sumac!

there's a place near my office, called the amish market. same ownership (but apparently, different management) as the great one on ninth avenue (fantastic sandwiches! remember the good old days when you could pick up some tasty, overstuffed "special" sandwiches, sneak'em into the $5 movie at worldwide plaza?) and i went there for lunch twice this week (not knowing that they have great brick oven pizza). i wanted to try something different, i.e. not my standby of turkey, lettuce, tomato and avocado on whole wheat!). i ordered the lamb kebobs and the lamb gyro. they offer a generous portion for their wrap sandwiches, but the lamb kebobs were a little chewy (even when grilled "medium-rare") and the ground lamb for the gyros had some alarming white gristle. i don't really want to know what that was about.

but the fellas that man the grill and create the sandwiches are nice as can be. i was curious about their sauteed onion preparation--there was some spice added to them which lent a pale pink color. so unusual, it looked like a filipino sauteed squid dish. i had to ask what the spice was. and they explained that it was called sumac. and they pulled out a jar of the stuff and gave me a generous sample to take home.

now, when i think of sumac, i automatically think of the label on the bottle of calamine lotion--how it "dries the oozing and weeping poison ivy, poison oak, and poison sumac." i think of itching and rashes. i don't think of adding it to my saute.

but this spice is wonderful...tangy, with a great color.

and it turns out, the spice sumac (very different from the toxic ornamental varieties that require the use of calamine) is ground from the dried berries and often mixed with salt. it's said to be most popular in turkey (sumak, somak) and iran (somagh), sauteed with onions or sprinkled over rice. the fruit sumac is often pureed into a paste and used in lebanon, syria and egypt in the same way that tamarind is used in indonesian and indian cooking.