Sea bass in acqua pazza
Let’s say you come home late, you are starving, yet you want a good meal: grab a piece of your favorite fish and make it in acqua pazza, i.e. in crazy water. Get a loaf of good French bread to sop up the juices and a bottle of decent...
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Citrus and cream jelly
Diet desserts? I always figured if one feels like eating a slice of cake, great, eat it, enjoy every morsel, and cut back on portions of food at the next meal. But what if you want to cut down on your food intake? Agar-agar is an appetite suppressant: Making...
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Fava bean stew
If you live in the US or elsewhere and you would like to get a glimpse of the food most popular in Egypt, then open a can of foul mudammas and make yourself a bowl of foul. Foul mudammas in cans is available at any Middle-Eastern store or even...
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Semolina date cookies (kaak bel-ajweh)
This is the other pastry that would make its appearance in our house for the Easter holiday, kaak b’ootah (aka kaak bel-ajweh); this one was my favorite because of the sweet date filling. My grandmother would sit at the tiny kitchen table and would shape these by hand with brass...
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And that vegetable is?…
Anybody care to shed some light? It is about 7 inches (18 cms) long and weighs about 10 ounces (300 g.). ANSWER: It is a purple radish and is imported from Korea.
Spring soup
I lived in Aix-en-Provence for six months after finishing up high school; Aix is a beautiful town in the South of France filled with picturesque courtyards outfitted with ancient fountains and majestic old mansions. I was supposed to be studying political sciences at the university, but I found the...
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Bocconcinis with strawberries salad
I have had the most wonderful experience recently: I reconnected (after decades!) with my former schoolmates from high school on Facebook. Most of us scattered and relocated all over the globe when the war in Lebanon was raging in the late seventies. We all attended a French school in...
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Stuffed swiss chard leaves with lamb chops and yogurt sauce
Today I made some stuffed swiss chard leaves in roughly one third of the time it normally takes to make them. I simply changed one thing: Instead of cutting the leaves into neat four-inch squares, I thought “why not make king-size cigars instead?” I bought two bunches of swiss...
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Pistachio maamoul
The ma’mouls were an Easter tradition in our house established by my grandmother who made them by hand from start to finish. No wooden ma’moul molds for her or food processor. She used her fingers, knuckles and palms. To shape the cookies, she used malkat, those brass tweezers that...
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