Mahshi

Kelly B

Kelly B

Curmodgeratrice
USA English
My computer has trouble with the special characters, and I'm not in this area often enough to try to fix it since I don't speak Arabic, but I cook the Arabic foods I learned from my mother-in-law (Egyptian/Lebanese.) So please excuse the attempts at Western spelling.
In the cilantro thread, mahshi was discussed. I had the impression that the word was a general word for "stuffed" that could refer to kousah (summer squash) or malfouf (cabbage) or grape leaves (warm with rice plus meat and tomato sauce and mint, of course, not the cold plain rice ones from other parts of the Mediterranean...) and maybe peppers, too.
So did you all have the same particular item in mind? And which was it?
 
    • No. "Mahshi" itself does evoke the image of one particular food - but, as you have always thought - any and all stuffed vegetables/leaves.

    Incidentally, Palestinian stuffed grape leaves are also warm - but we do stuff them with rice, as well as meat and spices (no tomato sauce). That's also what we use to stuff kuusa, malfuuf, filfel (peppers), betinjan (eggplant), and anything else that we feel like stuffing. One exception is potatoes, which get stuffed with only ground beef, onions, and spices.
     
    Thanks for the reply! I edited to add rice to my description of warm ones - sorry. I didn't mean that rice doesn't belong, but rather that you need all of those other wonderful things for them to be really good.


    Rats. I just realized I was downtown today, not far from the only store that carries decent grape leaves, but I didn't think to buy any. I'll have to go back - we're having them next week, you know.:D:p
     
    Hi, there

    There are many Stuffed foods such as you've mentioned and the following :

    1-Stuffed lamb :D (really)(Kharoof Mahshi)
    2-Onion-Stuffed chicken(Dajaj Mahshi bil Basal)
    3-Minced meat-Stuffed Potato(Batata Mahshiyyah bilaham mafroom

    So, don't wonder if there be lamb-stuffed camelet in future :)D ).Could you imagine it!

    Ayed's regards
     
    to add a little bit of grammar to this delicious thread :D i'd like to say that the word mahshi is the "ism maf3uul" of the verb ya7shu (=to stuff) that's why any food that's stuffed is ma7shi (actually the correct fasii7 pronounciation is ma7shu, but who cares about that now ;) )

    Back to recipes. In Egypt, as far as I know, we don't stuff grape leaves with meat, but with rice, cilantro (the leaves), persil, some people add tomato or tomato sauce, spices... (and it's my favourite of all types of mahshi) :)
    We stuff alsmot any kind of plants in which we can make a whole and fill it with stuffing (7ashw حَـشْـو) be it rice or meat or curry or feriik (some sort of wheat grain). And as Ayed said, some kinds of meat are also stuffed (chicken, pigeon, lamb...)
     
    Yes - I forgot about the meats that can be stuffed! :) As Cherine said, we stuff pretty much every type of vegetable that can be hollowed out and stuffed somehow. I'd say summer squash, eggplant, qare3 (a type of pumpkin), peppers, and potatoes are the most common - but the list doesn't end there. We also stuff carrots, beets, tomatoes, cucumbers, and lifet (not sure what it's called in English). And of course, we stuff grape leaves, lamb, and chicken.

    Incidentally, we have a kitchen device that is indispensable to stuffing. It is used to hollow out a vegetable. It is called مقورة (maqwara), which literally means "that which hollows out." Anyway, I haven't seen it in the US, and I don't even know what I would call it in English. Does anyone know? If there isn't a word for it in English, this would be proof of the linguisitc theory that language reflects reality (i.e. certain words do and don't exist because we do or don't need them :)).
     
    I have one (two, actually, but the handle fell off of the one from MIL). It's a vegetable corer, and I found many available on commercial sites.

    I'm going to have try the potato idea. That sounds great.

    I just got the grape leaves (and some ful medammes, too).
     
    Belhana we-shefa Kelly (bon appetit) :)
    We also stuff Cabbage (green cabbage, i'm not sure about other types of cabbage being stuffed).

    Just today a friend of mine told me that some people here stuff grapes with meat (so I was mistaken about my previous post) :)

    Potatoes are stuffed with meat. Tomatoes, green pepper, eggplants... with rice.

    Hope you'll like the potatoes :)
     
    Vegetable corer! Of course - completely logical. So I guess they do have them here. :)

    Grape leaves - yum. Sa7ten u 3afyeh!
     
    Josh Adkins said:
    It sounds like you may be talking about a turnip.
    Click to expand...

    That's what I thought, but I wasn't sure. I don't have an Arabic-English dictionary handy so I couldn't check.

    And yes, I forgot about cabbage. They're my favorite!
     
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