Lebanese Dinner

Hey Cheeky,
I'm a bit behind with showing you these photos (seems to be the story of my life lately hey?) but better late than never right?

As you know, every month I'm trying to cook an international meal. Last month (May) the meal was from Lebanon. I used to work at a Lebanese take away and I love the food. I know that there are probably a lot of things you'd consider to be Turkish rather than Lebanese, but I think there are a lot of crossovers. These were all Lebanese recipes though.

Most of my recipes were from this cookbook - Abla's Lebanese Kitchen. I don't have the actual book, but I do have an extract from it. A newspaper had this feature a while ago where every day you could get a mini cookbook with the paper. Each mini cookbook had some of the recipes from an actual cookbook. Based on the things I made for this dinner, I'd love to get the actual full sized cookbook.

The menu was as follows:

• Khoubiz el firin – Lebanese Bread
• Hummus – Chickpea Dip
• Fattoush – Bread salad
• Tabbouleh
• Djaj mishwee bi toum – Garlic chicken on skewers
• Felafel – Chickpea fritters
• Baklawa – Honey Nut Pastry

The Lebanese bread was a disaster at first. I was cooking with Kyroun, the kid down the street, and we tried one recipe from Abla's cookbook and it didn't work. I ended up using a different recipe (not sure where I found it now, I thought I had a link but nope.). The revised version was much better.

Everything else went fairly well as well, although I wish I hadn't cooked all of the Felafel. I made heaps and we didn't eat them all. I would have been better off just cooking a few and saving the rest. They taste best when they're freshly cooked.

The baklawa was a nice surprise - it had lemon added, and at first I thought it tasted strange, or had too much lemon, but it actually cut through some of the sweetness so that was good.

We found this thing on line where somebody had made flags based on traditional food. The flag for Lebanon was made with bread and tomato, but we decided to give it a go as a decoration and we used hummus, with paprika for the red stripes.

Anyway, on to the pictures. It was a yummy meal, and we enjoyed ourselves, but I didn't manage to figure out any little gifts to give. I've done that for all but the first meal, and I'm already thinking about what i"m going to do for this month's one, which is Danish. Actually, that is meant to be happening on the 20th so I'd better get things figured out soon. I'll keep you posted.

Love Dorky. 

Cyclamens are apparently the national flower, so Moogi made these from crepe paper.

Menu and a prayer for before the meal

To drink we had this sort of rose syrup cordial that Kyroun made. It was actually really yummy. 

Do you think there's enough food for 5 people? 

See the flag? It turned out so well that we have decided to try and do it every month now. 

Unfortunately I had to share this with other people. 

The best part of the meal