Sweet bulgur
Rummaging through the kitchen cupboards at my parents’ house can yield interesting discoveries: I found a jar that contained a viscous, caramel-colored paste. Can you guess what it was? I called the jar’s donor, Um Elias, mountain-dweller, mother of six and seasoned farmer. Her answer was: ” Debess el-enab,...
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Cream of pumpkin soup
When McDonald’s opened a franchise in Lebanon a few years ago, I felt indignation, contempt, anger and frustration. I just could not understand how my fellow Lebanese who had always been so keen on good food and fresh ingredients would patronize the king of fast foods. Reality has set in...
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Mulberry leaves tea
Most people who have a general knowledge of the Middle-East will tell you that the reason that Lebanese people speak French is due to the fact that France had a mandate on Lebanon for a few decades. Wrong. The reason that France had such an influence on Lebanon was...
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Amardeen Bars (Apricot bars)
If you have grown up in the Middle East, then amardeen was most likely in your pantry; an apricot paste sold in large one-pound sheets, it has an intense, tangy and sweet apricot flavor. The apricots are from a region in Syria near Damascus. Kids in the Middle-East eat...
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Tabbouleh, classic version
First rain inBeirut today since the beginning of summer, pouring with a vengeance; the streets turned into small rivers; traffic came to a complete stop; and with the sound of rain, the cacophony of cars honking. A five-minute jaunt into Achrafiyeh, the eastern side of town, took me an hour and...
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Eggplant pizza
We are still getting eggplants by the bushel; so instead of the usual baba ghannouj, we made eggplant-topped pizza today, with a zaatar-flavored crust. One important thing I learned while visiting Abu Kassem and his zaatar fields: Zaatar is a tremendously healthy herb, (strengthening immunity and increasing circulation for...
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Salad with zaatar croutons
There is a wonderful, traditional whole-grain bread here called markook. Making markook is an art mastered by fewer and fewer people. Markook needs to be hand-tossed several times, stretched on a pillow and baked in a traditional oven oron a saj. It is paper-thin. It is sold in middle-eastern groceries in...
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Winkles from the shore at Tyre
There were thousands of those, nudged against the rocks, either alone or in cluster; I showed them to Anne-Sophie, French and residing in Montreal, who was here on vacation and she exclaimed ” bigorneau”; apparently the French love them and eat them like mussels or clams. (They love them...
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Sea Turtles in Tyre
When my intrepid cousin flagged me to join her and a dozen of her friends on a weekend trip to Tyre, I was thrilled. Tyre is a port-city on the Southern coast of Lebanon. Most famous for its Roman ruins (there is a Roman hippodrome that was designed to...
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