lebanese cooking demonstration today! at portland's better living show expo center 5 pm!

linda sawaya at portland's better living show at 5 pm today! come by if you can to get your copy of alice's kitchen signed, and taste the made-with-love lebanese vegan menu: mjaddarah, salata, and hommus!

see you there!

linda sawaya's lebanese cooking demonstration at portland's Better Living Show Kitchen Stage

i forgot to mention in my recent post on lebanese omelette (ijhee) that i did a lebanese cooking demonstration last year of this spring favorite at the Better Living Show's Kitchen Stage! hungry and appreciative folks tasted about 100 samples of it served with local goat feta cheese, cured olives, persian cucumbers (okay not perfectly sustainable, but almost), and pita bread. it was a great hit! here's the newest baby spearmint harvested from my garden for the ijhee in a shimmery green bowl.

good news—i'm invited back to cook again this year and feed the masses...and i'll be doing my vegan favorites of mjaddrah (lentils and rice with carmelized onions); salata (lebanese salad with spring greens and garlic lemon dressing), and hommus bi tahini (i think everyone knows what this is :?), right?)

if you're in portland, come to the portland expo center on friday, march 26th at 5 pm to say hi and taste this year's offerings from alice's kitchen: traditional lebanese cooking! click on this link for more details! and be sure to make the lebanese omelette and let me know how much you love it!

lebanese spring omelette—ijhee

this is the time of year when the parsley and mint are coming back to life in the Pacific Northwest, having gone dormant for a brief time of winter. i love exploring the garden to find these essential ingredients for our fabulous lebanese omelette that is perhaps more of a frittata than an omelette. it is very green, indeed, and full of nutrients with unique spicing of cinnamon and cayenne pepper. the recipe (page 141 of alice's kitchen) for ijhee is simple and easy-to-make. pictured above are ingredients: onions, both green and spanish, italian parsley, spearmint, flour, cinnamon, cayenne pepper, baking powder, and salt.

begin by chopping the spanish onion into a medium bowl; then mixing in a small amount of flour, baking powder, cinnamon, cayenne pepper, and salt. next comes the finely chopped parsley, mint, and green onions. this parsley and mint are the first of this year's garden's harvest! my green onions were too tiny, so these came from the grocery store, and they're fresh enough to use all the greens and whites.

the greens are mixed well with the onion and dry ingredients, with the eggs as the last addition.

mix well so everything is covered with egg. heat up equal amounts of clarified butter and olive oil in a cast iron or non-stick skillet. when it is good and hot, the egg vegetable batter can be poured in entirely and spread evenly across the pan to make one big omelette (frittata), or drop in a 1/8 cup of the mixture forming little circles for individual omelettes that can be easily tucked into a mini pita round. when one side is golden brown, flip it over to complete the cooking. carefully lift out and onto a paper towel to absorb excess oil.

the big omelette can be quartered and makes 4 servings. this same recipe with 4 eggs makes about a dozen little patties that make fabulous appetizers, as pictured above. both versions are best served in pita pockets, with cured black olives, sheep or goat milk feta cheese, and sliced persian cucumbers on the side. besides being extremely tasty, these can be made ahead and served at room temperature. or you can make the batter ahead and cook the omelettes as needed. sahtein! and don't forget, if you make it with love, it will be delicious!

alice's kitchen cookbook blog featured on "Grow Your Own" blog

my recent post about planting fava beans and using homegrown beans in our lebanese winter soup shourbat makhlouta was found and i was invited to submit my post to Grow Your Own roundup. the big bean in the foreground is a scarlet runner bean from last year's garden!

so of course, i did! check out the link to see the many entries for middle of the winter (except some entries from australia are mid-summer) dishes, along with my blog post.


since i garden and cook, there will be more connecting with "grow your own" cooks!


at a nursery in LA yesterday, i looked with longing at someone walking around with a tomato plant! that won't happen in portland until may at the earliest (without a greenhouse!).

kumquat heaven!

how does this image relate to alice's kitchen? i'm visiting LA and this kumquat tree is one my dear mother planted in the front yard of the apartment building—a beautiful spanish style four-plex from the 1920s—she lived in after my beloved father died and many of my family members lived in at various times over the years—sisters, grandmother, aunt and uncle, nephews, nieces—the tribe. my father also planted a black fig tree and two apricot trees in the back. they're bare right now, but the kumquat mama planted is prolific with fruit...and they're scrumptious!

and beautiful!

makhlouta-a perfect winter soup!

hearty is an understatement! shourbat makhlouta—the name of this hardy, protein-rich soup comes from the arabic word for "mixed up" or "mixture" since it is made by "shopping" in your kitchen pantry for a little bit of every grain, legume, and bean that you have. because i am an avid cook, as was my beloved mother, alice, like hers my pantry is full as a commercial pantry with many varieties of beans, grains, and legumes to enrich the soup. my sweet lebanese friend josephine tells me her mother used lamb to fortify the soup, while my dear mom's was strictly vegetarian, so of course mine is too.

in this easy-to-make lebanese soup recipe, it takes about a cup and a half of dried beans, grains, and legumes to about 7 cups of water, a couple of chopped onions, a generous amount of olive oil, salt, pepper, and cayenne pepper all put into the pot, brought to a boil, and then simmered until everything is tender—about 1 1/2 to 3 hours. ladle into bowls with a drizzle of lemon juice to finish off with some pita chips on the side. from the recipe on page 54 in alice's kitchen: traditional lebanese cooking.

you can see in the detail photo how thick the soup has become because of the addition of red lentils, which cook and thicken quickly. the other ingredients in this particular batch starting with the large bean in the foreground are a tablespoon each of: scarlet runner beans from the garden, pintos, adzukis, small favas, white, cranberry (borlotti) beans also saved from the garden's summer crop that hid until they were too tough for fresh green beans, black beans, red and green lentils, garbanzos, split peas, kidney and red beans, black-eyed peas, yellow peas, whole wheat berries, barley, brown rice, and on the right you can see a corn kernel, also from summer garden that was too starchy for fresh eating, so i left the kernels on the cob to dry in the pantry, and just plucked them off the cob and into the pot for the soup. somehow even with the disparate sizes of ingredients, it all cooks to a wonderful nourishing tenderness.

my dear friend samar from lebanon tells me that this soup is traditionally made at the end of winter to clean out the pantry from the last year's stores, and this is just what my makhlouta turned out to be. in going through my pantry, i found some large fava beans from several years back tucked away in a corner. there were holes in the beans and some round black dry questionable looking bits suspiciously the same size and shape as the holes. these did not go into the soup!

but my curiousity as a gardener prevailed and i added water to the jar of beans and soaked them overnight. this is my usual method to determine seed viability before i plant beans, corn, and other vegetable seeds. this method also gives the seeds a head-start on slugs and birds, and others hungering after my tempting plump spring seeds.

after soaking, i rinse twice a day for a couple of days and observe to see if they sprout. (yes, this is how bean and seed sprouts are made!) and if you have been following my blog, by now you understand this is not for the squeamish or faint of heart!

here's what happened:

they sprouted in spite of the bug holes, which you can see! these large favas are also called horse beans, and they are larger than a quarter, and after soaking get even bigger. they are nitrogen-fixing plants and enrich the garden soil, and are a very hardy staple for winter gardens in most mediterranean countries. my parents' Lebanese mountain village of Douma is no exception.

so i planted them, as my new lebanese friend joseph (yusef) who has a new falafel and produce stand in southeast portland (farmer's backyard at s.e. 11th and madison) suggested it's not too late to plant fava beans. in the pacific northwest, they're best planted in the fall for spring harvest. often if i plant them in the spring, the summer flowering plants, whose blossoms have a most lovely fragrance attract black aphids; while the fall-planted seeds produce before the season of the aphids. mid-january must be a mid-winter planting. it will be interesting to see how these fare. so here's my new fava bean bed planted last weekend before covering with soil, with the first sign of spring—a snowdrop—blooming nearby! on a dark grey and misty day, this life-giving activity energizes and gives me hope for the sunny days to come!

after planting it's time to take off the muddy gloves and come inside to enjoy a steaming hot bowl of shourbat makhlouta! sahtein!

 this post was entered in the Grow Your Own roundup for january 2010, hosted by house of annie!

lebanese christmas cookies—installment number 3—fig cookies

my beloved mother, alice, baked date or fig or other jam filled cookies for the holidays which were very labor intensive—each cookie is hand-formed—a walnut-sized ball of dough hollowed out with a teaspoon of date filling tucked and sealed inside, and then individually decorated with little pinchers that mother had specially made. they're called asabi bi ajwe (date fingers) in Alice's Kitchen: Traditional Lebanese Cooking, recipe page 199 of the 4th edition, and are such a treat.

if mama didn't have dates, or even sometimes just as a preference she'd use fig jam, or a mixture of any homemade jams she had in her pantry including apricot and strawberry. while in lebanon, i tasted some divine date or fig cookies rolled in sesame seeds at a fine beirut bakery. and because i am a woman of today, there just isn't time for me to create individual cookies like mama. so i adapted her recipe for date fingers to the don't-have-enough-time folks, which includes most of us, and create a long log of dough filled with fig jam since several fig trees in my garden provide an abundance of figs and jam (photo of huge platter of my desert king figs graces the top of this blog). and these sesame fig (or date) cookies are much like those i savored in lebanon.

mahlab is one of the few unusual ingredients in the cookbook and in this recipe. cornell cherry kernals are ground to a powder in a hawin—a brass heirloom mortar and pestal from the old country—with a little sugar to flavor the dough. these cherry kernals are available in middle eastern grocery stores and from specialty herb and spice purveyors.

here's another photo because they're both so beautiful i couldn't decide which to use!

a jigger of brandy, the other interesting ingredient in this sublime dough, joins with flour, butter, eggs, and sugar. my "quick" method is to roll out a rectangle of dough about 1/8" thick on baking parchment, which helps me to handle it. place a long cylinder of jam filling along the edge, roll it to where the dough covers the filling and then cut and pinch the edge to seal it, forming a long log. i use the parchment to lift the dough up and over, with sesame seeds underneath preventing it from sticking and adding nutty flavor! my fig jam sometimes has walnuts and sesame seeds already in it, as did this batch.

you can see that i don't have a perfect rectangle, and that's fine—the buttery dough just pinches closed. the sesame seeds on the parchment under the dough are a recent addition not in the book recipe variation—but when i've offered plain or sesame-coated cookie taste samples at recent book events, most people choose the sesame seed variation. the next step is to roll and elongate (many years of making ceramic buttons trained me to roll out dough!) by rolling back and forth, covering evenly with sesame seeds. refrigerate briefly and slice before baking.

they're petit and oh, so good! even mama approved! these fig-sesame cookies rounded out the trio of lebanese christmas cookies that i sent out and gave to friends in the spirit of alice's kitchen, and cooking with love.

installment 2—lebanese holiday cookies: almond crescent moons (nus qamar)

a simple to prepare traditional lebanese christmas cookie (yes, it's january and many of us are cleaning up our diets to begin the new year right, so just remember this post for next christmas! and for our lebanese Easter cookies—mamools—i promise to post them before Easter!) the almond crescent moon cookies, nus qamar in arabic, are so light and melt in your mouth with a little crunch, it's hard to stop eating them.

it's basically a butter, sugar, flour mixture with ground almonds and flavored with vanilla and almond extract—of course they're yummy! the dough easily rolls into a coil whose ends i pinch and curve into a crescent moon shape. baking time is pretty quick until they're slightly golden. here's the unbaked cookies on a baking tray. the finished ones were eaten or shipped out for christmas before i had a chance to photograph them! but i have some extra dough that i froze, so when i bake them up, i'll be sure to add the photo. i have to admit, my beloved mother alice's looked far more beautiful than mine! she would make them tiny, while mine turned out to be giant moons! God bless her hands and rest her soul! she would bake dozens and dozens and give them all away, in the true spirit of lebanese generosity.

find the full recipe on p. 197 of alice's kitchen: traditional lebanese cooking.

lebanese christmas cookies—installment number one—baklawe (baklava)...yes, this is late, but beautiful and oh, so yummy!

yes, i said i was going to bake christmas cookies, and i did—baklawe (baklava) as far as the eye can see! here's one of the trays i made and shipped in tins across the u.s.a. to some lucky folks!

this is how it all begins:

with the old-fashioned nut-chopper—this one was my dear mother alice's—walnuts from my walnut tree, (thanks to baba! and i can't resist sharing this recent photo of him under the walnut tree with his latest catch—and i caught him in the act with fresh feathers on his mouth! poor beautiful robin!)

and of course, my copy of alice's kitchen: traditional lebanese cooking for the recipe on page 203! if you don't have the cookbook, the recipe is pretty simple: a mixture of ground walnuts with a little sugar and orange flower water is the filling that goes between layers of buttered filo dough; baked and then topped with a cold simple syrup flavored again with orange flower water. heavenly, yes divine!

here's the filling spread across one half of the package of buttered filo dough:

now the rest of the filo gets buttered and layered over the nut mixture and cut into squares or diamonds, like this and then baked:

the butter is not just melted, but clarified (recipe on page 39), which is simply melting and cooking the butter, lifting off and discarding the white foamy bubbles that you can see at the left side of the pot in this picture, and not using the sediment at the bottom. clarified butter (samne in Arabic) is the same as the Indian ghee, the main quality being that it does not burn as quickly as plain butter:

when the baked baklawe comes out of the oven, the made-ahead simple sugar syrup (attar) (or agave syrup) flavored with orange blossom water is drizzled over the top. here's the scrumptious finished product:

the diamonds

or the squares

i also baked almond crescent cookies (nus qamar), and fig cookies flavored with anise and mahlab! soon i'll bring up the photos for those! till then, happy cooking and happy new year!

happy new year! amah brings good luck!

happy new year! amah is the lebanese traditional food for ringing in the new year. this hot porridge of whole wheat berries simmered with anise seeds for a couple of hours until tender tastes best when sweetened with sugar or my preferred much healthier agave syrup, sprinkled with walnuts from my tree—harvested this year thanks to my precious squirrel-chasing yorkie-mix, baba ghannouj!—and raisins—these, extra-plump. this cereal is also created to celebrate the birth of a new baby. very auspicious, indeed!

i love this photo—eye of baba—taken before his recent hair cut, speaking of auspicious!

we spent the new year's weekend with dear friend jacquie and her two big sweet golden retrievers in seattle and cooked up a storm—this comfort food for breakfast, mjaddrah for dinner, and baked tilmeh b'zaatar for breakfast the next day, as requested by my friend. she knows how much i love to cook, and it was great fun and yummy! and the big doggies played beautifully with my little seven-pound baba, who preferred to chase and bark at the twice-his-size giant grey cat, toby!

the brazil/lebanese food connection

besides the homemade lebanese food, we ate some excellent vegetarian asian food at teapot vegetarian house  and some fabulous brazilian coffee nearby at a bakery/cafe called kitanda. it was no surprise to find lebanese sfeeha in their display case, as the early lebanese immigrants to brazil including my grandmother dalal's brothers and sisters took their famous savory pastries with them. these have now become a brazilian staple, along with baked kibbe balls, also in the bakery display case, made with ground beef instead of lamb—another lebanese quintessential food!

our last dining out was at an amazing suburban/urban food court with a fabulous big band performing for eaters, listeners, and dancers. it was a depression-happy group with a huge array of ethnic foods from which to choose that is family-friendly, reasonably priced and very up-beat and high energy. the place was happily full and lively with great shops like half price books a few steps away and many languages being spoken. check out crossroads mall—a great model for urban/suburban renewal! my friend jacquie pointed out they even have a public library there to reach many who would not normally go! and there's a weekly farmer's market.

holiday persian shirazi salad

over the holidays, my dear friends pam and wayne had a wonderful persian potluck with some of their persian friends. my contribution was a shirazi salad, a very classical persian salad very similar to our lebanese salads with lemon and olive oil, but without garlic—just like tabbouli. having recently eaten this tasty dish at a new persian restaurant in my neighborhood, salar's mediterranean grill, i concocted my own recipe based on discerning the flavors and ingredients of this quintessential persian salad. typically served in summertime, it's colors were just what was needed for a festive event to complement the kuku, chicken and saffron rice with beautiful and tart red barberries (zereshk polow), and kefta. luckily the discerning excellent persian chefs there loved my shirazi salad. i didn't peel the persian cucumbers since they're not waxed, and this variety has minimal seeds, making the texture crunchy not soggy.

my recipe: persian cucumbers, cherry tomatoes, red onion, parsley, dried mint since my fresh mint had frozen in the cold, lemon juice, olive oil, salt and pepper. the salad is minced and very refreshing and colorful. my photo showing before it's tossed and dressed.

a new persian international market in my neighborhood, PARS International Market, has the barberries if you decide to make zereshk polow! and they sell Alice's Kitchen, too! the owners are delightful, so if you're in the neighborhood, do check them out and tell them linda sent you!

here's a shirazi salad recipe from the iran chamber  which has recipes for a number of persian favorites.

Salad-e Shirazi


4 Servings

4 medium tomatoes
2 small cucumbers
1 medium onion
3-4 tablespoons fresh lime juice
2-3 tablespoons virgin olive oil
200 grams fresh mint (or 1 teaspoon dry mint)
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/6 teaspoon black pepper


Directions:

Wash and peel cucumbers. Wash tomatoes and mint. Peel onion. Chop cucumbers, tomatoes, and onion very finely, and mix. Chop mint very finely and add. Add fresh lime juice, olive oil, salt, and black pepper.

Mix well and serve cool. 

tis the season for baklawe! fa la la la la! la la la la!

Growing up in Alice's Kitchen, sweets and pastries were reserved for special occasions and holidays rather than a regular after-dinner event. a big bowl of fresh, seasonal fruits was our typical dessert, while the homemade farmers' cheese (jibn) and olives that mother and sitto cured from our tree in the front yard remained on the dinner table with some arabic bread, fig jam, and the occasional halawe (halvah).

mother's irresistable homemade baklawe (baklava) was for the holidays, when she'd graciously package up numerous tins of sweets to share with friends, guests, neighbors, and relatives visiting from arizona or other far away places.

her baklawe—so light and delicious—one piece was never enough. this quality distinguishes our baklawe from others that are so heavily laden with syrup and sweet, one piece can be too much! in the old country (lebanon), people made their own filo pastry, but thank goodness in LA in the 1950s there was one Arabic grocery store Nasrawey's on Hollywood Boulevard, where they sold frozen filo pastry dough. how lucky we are now that most supermarkets in major cities carry this, making baklawe a fun holiday baking project with kids, as they love brushing on the butter, and grinding the walnuts in an old-fashioned nut grinder!

so i'm getting in the mood to make baklawe to fill the Christmas tins i just bought and to use the fresh crop of walnuts from my tree—rescued from the squirrels this year by my hero doggie, baba ghannouj! here's a photo of last year's tray. making this is much easier than one would imagine, and the results are worth the effort.

i use a utility paint brush to spread the melted butter. and instead of basting each filo sheet, save time by placing two sheets at a time which coats each sheet on one side. half of the buttered filo dough goes on the bottom of the baking tray, then a layer of walnuts, sugar, and orange flower water mixed together, and then the final layer of filo brushed with butter. a sharp knife is best to cut diamond-shaped pieces before baking. when the hot baklawe is removed from the oven, a cold simple syrup flavored with orange flower water or rose water and a little lemon juice is drizzled over the top. agave syrup works beautifully in place of sugar! the pieces need to be cut through again, but one buttery bite of this Arabic delicacy is heaven-sent! happy holidays and happy baking!

oh, yes, of course the complete recipes for baklawe, jibn, and how to cure olives are in Alice's Kitchen: Traditional Lebanese Cooking! so order your copies now for holiday baking and gift giving!

alice & linda are cover girls again!

check out the latest post on my art blog, as it's related to both of my blogs—cookbook and art!

alice's kitchen cookbook article, "Memories of a Lebanese Garden" written and illustrated by me is featured on Saudi Aramco World's 2010 calendar! you can download your own calendar by clicking on this link!

my lebanese cooking classes featured in the blogosphere!

over the past few years, i have been teaching lebanese cooking classes in people's homes, featuring recipes, of course, from my book, alice's kitchen: traditional lebanese cooking.

i just discovered that a recent cooking class/dinner party i taught at my friend and naturopath elaine's house was blogged on by her husband, david, whom i met that evening. we had an ambitious menu, so i requested the guests/class refrain for a while from drinking alcohol, since we had a lot to do if we wanted to eat before midnight! when you see the menu, you'll understand!

appetizers

        baba ghannouj

mhammara (red pepper & walnut dip)

ful mdammas (fava beans with garlic)

raw cut veggies (persian cucumbers, carrot sticks, romaine lettuce, and such)

olives

pita bread

feta cheese

pistachio nuts, cashews, jordan almonds

entreés

lebanese omelette (vegetarian—either as entreé or appetizer)

barbequed chicken with homemade garlic mayonnaise

sheikh al mihshi (japanese eggplant stuffed with lamb) served over lebanese style rice, garnished with  sauteéd nuts

salads

tabbouli

lebanese beet salad

dessert

fresh seasonal fruits and berries

knafe bi jibn (lebanese cheese pastry) with simple syrup (attar)

beverages

lebanese rose syrup 

jallab (sweet date beverage) with pine nuts

lebanese beer and wine


quite an effort and quite a feast! twelve guests/cooks were invited—not all were in the kitchen! some of the men played music while mostly women and one brave man were the students/cooks, with david documenting the event with his camera! it was a great collaborative effort and still we didn't eat until after 9 p.m. (early for middle easterners!) perhaps because of the elaborate menu and challenges with using the convection oven—elaine had barely used hers—it was new, and my total cooking experience is on my traditional vintage gas stove!

it was an enjoyable and memorable night! here's one of david's photos. be sure to read his blog to see more and to hear his perspective. thanks, david!

alice's kitchen returns to LA for 100th anniversary of...

the church founded by my great uncle, Fr. Gerasimos Sawaya, of Douma, Lebanon, St. Anne's Melkite (Byzantine rite) Greek Catholic Church. copies of alice's kitchen were given in honor of my mother, Alice, and the Sawaya family to guests attending a banquet to celebrate this event. people who knew mama, and others were thrilled to receive copies of the book, which along with so many recipes, includes history, historical photos, and memoir. Fr. Sawaya looks a lot like my father, Elias, quite handsome, indeed.

this summer i was craving tabbouli salad made from my homegrown tomatoes, parsley, mint and green onions (recipe of course from alice's kitchen!). it is served in little romaine "boats" and picked up to eat like a taco! not much bulgar in it compared to what is often called tabbouli in the west. the winter version of tabbouli, called safsouf, has much more bulgar since greens are not as abundant as in the summertime.

i am delighted to be posting on this new blog, with color photos showing what many of our traditional lebanese dishes look like in full beautiful color.

things are winding down in the garden, so i will have more time to post. and i will include some images of the abundant summer harvest, like this one.