on maybe a very chop down edited video is like well when do I find the time to clean my dishes like when should I be wiping away my cutting board when should I be putting things away um so hopefully you guys kind of appreciate that because like one of the things I think is good about this style of video is being able to just like you know like showcase some of these things like I don’t know what you’ll take away but you know I hope I hope you get something out of it okay these are probably done going to flip them you could internally uh temp these too if you wanted to um but I can feel they’re pretty firm get those nice smells from the Browning and then yeah that’s really all there is to it so I’m going to transfer stuff back um put everything in the containers pop it in the fridge and then I’m actually G to come back in a few hours and uh we’ll kind of assemble the The Rice Bowl with the kebab and the white sauce it’s so it is actually an entire another day later just because man during the winter it just gets dark so quickly so like I want to try to get out in the evening and then by the time I get back from being outside I’m like well it’s kind of dark in here and it’s just easier to film when I have at least some natural light so here we are but again I mean it doesn’t really matter because this is like why I love making meals like this um and for me too I I swear there is a difference about having them kind of in individual containers and then heating them up together rather than just like having four prepackaged things I don’t know maybe it’s just some weird psychological thing but for me it always feels a little bit nicer when you kind of need to portion things out and and build your plate still rather than if you do all the uh pre- portioning yourself so we’ve got our yellow rice actually do a little bit more also I I was snacking a little bit last night on this CU I had to save it for the video but couldn’t completely help myself okay so we’ll do three of the kebabs then just warm this up oh and then I forgot so this whu I did make off camera um or I I filmed the clips it’s literally just one part Mayo one part uh whole fat yogurt and then bunch of Dill bunch of black pepper super simple Herby sauce really good all right beautiful and man like these do really reheat quite nicely hopefully you can see this in this side camera here okay so to assemble this um you know shake up the salad a little bit here and then I’m I’m going to add this kind of directly over the rice think that’ll kind of look nice get a little couple extra little pieces of cucumber in there and then for the sauce I’m just going to kind of drizzle this over our kebabs we can obviously add more and then another little final addition I’m going to add just kind of spilled a little bit add a little bit more of this Aleppo pepper just give that a little like fresher crunch this is um a topic I think I’ll either make a video on this channel or the main Channel but I do want to talk about adding spices at the end of cooking I feel like it’s a very underrated technique um that is that is really really quite useful so there you have it I mean Kebab a a little spicy a little creamy with the sauce just going to taste really good we’ve got our s we’ve got our um our yellow rice with a BAL salad I mean that looks pretty amazing quick photo and then I’m diving into this let’s di in these are some of my favorite meals it’s just like it’s it’s very filling it’s rice it’s fresh it’s it’s got all the aromatics you want in it little bit of that creaminess from that um Dill black pepper sauce and then I mean yeah I I just love meals like this and they again they feel so much fresher even though like again this was just sitting in my fridge but it feels like I just kind of made it um so yeah hopefully you guys enjoy this video recipe for this will be up on the website as always um but you know feel free to adjust with whatever you happen to have in the fridge I’m going to finish this and I will catch you all in the next one peace y’all