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

A confession.  The real inspiration for my lifelong love and fascination with Lebanon’s cuisine has a sticky, sweet origin — puddings. I think that’s partly because they were rare, for special occasions — Eid, birthdays, marriages and funerals. One of my best memories dates to just before the war. My father would walk with me downtown to one of the old colonial squares that would soon be rendered out of bounds and then destroyed by the fighting. We would go […]

Categories: Lebanese recipes, memory and culture

Well, as I was saying, I tried to grow a pomegranate tree in London.  The bush grew but the pomegranates didn’t. But someone has had more success than me.  The picture shows a pomegranate tree with fruit ripening on it in Richmond in south west London. It’s a hobby of mine to track down fruit trees, both ordinary and exotic, in unusual, urban places.  I’ll be posting more — but would love to hear if anyone else has found incongruous […]

Categories: Lebanese recipes, memory and culture

Lebanon is my home.  I left it many years ago, but it is still with me in its scents, its flavors and its textures.  The wonderful freshness and generosity of its food has always stayed with me as a key part of who I am.   I want to share some of the pleasure and pride that I have in my culinary heritage, both with younger generations who may not have had the luck to learn these dishes as I did […]

Categories: Lebanese recipes, memory and culture