Recipe for Maklouba: Upside Down Chicken and Eggplant Dish | Legal Nomads.

Taking inspiration from this recipe posted on the Legal Nomads website, I made Jordanian Maklouba, which literally means “upside down”.  This dish was fantastic and is marked by the use of baharat or “7 spices” – a happy marriage of, you guessed it, 7 spices.  I ended up omitting the eggplant from this recipe, but it was still delicious, nonetheless, and my entire house smelled like a wonderful spice market.  I think you can easily make this into a vegetarian recipe by leaving out the meat entirely and using vegetable stock to cook the rice.  The next time I make this recipe I plan to roast the eggplant and cauliflower to add a nice sweetness to the dish.

Once building my pot, it was filled to the brim and looked like this:

As I realized, there is an art to making maklouba.  You can be very creative and make fun patterns with your veggies.  I added carrots to the bottom for some flair.

I definitely recommend using a large enough plate to flip the maklouba from the pot, which I foolishly did not do here.

To make 1 cup of the baharat, I mixed the following:

• 2 tablespoons of black pepper
• 1 tablespoon of ground coriander
• 1 tablespoon of ground cinnamon
• 1 tablespoon of ground cloves
• 1 1/2 tablespoons of ground cumin
• 1/2 teaspoon of ground cardamom
• 2 teaspoons of ground nutmeg
• 2 tablespoons of paprika

The maklouba recipe only calls for 1 tablespoon of baharat so I stored the remainder in an air-tight container to be used again for my next round of maklouba.