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Mezze @ Antoine

‘Mezze’: A comprehensive invitation to try your hand at Lebanese cooking

Here is an article on the Mezze Book, published in the Daily Star.
November 29 2013.
By Beckie Strum
 
BEIRUT: Barbara Abdeni Massaad took an unorthodox approach to her most recent cookbook, “Mezze: A Labor of Love,” by replacing photographs of the well-known dips, salads and finger foods with colorful illustrations. “If a single image could define our unique culture and heritage,” Massaad writes, “it would certainly depict an over sized table groaning with small, colorful plates of food, surrounded by happy people caught in the act of socializing and sharing a meal.”
Massaad and “Mezze” illustrator Pascale Hares launched the book Thursday evening at Falamanki restaurant in Sodeco, with women lined up from the minute the two sat down to sign copies of the guide to Lebanon’s most iconic foods.

This is Massaad’s third English-language Lebanese cookbook. She’s written on traditional baked goods in “Man’oushe: Inside the Street Corner Lebanese Bakery,” and preserves in “Mouneh: Preserving Foods for the Lebanese Pantry.”
The whimsical illustrations – kibbeh akras with eyelashes and smiles, a young woman sleeping in a pile of okra, silly speech bubbles containing local slang – in a way reflect Massaad’s approach to teaching mezze.

Rather than preach the correct way to make each dish, every recipe comes with a caveat or two: You can replace this for that, she writes; or in the south, they do it this way; and of course, some use pomegranate molasses instead of lemon juice.

The pictures offer abstract representations of the food and the genial spirit in which it’s eaten without obliging readers to duplicate from a photograph. The words together with the pictures accommodate the varying nature of mezze and strip the ego out of Lebanese cooking – the arrogance that proclaims one regional variation to be the real one.

For her fattoush recipe, for example, Massaad says the beauty of the salad is that it can be made from whatever vegetables are available and in season. She invites cooks to fry or bake their Arabic bread for the croutons.

Wherever she can, she offers people options and tries to incorporate as many variations as she can.
The raw meat section contains seven different recipes, all of which she says can be made with lamb, beef or goat. And the topping options on her hummus read like the fine print in a car owner’s manual: beef tenderloin, lamb tenderloin, basterma, sujuk, fried pine nuts, awarma, more chickpeas and on and on.
That’s not to say Massaad doesn’t divulge her favorites. She explains her affinity for muhammara, a red pepper and walnut dip from Aleppo, and her love of kibbeh orfalieh, which originated in Turkey.
And though accommodating of regional tastes, when it comes to flavor she urges readers to heed her advice. For example, she insists eggplant should never be cooked in the oven to make baba ghannouj – chargrill it on the stove top and remove the seeds, which can produce a bitterness.

Mezze also defies the standard recipe design that separates the ingredients from the method in tidy uniform layout. Thus, she puts emphasis on thoroughly reading her words, which are littered with crucial tips that will make the difference between passable and superb mezze.

She predicts the nuanced challenges her readers might face and divulges tips that only seasoned cooks have learned – the kind of advice for which those of us who don’t have Lebanese tetas crave.
So what are some of these secrets? To make hummus smooth, for example, most big producers have heavy machinery to give it that buttery consistency. To do it at home, Massaad suggests pulverizing the chickpeas first in the food processor and then moving them to the blender, where the other ingredients are added.

Similarly, did you know that at Sahyoun, arguably Beirut’s most famous falafel makers, the owners use only fava beans? Massaad offers a recipe that mixes fava beans and chickpeas.

The book is realistic and reflects what one actually finds on the table. She includes Lebanese-style French fries, which are not age-old local fare but are part and parcel of today’s mezze spread. She also incorporates Armenian mezze that were brought to Lebanon relatively recently, but which she says are here to stay.

Massaad gives a nod to chefs that have remained true to their heritage while moving recipes forward. And she presents the lessons she’s learned not as a monologue on mezze done right, but as a dialogue in which she invites readers to participate – readers that she knows will come with their own culinary baggage.

“Food preparation is never about a strict set of rules,” she writes. “Cooking is personal, meaning that the character and personality of the cook should be evident in the final outcome.”

Falamanki Book Launch / Beckie Strum

Read more: http://www.dailystar.com.lb/Culture/Lifestyle/2013/Nov-29/239443-mezze-a-comprehensive-invitation-to-try-your-hand-at-lebanese-cooking.ashx#ixzz2mOI7KLox

(The Daily Star :: Lebanon News :: http://www.dailystar.com.lb)

Le mezzé à la manière de Barbara Abdeni Massaad

 Article of L'Orient le jour, Carla Henoud has captured the essence of my work and of my being. I am very grateful!

Mezze: A Labor of Love

The cover of Mezze: A Labor of Love

The new baby is finally out! Delivery was not painful... It has been smooth sailing all along thanks to the team I work with. I'm very grateful for the dedication and hard work. Pascale Hares you did a fine job illustrating my book, you were able to capture what is inside my BRAIN. Scary! Dots, my printing partner makes the dream a reality always... Jill Boutros watches over my writing like a hawk. The list is long, I have written all in the book.

Why a book about Mezze?

Mezze is an obvious choice. It often defines our Lebanese cuisine all over the world and is definitely something to boast about. Julie Andrieu, a French TV host who has traveled all over the world in her famous show "Fourchette et sac a dos" claims that the Lebanese mezze was one of the most interesting food experience she encountered while traveling over 80 countries. It's impressing! But we knew that!

On the 28th of November, at Falamanki in Beirut, we are launching Mezze: A Labor of Love. I want to thank Al Wadi al Akhdar for their support and encouragement to make this project possible. Falamanki has always showed support in my work and my soul lies in their cute "Dekeneh" with all those wonderful village products and artifacts.

There's over +70 recipes with beautiful illustrations. The book will be sold for 35 USD.

I hope that the launching will be success, in spite of the political instability and economical crisis and everything else going on.... God help Lebanon and neighboring countries, spare us from more bloodshed and suffering.

Peace. Let's create beautiful and positive things while we live on this earth.

Here are some exerts:

The Vegetable Basket

Kebbeh Nayeh

Beef Tongue

Chefs of Lebanon, Slow Food Beirut NEEDS YOU!!!

Come join us at the Cooking Festival

I'll let you in on a little secret, I've always wanted to meet all the chefs of Lebanon. Why? because I cherish these men and women who dedicate their lives to feeding others (make sense?)...

I am now heading the Slow Food Beirut Convivia, slowly but surely with the help of a few volunteers. Hopefully this year, if the political situation remains more or less stable (meaning bombs don't fall on our heads), then Slow Food Beirut will host each month an event dealing with food and the people who make it happen...

Our first initiation is at the 2013 Cooking Fair! The good people who also organize Horeca have made this festival a yearly event. It is growing from year to year and people seem to get interested. Last  year I made bread for good folks to show them that it's really not such a big deal. This year because of my new status, I want to focus on spreading the good word of Slow Food.

The talk I am preparing for the festival will introduce chefs and others to the philosophy of Slow Food. That said, we will get memberships and discuss new year strategies. I would like to get each chef involved in an event and try to bring them closer to a farmer, a small scale producer, an artisan. Is it so hard? It might be because knowing the restaurant business (I've had my share), consistency is important. We, as Slow Food Beirut, have to build this trust and create a strong link and relationship.

Tony Ramy, who is quite famous in the Syndicate of Restaurants in Lebanon pointed out to me an example which I will use during my talk. Once he was on an outing in a restaurant with his family in a local village restaurant near St. Charbel... He discovered that all the food he was eating was imported including the potatoes, the meat, even some of the pickles, ... He felt cheated and very frustrated. What has become of our heritage, of our pride goods, of our culinary past???

I suggest we all get our acts together and work on safeguarding our culinary traditions, here and now. (Before IT IS TOO LATE!!!!)...

Hope to see many of you there!

The Fisherman and the Businessman Sense

I met someone recently who told me about this charming story, it seems so obvious and yet most of us are so blind. Personally I believe in the fisherman's philosophy. Society makes us, almost forces us to become slaves of money... soon later, we loose ourselves. I've never been in love with money, it has never made me a freer person. I'm content with rich experiences more than worldly goods.

And as I get a little older and hopefully wiser I think "less is better".

Thank you Donald for sharing your story...

The Fisherman and the Businessman - a classic Brazilian story.
Pritesh Kalantri

There was once a businessman who was sitting by the beach in a small Brazilian village. As he sat, he saw a Brazilian fisherman rowing a small boat towards the shore having caught quite a few big fish.
The businessman was impressed and asked the fisherman, “How long does it take you to catch so many fish?” The fisherman replied, “Oh, just a short while.”
“Then why don’t you stay longer at sea and catch even more?” The businessman was astonished.
“This is enough to feed my whole family,” the fisherman said.
The businessman then asked, “So, what do you do for the rest of the day?”
The fisherman replied, “Well, I usually wake up early in the morning, go out to sea and catch a few fish, then go back and play with my kids. In the afternoon, I take a nap with my wife, and evening comes, I join my buddies in the village for a drink — we play guitar, sing and dance throughout the night.”

The businessman offered a suggestion to the fisherman. “I am a PhD in business management. I could help you to become a more successful person. From now on, you should spend more time at sea and try to catch as many fish as possible. When you have saved enough money, you could buy a bigger boat and catch even more fish. Soon you will be able to afford to buy more boats, set up your own company, your own production plant for canned food and distribution network. By then, you will have moved out of this village and to Sao Paulo, where you can set up HQ to manage your other branches.”

The fisherman continues, “And after that?”
The businessman laughs heartily, “After that, you can live like a king in your own house, and when the time is right, you can go public and float your shares in the Stock Exchange, and you will be rich.”
The fisherman asks, “And after that?”
The businessman says, “After that, you can finally retire, you can move to a house by the fishing village, wake up early in the morning, catch a few fish, then return home to play with kids, have a nice afternoon nap with your wife, and when evening comes, you can join your buddies for a drink, play the guitar, sing and dance throughout the night!”
The fisherman was puzzled, “Isn’t that what I am doing now?”