rare spiral-bound, lay flat Alice's Kitchen: Traditional Lebanese Cooking available!

i just found a box of spiral-bound, lay flat copies of my 2005 edition of Alice's Kitchen printed to fill orders while waiting for my big printing of the newest edition. if you would like a chance to win a free copy and are on FACEBOOK, please LIKE my cookbook page!

the 100th person to LIKE my page will receive a signed copy of the book with free shipping in the U.S.!

if you're not on FB, or would just like to buy one of these rare copies, send me an email, and i will tell you how to order one. the price is $30 including priority mail shipping in the U.S.

i use my lay flat copy all the time in the kitchen, since it is so much easier to use. the perfect bound books are what bookstores and libraries prefer, which is why the majority of the books were printed with a spine.

Lenten blessings and happy cooking! be sure to enjoy the many Lenten (vegan) recipes in Alice's Kitchen: Traditional Lebanese Cooking by Linda Dalal Sawaya.

Festive Lebanese baba ghannouj for the holidays from alice's kitchen: traditional lebanese cooking

Beautiful, ruby-red in-season pomegranates bejewel baba ghannouj for your festive holiday table! recipe in alice's kitchen: traditional lebanese cooking! their sweet tartness are a perfect complement to our smokey baba ghannouj. 

see the book for the recipe and my blog post for great photos of the process. remember, our holiday sale on alice's kitchen: 5 books for $75 including free shipping via media mail. order before december 15! email me for details.

enjoy, many blessings, and happy holidays and happy cooking!

Holiday season special offer of Alice's Kitchen Lebanese Cookbook!

5 cookbooks for $75 including media mail shipping! offer begins today and ends on December 15 so they will arrive in time for your holiday gift giving!

give the gift of love: Alice's Kitchen: Traditional Lebanese Cooking. as my beloved mother alice affirmed: Dear, if you make it with love, it will be delicious!

so spread the love and order your gift copies today. your friends will love you for it!

signed and personalized copies make it an extra special gift.

to order you may pay via paypal (linda@lindasawaya.com), send me an email, or send a check to my post office box.

linda sawaya
po box 91192
portland, OR 97291

wishing you happy cooking, and happy holidays!

with love and many blessings,
linda

alice's kitchen: traditional lebanese cooking will be at PORTLAND LAMB JAMB Sunday, October 21

shish kebab (laham mishwe) and kafta are classic Lebanese lamb dishes detailed in alice's kitchen: traditional lebanese cooking, and previous blog posts are linked for your perusal.

the occasion for revisiting them now, is the PORTLAND LAMB JAMB, a fundraiser for hungry children in which i will be presenting alice's recipes to an audience that loves lamb. the event is on Sunday from 2 to 5 pm in portland, oregon. alice's kitchen has 41 pages of lamb recipes and features 5 pages on how to properly cut a leg of lamb so the flavor is excellent. most lebanese cookbooks do not have this information, while alice's kitchen uniquely does! folks who say they don't like lamb would benefit from mama's teachings here. if the fat is not properly trimmed, according to mama, it gives a bad flavor. so the secret is here (in the book!!)

additionally, as described in the cookbook, in my parents' village of Douma, the butcher prepared the lamb cuts for specific dishes on order and delivered them! but in LA when i was growing up, mama had to become the butcher, as the meat dept. of A & P didn't know laham mishwi from kafta.

so we have mama to thank for this wisdom! 

lamb was not an everyday feature of our diet, and when it was included, traditionally small bits of meat were eaten with rice and lots of vegetables. this is why alice's kitchen is loved by vegans and vegetarians as well!

happy cooking! see you at PORTLAND LAMB JAMB!

Alice's Kitchen will be at Portland's Wordstock Book Festival this weekend!

If you're in portland this weekend, please come by the convention center for a great book festival, wordstock, and visit me at booth #815. i will be there signing copies of alice's kitchen: traditional lebanese cooking and The Sweets of Araby, a book for which i illustrated and designed the cover, as well as doing interior illustrations, published last year by Countryman Press, and named a NY Times Notable book for 2011. it is a delightful book with recipes and stories based on the tales of the 1001 Arabian Nights.

my beloved mother, alice, joined me at Wordstock in 2005, when they had a cooking stage and the revised and expanded edition of AK had just been published. it was such a joy to share the stage with mama; the audience loved her, and she was honored by the line of people waiting for us to sign their books.

this weekend i'll be selling the books at a special price, and will be sharing some of my summer dried figs...so do stop by! mama will be with us in spirit! reminding us: Dear, if you make it with love, it will be delicious!

and if you are too far away, you can order copies through my website or amazon. happy cooking!

LEBANESE COOKING DEMO by linda sawaya in vancouver, washington October 17!

fall and harvest greetings to all!

i have been busy this summer and posting a lot of food and cooking images to my TWITTER (@lindasawayaART) and FB, so if you'd like to follow either or both of those, you will see what i've been up to.

i do plan to continue posting here, just found the iphone/instagram so instant, it made it possible in an otherwise very busy period!

OCTOBER 17, wednesday from 1:30 to 2:30, i will be doing a FREE cooking demo at CHUCK'S PRODUCE, a very wonderful store i just discovered. will be demonstrating how to make a quick and FABULOUS hommous b' tahini and baba ghannouj!

sign up with them soon, as their classes fill up quickly! and come and learn how to make the best hommous and baba in the pacific northwest!

of course i'll be signing and selling Alice's Kitchen: Traditional Lebanese Cooking too! please come by and visit, taste, and pick up some gift copies of your favorite Lebanese cookbook!

labne—creamy, healthy lebanese yogurt cheese...in one step!

labne (labneh, labni) is a simple yogurt cheese easily made from homemade or store-bought yogurt. it is a staple of Lebanese cuisine that i grew up with in Alice's Kitchen. the Arabic word for yogurt, laban, from the same root as name of the country Lebanon (lubnan), meaning White One, referring to the Lebanese mountains, especially the typically snow-covered Mt. Lebanon.

sitto (my grandmother) would make the laban (yogurt) as a first step, making the sign of the cross over the milk and starter to bless it. the next day when the yogurt was ready, some was kept for eating, while a quart was saved to make labne.

three items: a teaspoon of sea salt, a quart of full-fat yogurt, and a cloth bag, which mama made from white cotton sheets is all that is needed. the reusable bag is a 8 x 9 inch rectangle with a drawstring at the top. a large coffee filter could be used instead. i learned by reading packaged yogurt labels that reduced or non-fat yogurt has lots more carbs.

to one quart of yogurt, mix in one teaspoon of sea salt until thoroughly combined. turning the bag inside out so the seams are on the outside makes it easier to remove the labne from the bag at finish. wet the cloth bag with cold water and wring out. pour the salted yogurt into the damp bag, tie the top so a corner of the bag is at the bottom, and hang over the sink to drain overnight.

salt draws the water (whey) from the yogurt, making labne, a creamy tart cheese that is a superb substitute for cream cheese or sour cream and has more protein and less sugar and carbohydrates than unstrained yogurt.

 above: full bag of laban draining overnight to make labne. below: labne ready to serve!

once reduced of whey, the quart of yogurt makes a pint of yogurt cheese, labne!

drizzle with olive oil and refrigerate!

traditionally labne is served with bread and olives for breakfast, or a light supper. it's an ingredient in the filling of Lebanese meat pies (sfeeha), and is eaten with stuffed grape leaves, kibbe bil sineyeh, and is a staple of a typical Lebanese mezza. white and creamy, nutritious and tart, it is great on crackers or as a base for a dip.

i haven't tried making it with now readily available goat milk yogurt, which was likely done in the old country, so will add this to my next experiment list! check back for results!

enjoy!

chestnuts roasting on an open fire!

it's still officially winter; it snowed just this week in my portland garden. and although i took these photos in the Christmas season and it's now Lent and daffodils are budding up, the forget-me-nots, snowdrops, primroses, and Lenten roses are all blooming in my garden, it seemed best to post these chestnut roasting photos now instead of waiting for next Christmas!

raw chestnuts! ready to roast like they do on the streets of new york or rome and sell in rolled up newspaper cones! or like they do in lebanon, where my parents came from!

make an X in the top with a sharp knife. this is how my dad cut the raw chestnuts to roast over a fire or under the gas broiler so they'd cook inside and be easy to peel.

now they're ready to put in the broiler of my gas stove for just a few minutes until they turn golden brown and split open.

you know they're done when the X's curl and open up.

let them cool enough to peel and eat while they're still warm and you're in for an amazing texture and nutty flavor—chestnuts roasted over an open fire.

gorgeous persimmons for the season, to ring in the new year! fuyu and hachiya what to do with them?

growing up in a lebanese-american family in los angeles, persimmons, known in arabic and some other languages as kaki, (from their latin botanical name: Diospyros kaki) were a luscious winter treat with unique flavor and texture. my parents brought home the hachiya variety which must be very soft before they're eaten, otherwise, we learned the hard way—the mouth suffers.

the flatter fuyu variety, which i came to know while living in the bay area some years ago became a winter favorite as they can be eaten like an apple when firm, sliced into slivers to add color and sweetness to a winter salad in lieu of out of season tomatoes, or dried, and have a fabulous fragrance.

what to do with them? we lebanese just eat them fresh and raw. they're super sweet. the fuyus make excellent dried fruit, known to be eaten by the chinese at new year's. 

here, i've made a rather unlikely combination by pairing fuyus with a habanero chili goat cheese dip i made for a party. other than the cheese being goat cheese chevre, this is not lebanese, but it was such a pleasure to photograph these sumptious succulent fruits. and my dip was raved about at the holiday dinner party with a mexican theme.

the sweetness of the persimmons plays off the spicy flavors of the dip and saltiness of the the corn tortilla chips. the colors served in blue glass and ceramic bowls are an artist's dream of complementary colors. 

on top the garnish is a sweet yellow chili pepper which i also added to the habanero chevre mixture in the food processor, along with a bit of lemon juice.

my home grown habanero chiles were roasted over the flames of my gas stove top and then cooled, peeled, and blended with the chevre. in the photo is a tiny habanero that shriveled up.

the hachiya can be only eaten when ripe

the firm slices of fuyu on the left, and the soft, succulent ripe hachiya on the right after i've taken my taste of it.

my friend andrea has a most gorgeous fuyu persimmon tree in her portland garden, pruned like an umbrella. standing under it full of leaves with the fruit still green was a marvelous experience that felt like an abundant blessing. 

the fruit ripens after the leaves have fallen. here's andrea's photo of her tree with her chicken coop beyond that inspired me to plant my own fuyu persimmon tree which i did just in time for the new year. may it be a blessing to us all! thanks to andrea's inspiration and heavenly garden.

enjoy and many blessings and peace in the new year! happy new year and happy cooking!

holiday greetings! celebrate the season with alice's kitchen: traditional lebanese cooking gift book offer!

my new december art news went out yesterday with a holiday greeting which i'd like to share here, that includes a holiday offer of 5 copies of alice's kitchen: traditional lebanese cooking for gifts, as everyone loves alice's kitchen!!! 5 copies including free shipping for $75 if you order by december 18th. 

email me right away to get these books for your loved ones! or if you just need one copy, use the "buy now" on  my website to purchase via paypal. or you can also buy through amazon, if you prefer!

let me know if you'd like your books signed and personalized!

remember to find the great recipes for holiday pastries in alice's kitchen! the baklawe (baklava) posting and other Christmas cookies in this blog provide inspiration as well as direction.

please email me if you'd like to be on my emailing list!

sending love, blessings, abundance, joy, great health, and peace in the new year!

and most of all, happy cooking!

summer's officially over...but dried figs provide summer sweetness all year long!

two ways to cut fresh summer figs to dry and preserve them for winter delights! 

my garden and i are blessed with several varieties of fig trees that do well in the pacific northwest. this year's crop came all at once even though the varieties normally ripen in a delightful flow over july, august, and september because of our cool and late summer. drying them is a traditional way to keep them for the winter, as well as making fig jam.

my tried and true way of drying them has been to cut the juicy moist and plump fruits in half after removing the stems, leaving them connected at the blossom end, and placing them on food dryer trays. 

this summer after having dried two full batches in my habitual way, i remembered visiting my dear aunt adele in los angeles a couple of years ago and seeing her just-harvested figs from the trees that my uncle edmond had planted years before he passed away drying in her sewing room on trays in the warm LA breeze. 

she cut them into a 4-pointed star shape—much prettier and faster drying than my halvsies, even when presented on a beautiful wooden dish from India and sprinkled with almonds—a great serving combination.

now you can see auntie adele's inspiring designer cut figs and how they fit like mosaic pieces on the drying try! pretty! and you can see the normally early crop (green outside, light inside) next to the july crop (green outside, red inside) of Desert King, both of which ripened in august/september!

see how much they shrink when dried, which in pacific northwest climate with my food dryer takes about two days.

no recipe needed for this simple treat if you have the abundance of fresh summer figs! mama's fig jam recipe with walnuts and aniseed is in Alice's Kitchen on page 213! happy eating!

Refreshing, light Lebanese yogurt and cucumber salad

just-picked Middle Eastern cucumbers—small, crisp, and not seedy give the best crunch to this Lebanese summer salad. when a cup of yogurt might be refreshing, adding thinly sliced cucumbers, garlic mashed to a paste with salt, crushed dried spearmint, and a little lemon juice makes a superb complement to barbeques, spicy entrees, or simply makes a perfect light meal all on it's own.

this chilled summer salad, the Lebanese cousin of Greek tsatziki, or Indian raita, or Turkish cacik, or Persian mast o khair which is very similar to the Arabic and Lebanese name, laban ou khyar, which is what mama called it so that's it's name in Alice's Kitchen: Traditional Lebanese Cooking on page 66.

this cucumber variety is called "muncher", an American version of Persian cucumbers or the Mid-East Prolific variety which i usually grow. it's the first time i've grown munchers, and am quite pleased. the blossoms on the plant are huge—almost 3 inches wide! and the cucumbers shown here are only about 4 inches long, picked when they're small and crisp.

my dear friend josephine gave me some Lebanese cucumber seeds a year or two ago, and i managed to have one plant that survived the slugs that feasted on lots of the garden this damp and cold june. pictured here is a mix of Lebanese and "muncher" cucumbers.

i forgot to mention the laban ou khyar salata was on the menu last week with the shish kebabs, along with the green fresh garbanzo beans (hommus or homsi) served as an appetizer...part of the Lebanese or Middle Eastern mezza (hors d'oeuvres). these were a special treat that simply required putting them in a bowl! look how cute they are...sometimes with "two chick peas in a pod".

if you don't grown your own (and i didn't grow these, although many years back i tried...and the graceful leaves of the garbanzo bean plant are lovely), you might be lucky to find these at a farmer's market, or as i did in a local employee-owned grocery store with an international clientele. add them to the mezza or appetizers you're serving along with an empty bowl for the husks, olive seeds, and pistachio nut shells which are essential components of a mezza.