United Arab Emirates Unit

I think my primary awareness of the United Arabe Emirates (UAE) comes form movies. It’s a common location for action movies. Famously Tom Cruise did that stunt outside of a skyscraper, which just watching terrifies me as I imagine all the things that could go wrong. So, as we reached the United Arab Emirates Unit in our geography lessons for Asia I was pretty curious.

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United Arab Emirates Unit resources

Oh! I forgot to add Garfield! I know about the United Arab Emirates from Garfield because Garfield was always threatening to mail Nermal to Abu Dhabi.

I know that is a super useful bit of information, right?

Back to those UAE unit resources, sorry I got distracted.

Oh wait, one more story. So I like to find pictures from the country like the one up above, and I found this amazing palace, or I think it was a palace, I didn’t write it down since I ended up not using it. But, it has some really unique copyright laws for how pictures of architecture work in UAE, so while I could use the picture in the way I intend to here in the United States, I’m not entirely sure I could in the UAE, and since this is online it could be viewed there, so I didn’t use the picture.

Now for really real back to the United Arab Emirates Unit

I always feel sorry for countries later in the alphabet because it is so hard to find good information on them. I guess people get to somewhere in the “M’s” and just give up.

• 10 UAE facts– these are fairly straightforward and not super interesting
• 15 UAE facts– It has FIVE more facts than the last post, a whole FIVE
• 39 United Arab Emirates Facts– I’m gonna admit most of these facts aren’t super interesting, but it does give you a good idea of who the country is
• 55 UAE facts– but look at these 55 facts! If you just look at one of these, look at this one, it has the best pictures, and their facts are slightly more interesting, even if that more interesting is just slightly different phrasing to go with sparkly pictures
  

Excuse, me I just remembered I need to make some bread dough for dinner for tonight. I’ll be back in just a second (hits save).

As a matter of amazing timing, the Geography Now video for UAE came out right as I was about to reach it, so I delayed just a little bit so we could watch it, because let me tell you…. the video we saw for Vanatu, it’s scarring.

Okay, maybe not really scarring, it focused on something I don’t care to focus on.

And the Flag Friday video, which again, my kids don’t care about, but I enjoy.

Okay, that’s our resources. Now on to the UAE recipe!

United Arab Emirates Unit recipe: Biryani

I remember back when Jeff and I were first married we would frequently make Hamburger Helper as meals. We were both working and it was easy to make just get a pound of hamburger and whatever flavor we picked.

They had a couple of rice recipes that I loved.

Now, I’m trying to mostly cook from scratch, so ever since I’ve been trying to recreate that one pot rice meal that I used to love so much.

This was not a successful attempt. Sigh, someday. I will continue my search for an amazing one pot rice dish, but Biryani was not it.

Biryani ingredients

• 3 cups rice (the original recipe used basmati, but we used jasmine)
• 5 chicken breasts cut into bite sized pieces
• 1/2 inch of freshly grated ginger (about 1 tablespoon)
• 1 teaspoon turmeric
• 1/4 teaspoon chili powder
• 1/4 teaspoon cinnamon
• 1/4 teaspoon cloves
• 1/4 teaspoon cardamom
• 2 onions chopped
• 1 cup plain yogurt
• 2 tablespoons lemon juice
• 4 tablespoons mint
• 4 tablespoons coriander leaves
• 4 tablespoons oil
• small chili pepper minced
• 4 tablespoons toasted cashew nuts
• 1/8 teaspoon saffron
• 2 1/2 teaspoons salt
• 10 cups water

Making Biryani

Rereading the instruction, I now know why it might not have been popular, aside from I’m probably the only person who was going to like the flavor mixture. So, I’ll have official directions in the printable card, and here I’ll write how I’m betting it went when I did this.

1. Read through the instructions, thankfully early enough you realize you need to marinate it for a while. That crisis is averted.
2. Defrost some cooked chicken. I roast whole chicken and then freeze it in meal-sized portions when I’m making broth. Next, mix together the turmeric, ginger, chili powder, cinnamon, cloves, cardamom, and salt. Completely miss that the onions are supposed to be cooked.
3. Mix the onions, yogurt, lemon juice, mint, coriander (wait Jeff hates this so I left it out), jalapeno pepper, and oil with the chicken mess. Leave that to marinate.
4. Now here is where I messed up, I did not understand why I was cooking the rice in 10 cups of water, if I had, I would have followed that instruction. Instead, I made rice in my rice cooker. DO NOT DO THIS. Instead put it in a Dutch oven.
5. I came back an hour or so later, the rice was done cooking, and I toasted cashews to sprinkle on top.
6. I combined the chicken mixture with the rice in a glass dish, added the saffron, and shoved that in the oven for an hour at 350.
7. I removed it and dished up bowls of Biryani and sprinkled the cashew over mine, and only mine because everyone else refused to add it.

But, ours did not look like the Biryani in the picture I found. It does not have the bright yellow color. The rice also is not particularly flavorful.

Reading this over again as I’m writing this I can clearly see where I went wrong.

I assumed I knew what was supposed to happen and so did not follow the instructions. See, sometimes I’ll find recipes online for a country and it just does not make sense, because their directions are terrible (and I’m sure the directions on here have been rather bad too at times). So I did not take time to figure out why it said to use so much water to cook rice, and just assumed it was a typo.

That was my mistake.

I would try making this again, but the flavor base is one I am the only one who is really excited about it. About half of my family really does not like to eat meat with citrus flavoring. I’ve found only one or two recipes that will get by that rule, and there are so many other flavors in there that the citrus flavor was overwhelmed.

Final call, I’ll be adding toasted cashews to some other stir-fry I might make, but that’s the only thing I’ll really keep.

Though the more I write about this the more I’m curious to try cooking it again to cook it correctly.

Biryani

Print

This one-pot dish is a great way to experience the UAE culture.

Prep Time 15 minutes

Cook Time 1 hour

Additional Time 1 hour

Total Time 2 hours 15 minutes

Ingredients

• 3 cups rice
• 5 cooked chicken breasts cut into bite sized pieces
• 1/2 inch of freshly grated ginger (about 1 tablespoon)
• 1 teaspoon turmeric
• 1/4 teaspoon chili powder
• 1/4 teaspoon cinnamon
• 1/4 teaspoon cloves
• 1/4 teaspoon cardamom
• 2 onions chopped and cooked
• 1 cup plain yogurt
• 2 tablespoons lemon juice
• 4 tablespoons mint
• 4 tablespoons coriander leaves
• 4 tablespoons oil
• small chili pepper minced
• 4 tablespoons toasted cashew nuts
• 1/8 teaspoon saffron
• 2 1/2 teaspoons salt
• 10 cups water

Instructions

1. Mix together the turmeric, ginger, chili powder, cinnamon, cloves, cardamom, and salt. Mix this into the chicken and let sit as you gather the rest of the ingredients.
2. Add to the chicken mixture, the onions, yogurt, lemon juice, mint, coriander, chili pepper, and 2 tablespoons of oil. Mix well and marinate for 1 hour. This step can also be done earlier, and brought out to mix with the rice.
3. Cook the rice in 10 cups of water for 10 minutes in a Dutch Oven. Drain the rice, but keep 3 cups of the rice water. While it is cooking start to preheat the oven to 350.
4. In the bottom of the Dutch Oven place half of the rice, then layer the chicken mixture, and over that put the rest of the rice.. Pour the remaining oil over the top.
5. Mix the rice stock with the saffron and a teaspoon fo salt, then pour over the rice dish. Cover and cook for one hour.
6. While it cooks toast the cashews over a medium heat for 1-2 minutes. When you remove the Biryani from the oven garnish with the toasted cashews.

United Arab Emirates Unit notebooking pages

We filled out our Asia notebooking pages and had fun talking about the country. It is very unique.

UAE animals

I did not create any mini-books specifically for our UAE Unit, but here are a few animals from the United Arab Emirates you could use the animal report mini-books.

• Arabian wolf
• striped hyena
• foxes: red, Blanford, and Ruppell
• Asiatic caracal
• desert hedgehog

Some of what fascinated me about the country wasn’t specifically interesting facts, just how it’s structured.

• Emirates- the emirates in some ways are like the states here in the USA, but it’s also countries that willingly decided to work together and give up their autonomy as they recognized the changing world they occupied.
• It’s one of the few absolute monarchies still in existence AND it is both a Muslim state but also allows some amount of freedom of religion because they recognize if they want to bring in business they have to do that, it’s incredibly pragmatic.
• There are no permanent rivers or lakes, all of their water is either from underground reservoirs or collected rainwater (and there’s not much of this).
• It is also somewhat controversial because their land reclamation projects have destroyed some reefs.
• ROBOTIC camel racing! I repeat robotic camel racing. Excuse me I need to go see if I can find a video.
• There was actually someone who was kicked out for being too handsome, Omar Borkan Al Gala, they were worried female visitors might be too distracted by him
• Most of their drinking water comes from desalinization.

Okay, that makes so much more sense, though it’s still pretty hilarious. It’s robotic jockeys to replace the children who used to be the jockeys. It’s still pretty hilarious to watch.

Well, that’s our United Arabe Emirates Unit. I am now one step closer to getting all of our geography units written! Go me!

More great learning fun

Hmmm…. What should I share, let’s see what I pull out of this hat?

I grabbed 5th grade ideas.

• Harry Potter peg dolls
• California Unit
• Pollyanna book club
• Food web lesson
• Charlemagne lesson

Alexandermcnabb, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons