Mediterranean & Middle East Recipes

⏱ Prep: 10 min 🔥Cook: 35 min 👤Serves: 6 Origin: Lebanon Lebanese Hashweh, means “stuffing” in Arabic, and that is exactly what it started as. Spiced ground meat cooked with rice and warm spices, stuffed into whole lambs or chickens at Lebanese celebrations for centuries. Over time, hashweh became a dish in its own right: served as a rice pilaf topped with toasted pine nuts and parsley, spooned alongside roast chicken, set out at holiday tables, eaten on ordinary weeknights when someone wanted something more than plain rice. It remains the same recipe either way, the distinction is only in …

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⏱ Time: 15 min 🥙Makes: 4 wraps 🌿Vegan The Lebanese falafel sandwich is one of the great street foods, crispy falafel balls pressed onto thin pita with a swipe of hummus and harissa, layered with fresh parsley, mint, tomato, radish, thinly sliced onion and Lebanese pickles, then drizzled generously with tahini sauce and rolled tightly into a cylinder. Wrapped in paper. Eaten immediately. The crunch of the falafel against the fresh herbs and the creamy, tangy tahini sauce is the combination that has made this sandwich ubiquitous across the Levant and beyond. The assembly has an order. Hummus on the …

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⏱ Time: 10 min 👤Serves: 6 🌿Vegetarian Watermelon feta salad is one of those combinations that sounds wrong before you taste it and then immediately makes sense: the sweetness of cold watermelon against the salt and tang of crumbled feta, the coolness of cucumber, the freshness of mint, the brightness of lime. It is a Mediterranean summer salad, the kind eaten across Greece and the Levant wherever watermelon and good cheese exist in the same place at the same time. It takes 10 minutes and it is always the first thing to disappear from the table. Two things keep this …

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⏱ Prep: 15 min 👤Serves: 4 🌿Vegan 🫒Palestinian Jerusalem salad is a Palestinian chopped salad, one of the oldest and most widely eaten salads in the Levant, made from what grows on the land: cucumber, tomato, onion, parsley, lemon and olive oil. It appears on every table across Palestine, Lebanon, Jordan and the broader region under different names but the same essential idea. In its simplest form it has five ingredients. In its fuller form it has sumac, fresh mint, a pinch of salt that draws out the vegetable juices, and the finest dice you can manage. That last detail, …

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⏱ Time: 5 min 🥙Makes: 2 wraps 🌿Vegetarian The labneh pita sandwich is what Lebanese mornings taste like. Thick, tangy labneh spread across the inner side of a split pita, sprinkled with za’atar, drizzled with good olive oil, layered with thin cucumber slices, ripe tomato, fresh mint and green olives, then rolled into a tight cylinder and eaten immediately, sometimes standing up, sometimes on the way out the door, always with a glass of strong tea alongside. It appears on every Lebanese breakfast table and in every Lebanese household regardless of anything else on the table. It takes five minutes. …

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⏱ Prep: 20 min ❄️Chill: 2 hrs 🔥Grill: 8–10 min 🍢Makes: 8 skewers Turkish Adana Kebab is named after Adana, a city in southern Turkey with a serious reputation for spicy kebabs. Ground lamb, well-fatted, heavily seasoned with pul biber and kneaded until sticky is pressed onto wide flat metal skewers and grilled over charcoal until the outside chars and the fat renders into the meat. Served on lavash that catches the dripping juices, with sumac onions, grilled tomatoes and peppers alongside. The bread catching the juices is not incidental. It is one of the best parts. Two things define …

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⏱ Prep: 15 min 🔥Cook: 25 min 👤Serves: 4–6 🌿Vegan Lebanese lentil salad is built around one technique that separates it from every other lentil salad: the dressing goes on while the lentils are still warm. Garlic and cumin bloomed in olive oil, lemon juice whisked in off the heat, poured over the freshly drained lentils so they absorb the aromatic oil into every grain rather than just coating the surface. The result, after the lentils cool, after the parsley and mint and cucumber and tomato are folded through is a salad that tastes of cumin and lemon all the …

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⏱ Prep: 20 min 🔥Cook: 20 min 👤Serves: 4 Turkish Lamb Tantuni Wrap is the street food of Mersin, Turkey’s Mediterranean port city and one of the most satisfying wraps in Turkish cuisine. Thin-sliced lamb is steam-fried in butter with cumin and pul biber until the juices caramelise and the meat is tender and slightly charred at the edges. Then the lavash bread is pressed directly onto the sizzling meat in the pan, soaking up the spiced butter and lamb juices for thirty seconds before it is lifted and filled. That thirty seconds is what makes tantuni different from every …

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⏱ Prep: 30 min 🌡️Rise: 1.5 hrs 🔥Bake: 12–15 min 🥧Makes:16 Cheese fatayer, fatayer bi jibneh are the small, golden cheese pies eaten for breakfast at Lebanese and Levantine bakeries every morning, stacked in trays in the window, warm and slightly melted inside. Soft yeasted dough, a filling of akkawi, mozzarella and feta with nigella seeds, folded into triangles or boat shapes and baked at high heat until golden. The kind of thing that makes a table of people reach across each other without apologising. The dough is the same used for all Lebanese fatayer, spinach, meat and cheese versions …

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⏱ Prep: 30 min 🔥Bake: 35–40 min 👤Serves: 8 🌿Vegetarian Turkish Turkish börek (börek) is layers of thin pastry filled with spinach and feta, baked until the top and bottom are deeply golden and the interior is warm and yielding. It is eaten at breakfast with Turkish tea, as a midday snack from a pastry shop, at gatherings, and at any point in between. It is one of the defining foods of Turkish cuisine and one of those dishes that looks more difficult than it is. The technique that makes Turkish börek distinct from other phyllo pastries is the binding …

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