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(Healthy) Lebanese Meal



I keep hearing how healthy Lebanese food is…well, yes, depending on how you COOK it! :-) Anyway, enough said about that.

Now, A & I love trying all types of cuisine but we are also aware that some people may find what we think is normal a little TOO exotic. So when we had D & L over for dinner last week, we wanted to make them something that they wouldn’t normally have at home but not too out-of-the-ordinary to enjoy. We finally settled on Lebanese food as being different but still providing a certain sense of familiarity. I went down to Sydney Road and picked up some Lahme B’Ajine – Tripoli-style – and baklava. We served the Lahme B’Ajine with some delicious home-made hommus and vine leaves as entree. This was followed by Djaj a Riz, rice cooked with minced lamb topped with poached chicken and toasted pine nuts, Bazella, green peas and onion in a spicy tomato sauce, and Fattoush, a green salad made extra crunchy by the addition of toasted arabic bread. I followed the recipes from Abla Amad’s book but was quite disappointed with the Djaj a Riz. I expected it to be a lot more tasty than it, unfortunately, turned out to be. I guess that’s always the risk you run by going with a recipe that you haven’t tested it before… Regardless, it turned out to be a lovely night, and I will leave you with the very easy recipe for the Bazella. We don’t make this often but I enjoy it very much when I do get around to cooking it:

1 large onion – finely chopped, 1 clove of garlic – sliced, 1 tbs olive oil, 3 large tomatoes – chopped, 2 tbs tomato paste, 3 cups water, 2 tsp salt, 1/2 tsp ground black pepper, 1/2 tsp allspice, 4 cups peas
Saute onion and garlic in olive oil over med heat until lightly browned, then add remaining ingredients, cover and cook for 40 minutes. Like a good curry, it actually tastes better the next day.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 2nd, 2005 at 9:36 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

One Response to “(Healthy) Lebanese Meal”

  1. plum Says:
    September 4th, 2005 at 7:09 pm

    Cin, I’ve had the chicken rice at Abla’s and liked it, but some other things just didn’t do it for me. And the banquet – someone should warn you how much is coming – otherwise you fill up on dips and then can’t fit in all the really good stuff!

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