Clearly, this is not the most photogenic of Lebanese dishes. It needs as much soft focus as an ageing diva from the golden age of Hollywood. It is said in Beirut that if you can’t make a plate of mujadara, you better keep out of the kitchen the rest of your life. It is just about the cheapest and most basic meal you can make — a feast only for the poorest of the poor. But it is extremely […]
Categories: Lebanese recipes, memory and culture
This is a poor man’s dish in Lebanon. We have many types of lentils that are grown in the Bekaa valley. They range in colour from green to reddish brown. When I was a child, my grandmother used to make this dish for us with green lentils that grew in her village. She used burghul — cracked wheat — rather than rice, though. As a Beiruti, I know the dish as Moudardara, although it is also called Mujadara. But […]
Categories: Lebanese recipes, memory and culture
This is getting down to the real basics of Lebanese food. The combination of vegetables with meat and rice is a staple that every Lebanese home plays variations on throughout the working week. They are not the most glamorous of dishes but they’re healthy and the ingredients are always available and fresh. Sometimes during the war, there was no bread, but we never ran short of beans, spinach or rice. This is not the kind of dish you would […]
Categories: Lebanese recipes, memory and culture
Salads in Lebanon are as vibrant, varied and colourful as the markets I can remember going to with my mother to find our ingredients. We would go every day, but the best was Saturday. That is when my father would get up at dawn to make sure he was there in time to get the absolutely freshest and most delicious vegetables and herbs. He’d gather up enough to last us the rest of the week. He might even pick up […]
Categories: Lebanese recipes, memory and culture
This is a salad I lucked upon as I mixed various ingredients together. Its mix of carrots, beetroots and orange is very un-Lebanese. We have several wonderful salads, but none like this. I discovered that it was actually a classic Moroccan salad recipe after I first made it. The salad goes very well with bistilla. It is best in summer — as it is beautifully crunchy and refreshing. Ingredients 4 carrots grated 1 cooked (boiled) beetroot diced 1 orange peeled […]
Categories: Lebanese recipes, memory and culture
It took me time to appreciate Moroccan food. It is a very different proposition from Lebanese cooking, which doesn’t mix sweet and savoury in the same way. But the richness of the flavours won me over just as the extraordinary, shape shifting landscape of Morocco seduced me on a drive through the heart of the country a decade ago. I tried tagine for the first time there beside a lagoon during Ramadan. One of my children was almost swept […]
Categories: Lebanese recipes, memory and culture
I grew up in the midst of a war in Beirut for much of my childhood and all my adolescence right through to my mid-twenties. My world was reduced to just one part of the city — in and around Hamra and Ras Beirut in the west of the city. So, even my perspective on my own country was narrow. In terms of cooking and food, it meant that I was not exposed to much outside our own Lebanese […]
Categories: Lebanese recipes, memory and culture • Tags: Moroccan food
From Beirut to London in 100 Dishes