Maamoul – Recipes from a Traditional Lebanese Easter

Happy Easter! It’s really great to be able to share this recipe with you, and maybe from the photo above, you too will feel there are things worth coming back to this world for. This is my tray of maamoul, a traditional Lebanese sweet that is made especially for Easter. Maamoul is a semolina shortbread bound with butter, orange blossom water and rose water which on...

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Lebanese Breakfast

I remember breakfasts of Labneh, Zaatar, mint, tomato and cucumber with fresh, paper thin markouk bread. On weekends, when time was a luxury we could afford, it would be kishk and qawarma hiding full cloves of garlic in creamy whiteness speckled with shallow fried pine nuts. We burnt our tongues in impatience and never learned to wait. Eggs with sumac were fluffy and...

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Sous Vide

I want to buy a water bath but I can’t find one. I have been looking online, but I haven’t found a single company that sells them in Australia, and I am not yet desperate enough to ship one from the States. A search for sous vide returns a similarly frustrating result set. Has Australia not yet caught up? I bet no one has figured our what the perfect temeperature...

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Soy and Honey Pistachio Ice Cream – Dairy, Gluten and Sugar Free

I’m a pistachio nut. Let me rephrase that. I love pistachios. Growing up in a Lebanese home, our pantry had a section especially dedicated to Kloobat, a word that roughly came to mean “nut garnishes”: almonds, dessicated coconuts, pine nuts, walnuts and off course pistachios. Mom would use them on dishes both savory and sweet. Rice dishes like Chicken with Rice (tastes...

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Sweet Falafel? Why not?

What you see above may horrify and shock you, but yet, a part of you will be tempted to try these. I had the idea in a flash of brilliance. You see, to us Lebanese, tahini is a major major part of our diet. We make hommos and baba ghannouj with it, and we put it on top of fried fish, shawarma (Lebanese kebab, much better than the Turkish version, obviously) and falafels....

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Soft Boiled Eggs with Dukkah – Best Eggs Ever

soft boiled eggs with dukkahWas it Gordon Ramsay who decided if he would hire a chef based on how they cooked an egg? I’m not sure, but let’s say it is. I agree. And a boiled egg doesn’t give anything away, all happily encapsulated in an opaque shell, keeping its secrets to itself. Can you trust it? Has it cooked too much, or too little? Obviously a 65 degree egg...

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Shawarma – The real kebab

shawarma, the Lebanese kebab Can I have barbeque sauce, extra cheese and tabbouli with that? Certainly not!Imagine the horror upon my first encounter with the Aussie kebab! I don’t want to dig deep and talk too much about frozen reconstituted meat made from God knows what, impersonating as a poor excuse for a kebab. In fact, I want to avoid that all together. This...

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