Tag Archives: cilantro

Spaghetti with yogurt and cilantro pesto sauce (Ma’acaroni bel-laban)

This is a homestyle dish combining  a little pasta and the dairy always  on hand, yogurt! Not the kind of dish likely to figure on the menu of a Lebanese restaurant in Sydney or Washington or Paris, but ours nevertheless and highly ingrained in our culinary habits. To liven up the yogurt sauce a [...]
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Taro root with spinach, chick peas and cilantro pesto

Taro root is a vegetable that is commonly used in Lebanon, especially during Lent. It is cultivated locally and  known as kolkass; I know from my Egyptian friend Phoebe that the Egyptians love it too; in fact, when I stopped by the Palestinian grocer I found bags of Taro root in the freezer imported from [...]
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Fava bean and yogurt stew over Basmati rice

In the Near East, everybody is crazy about fava beans; it’s my mother’s favorite dish. In our family, fava beans were made in a yogurt-based stew with lamb shanks.  I grabbed a bag of frozen fava beans from the Palestinian grocer; these  are imported from Egypt ( fava beans are a staple food in Egypt). [...]
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