Dandelion salad
I absolutely love that dish. I ate it once at the home of Sadek Tabbarah, a Lebanese architect. His wife had made it and we ate it along with halloom sandwiches for dinner. Glistening with olive oil, studded with pine nuts, mellow from the caramelized onions and tangy with lemon...
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The culinary heritage of LEBANON, by Chef Ramzi
I started watching Chef Ramzi on Future TV a year or so ago. I especially enjoyed his segments on traditional Lebanese cuisine. On Saturdays, he would travel through the countryside, stop in a village and visit the local folks and watch them cook their homestyle dishes. I was fascinated....
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Cabbage salad
This salad, our Lebanese coleslaw, reminds me of Nayla, a classmate that I used to accompany home for lunch everyday for a few months until the war (it was in 1975) and frequent sniper fire forced us to stay home. Her dad was a deputy (Member of Parliament) for...
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Baklava, Texas-style
I have to be honest. Out of all the Arabic pastries, baklava or baklawa was never my favorite. Too sweet, too doughy, or so I thought. One day, Tracy, a Texan married to a Lebanese friend, made it using pecans, a nut that you find in Texas in any...
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Sweet potato kibbeh
This dish is perfect for the coming summer months because it is eaten at room temperature with some olive oil and green onions. It is considered a country-style dish akl reefeh that villagers would eat when meat was not available. I love potatoes in just about any form and...
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Saha by Lucy and Greg Malouf
I have a weakness for beautiful coffee table cookbooks. This one is particularly well done. The photographs are superb. The text is very well written and although this is supposed to be a cookbook it feels more like a documentary. One of the authors is Australian-born Lebanese of immigrant...
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Red lentils and rice casserole (Mujaddara safra)
This is a second version of the traditional mujaddara; this one is made with red lentils; the onions, once browned, are mixed with the orange lentils and rice and cooked in water until thickened; simple, delicious and iron-rich! INGREDIENTS: Quantity will yield 8 generous portions. 1 1/2 cups orange...
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Eggs in tomato sauce (Bayd bel-banadoora)
This dish always reminds of a young man I met in the late seventies in Beirut. I was taking an art class at the School of Fine Arts and he was the model. Faysal was a couple years older than I was and had had to quit elementary school to...
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Lite chocolate cupcakes
I think that as Middle-Easterners we are often self-critical and disparaging of our fellow countrymen. That’s why it is so refreshing to see people like Maxime Shaaya. The first Arab and Lebanese man to conquer Mt. Everest, the South Pole and last week the North Pole, how wonderful, how...
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