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From Beirut to London in 100 Dishes

From Beirut to London in 100 Dishes

keeping my arab heritage alive through food

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Author Archives: samara cuisine

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arayess bil kofta — or discovering street food

September 30, 2014 by samara cuisine

Street food in Beirut wasn’t really street food for me for much of my childhood and adolescence because the streets where you could get it near me like Hamra were dark and forbidding and downright scary at night.  The lamp lights would be off.  The cinemas and shops that once blazed all down the street were extinguished. It was more like a wild habitat for militias and starving stray cats than the shopping and social heart of West Beirut.  And […]

Categories: Lebanese recipes, memory and culture • Tags: kofta, lebanese catering

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Shorbat al Dajaj maa al-shairiyeh — or autumn approaching

September 12, 2014 by samara cuisine

Think of Lebanon or Beirut and you probably see pin sharp blazing Mediterranean days — a dazzling array of mezze, an ice cold drink and the sea below you.  Most of the year, it’s like that by the coast, but climb into the mountains up into the Bekaa and beyond and you feel the seasons fiercely as they change.  My husband tells me that one of his earliest memories is driving with his grandparents, who lived in Beirut, up what […]

Categories: Lebanese recipes, memory and culture • Tags: Bekaa, burgul, chick, chicken soup

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Itch — or a different twist on tabbouleh from Aleppo

September 4, 2014 by samara cuisine

This is the time of the year in the Bekaa Valley when the harvest is being brought in.  In the village where my relatives live, they have all been out in the fields cutting the ripened wheat.   From this is produced their staple food and one of the most ancient in the world — bulgur or cracked wheat. Producing it is one of the oldest processes in the world.  In the Bekaa, it has been done the same way for […]

Categories: Lebanese recipes, memory and culture • Tags: Aleppo, Bekaa, burgul, tabbouleh

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Baklawa — or can too much of a good thing ever be a bad thing

September 2, 2014 by samara cuisine

To the uninitiated, a Lebanese meal can become an extravagance too far.  Like an overpowering if charming friend, it can keep coming at you until you are exhausted and just want to be left alone.  The mezze is often enough in itself.  Even a few plates of hummus or baba ghanouj can seem like a full meal while makanek or kibbeh are still on their way.  That’s while you ignore the huge hunks of fruit and vegetables that are piled in […]

Categories: Lebanese recipes, memory and culture • Tags: filo pastry, pistachio nuts

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Foul moudamas — and Sunday morning in Beirut

August 16, 2014 by samara cuisine

I am trying to remember whether I could hear church bells on Sunday mornings when I was growing up in Beirut.  You certainly should have been able to hear them.  There are churches in downtown not far from our apartment.  The muezzin from the mosques was always nearer and more urgent.  But there must have been the sound of bells, too, but I can’t be sure now.  I think they went silent during the war, which after all lasted most of […]

Categories: Lebanese recipes, memory and culture • Tags: Beirut, church bells on Sunday mornings, East Beirut

2

Lebanese Barbecue two — and Pineapple Shishas

August 13, 2014 by samara cuisine

When I was growing up in Beirut, it was for old men hiding behind clouds of smoke from a world of shirked responsibilities in rundown cafes.  It would have been unthinkable for a young girl to smoke a shisha — or hubbly bubbly, hookah, whatever you want to call it.  Times change and the shisha has become hyper chic not just amongst young Arabs, but Asian and British kids here in London.  I never thought I’d fall for it, too, […]

Categories: Lebanese recipes, memory and culture • Tags: Haifa Wehbe, shisha pipe

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Lebanese barbecue– or why the English love Arabic fancy dress

August 12, 2014 by samara cuisine

I don’t remember ever being tempted as a child to dress up in a bowler hat and umbrella and pretend I worked in the City in London.  Nor did I ever want to stick a safety pin through my trousers and tear my t-shirt and act like a punk in the Kings Road.  I did have big hair and dresses with shoulder pads but that was the 80s — when the world dressed like the women of Saddam Hussein’s boudoir – […]

Categories: Lebanese recipes, memory and culture

1

Falafel — or Whose Food is it Anyway? (the other Middle East conflict)

August 2, 2014 by samara cuisine

As war has been raging in Gaza, I think many Arabs like me have felt bad about focusing on things that seem frivolous or insensitive in the context of such suffering.   I don’t want to get holier than thou.  There are many battles in the Middle East — some horrific beyond words such as what is happening in Gaza, Syria and Iraq.  Religion, culture and history all play a part in those and less violent confrontations.  Food, too.  I […]

Categories: Lebanese recipes, memory and culture • Tags: Gaza, Israel, lebanon

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Hotel in the War

July 24, 2014 by samara cuisine

  I am that boat drugged by the sound of the waves   in the darkened bay   The night is more immense than I remember your eyes   purple after you dived   We stayed on at the st george long after everyone left   it was a kind of bet   Long snakelike days glistening on concrete by the pool   no shadows at all   Above us lost worlds stretched in plumes of fuel and smoke   […]

Categories: Lebanese recipes, memory and culture

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Assafiri/Atayef bil jibneh — Lebanese pancakes with cheese

July 12, 2014 by samara cuisine

Little birds come in different shapes and sizes.  There are the ones my uncles used to catch and roast in the Bekaa.  Or those my brother still hunts from time to time in north Lebanon in an area he describes as a kind of Shangri La — a valley that no one goes to, that has been preserved from the random half-finished buildings that now blight so much of Lebanon.  The reason for its pristine beauty?  It’s where drug lords […]

Categories: Lebanese recipes, memory and culture

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‘Atayef/Qatayef bil Joz — Lebanese pancakes with walnuts and syrup

July 10, 2014 by samara cuisine

We are well into Ramadan now.  It probably won’t go down too well with some of my more intense Muslim friends, but the longer it lasts the more I think of the delicious treats I first started to make during the holy month when I was at university in Beirut.  No-one in my family had a sweet tooth, except for me and my dad.  So, it’s lucky that I had enough friends to help me get through the heart attacks […]

Categories: Lebanese recipes, memory and culture

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Shish Taouk and the passing of time

July 9, 2014 by samara cuisine

This is one of the most evocative ruins in Beirut.  An Italian restaurant that was once famous for its pasta in Phoenicia street just behind the sea front.  It’s been derelict for years.  Next to it is a car park, which will probably be transformed into a new high-rise soon.  One of the tallest buildings in the city is already almost finished behind it.  Like a lot of things in Beirut, the restaurant was both fun and tacky.  Its name […]

Categories: Lebanese recipes, memory and culture • Tags: Beirut, Quo Vadis

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Ramadan Treats — Kilaj ( Filo pastry filled with ground rice and rose water)

July 1, 2014 by samara cuisine

Again, it is almost dusk.  Here in England, it comes late — well after nine in the evening.  So, it’s been a long day for anyone fasting, although mercifully cool for now.  Iftar — the breaking of the fast — is only a short time away.  There is not the abrupt sunset of the Middle East where you free fall from burning daylight to total darkness within a few minutes.  But the anticipation is similar.  I visit many of my […]

Categories: Lebanese recipes, memory and culture

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Ramadan — nights of destiny and feasting

June 29, 2014 by samara cuisine

  The image is pretty much a cliche.  A distant, clear cut moon in a perfectly black sky silhouetting a minaret.  But it is what it is — and Ramadan is starting.  It’s the time of year when life takes on two dimensions in the Muslim world.  During the day, it stills as work slows down, people fast and await dusk when a very different life begins, full of colour, festivities and feasts.  In Saudi Arabia, for instance, even if […]

Categories: Lebanese recipes, memory and culture

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Sharab – Lebanese Drinks

June 16, 2014 by samara cuisine

  An ice-cold jug of rose-flavoured lemonade on a balcony in Beirut’s summer heat, a glass of rich red wine in a vineyard in the Bekaa Valley or a fierce arabic coffee warming your hands in the mountains– these are some of the settings and memories I most associate with drinking in Lebanon.  We are a country of various religions and subsets of religion of course so alcohol is consumed widely — and certainly in my childhood it was difficult […]

Categories: Lebanese recipes, memory and culture • Tags: mulberry tree, pomegranate

2

Freekeh maa Dajaj — Roasted Green Wheat with Chicken and Nuts

June 10, 2014 by samara cuisine

 This is a dish I did not know when I lived in Lebanon, but discovered from Syrian friends here in London.  But its ingredients I know very well from the long weekends and summers I spent in the Bekaa.   I used to ramble and play in the wheat fields with cousins and friends.  Sometimes we would gather the tall stems of wheat while they were still green.  We would make a little fire and try to roast or barbecue […]

Categories: Lebanese recipes, memory and culture

2

Eating with Iraqi Nuns in the Lebanese Mountains

June 7, 2014 by samara cuisine

This is a celebration of Lebanese food and culture.  But there are some things that can only be celebrated for their awfulness.  What I am thinking of is a diet of rancid milk, raw egg and blackened rice that I endured one summer when I was about eight.  I had been sent away from Beirut with my younger sister.  My parents were both busy with work and felt that it would be better for us to spend a few months […]

Categories: Lebanese recipes, memory and culture • Tags: Lebanese food

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Maakaroon maa Ater — Lebanese Anise Fingers with Rose flavoured Syrup

June 6, 2014 by samara cuisine

 We don’t need a special day to gorge on Lebanon’s succulent array of syrupy cakes and puddings.  Well, I don’t anyway.  But even though they are an everyday treat, there are times of year when some specialities are particularly prized.  All the different religions in Lebanon can lead to conflict and war, as they have done in the past, but on the up side they also provide a plethora of holidays.   One of these that I remember from my childhood […]

Categories: Lebanese recipes, memory and culture • Tags: orange blossom

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Another side of the Bekaa — Lebanon and Syria

June 3, 2014 by samara cuisine

Welcome to Arsal.  This is in a very different part of the Bekaa from where I used to go as a child.  There are none of the lush orchards or fields of wheat here.  Nothing to wax lyrical about.  Its desolate rocky landscape rises a little above the Bekaa just after Baalbek. I have no memories of this or other such places where people live harsh, uncompromising lives far from the glamour of Beirut. A young artist in Achrafieh, one […]

Categories: Lebanese recipes, memory and culture • Tags: Beirut, Bekaa, lebanon, President Assad

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From Beirut to London in 100 Trees

June 1, 2014 by samara cuisine

  One of the strongest and best memories I have from growing up in Lebanon are all the different trees that grew around my grandparents’ village in the Bekaa in the shadow of the mountain that we call Jebel al Sheikh — Mount Hermon to the Israelis.   The orchards stretched as far as I could see .  My grandfather was a farmer and had many acres of land.  Every spring I can remember the anticipation with which I waited […]

Categories: Lebanese recipes, memory and culture

6

Samak al Salmoon maa riz bil za’fraan — Salmon with dill and honey on a bed of saffron rice

May 28, 2014 by samara cuisine

This is a dish that combines my lives in Lebanon and in England.  Fish was always seen as a great luxury by my family in Beirut.  Partly of course because it is expensive there.  The fish restaurants on the Corniche were some of the most opulent in the city, with terraces gazing away from the chaos of the city and out over the Mediterranean.   Up the road in Baalbek, the epicentre of Lebanon’s cosmopolitan glory in the 1960s and […]

Categories: Lebanese recipes, memory and culture

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Fakhid maa riz — Slow roasted leg of Lamb with rice

May 25, 2014 by samara cuisine

This is one of the dishes that makes you think of special occasions in Lebanon.  Eid, Al Adha — and Christmas too since we are Lebanese as much as we are muslim. This is serious stuff — for big, extended families gathering for a feast.  And it had better be a real feast or you won’t be hearing the last of it for a long time.  All the preparations for a big holiday — the new clothes, the presents — […]

Categories: Lebanese recipes, memory and culture

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The Tower and The War — Reflections on Beirut Art

May 23, 2014 by samara cuisine

  It still stands there after all these years.  Never inhabited by anyone but ghosts and snipers.  The Burj el Murr.  I remember it going up just before the war amidst a frenzy of high-rise blocks. At the end of my street going towards downtown, you just turn to the right and there it is.  For something like forty years now, it’s been there — perched above Hamra and the bay.  During the civil war, this was the green line, dividing […]

Categories: Lebanese recipes, memory and culture

2

Fattoush — Lebanese Salad with Mint and Toasted Bread

May 20, 2014 by samara cuisine

This vibrant salad sits in the middle of the table every day during the fasting month of Ramadan.  At the end of a long day when you haven’t eaten or drunk anything, it’s a little hint of heaven — cold, fresh and green.  Especially if Ramadan happens to be in summer.  Back when I was growing up in Lebanon, my grandparents were able to gather the ingredients from the orchard behind their house.  As long as the chickens didn’t break in, […]

Categories: Lebanese recipes, memory and culture • Tags: fasting month of Ramadan

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