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Go topBY: Habeeb Salloum/Contributing writer Sunday dinner was an important ritual during my youthful days on our southern Saskatchewan homestead. Even though I often yearned for bologna and sardines, foods we rarely had, I always looked forward to my mother’s tasty Sunday dinners that varied from week to week. However, no matter what she prepared it … Continued
Buzzfeed Community There are several ways chickpeas can be used to make delicious, and often healthy, foods. This Arab ingredient can be used in desserts, soups, and more! 1. Scramble them like eggs! Via wellandfull.com Get the recipe here! 2. Make them into burgers! Via runningonrealfood.com Get the recipe here! 3. Use them to bake … Continued
BY: Yusra Al Shawwa/Contributing Writer The Arab World diet, a sub-type of the Mediterranean diet, has many positive influences on health, including cognition, brain function, and overall mortality. It can reduce risks for heart diseases, cancer, and developments of Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases. Since most foods are prepared with small quantities of olive oil, rather … Continued
In this hilarious video, several Americans are given Syrian dishes to try and their responses are overwhelmingly positive. These are Americans who know little or nothing about Syria, yet enjoy their time learning about the food and trying the traditional dishes. They also practice their Arabic in the video, making it that much more fun … Continued
BY: Nisreen Eadeh/Staff Writer For centuries, Arabs have been using natural home remedies to fix little problems, such as cuts, stings, and aches. Many of these ingredients can also be used to combat illnesses and provide an alternative to medicine. By holding onto these remedies, and others, from their ancestors, Arab Americans have established small … Continued
BY: Habeeb Salloum/Contributing writer The hot winds were fierce in the early l930’s, during the great depression, as they blew across the south Saskatchewan plains. I was no more than eight years old struggling with a pail of water half as large as myself through a blinding sand storm. The well was half a mile … Continued
Science Bulletin Sticking to a Mediterranean style diet might slow down aging finds the EU funded project NU-AGE. At a recent conference in Brussels, researchers presented that a NU-AGE Mediterranean style diet, tested in the project, significantly decreased the levels of the protein known as C-reactive protein, one of the main inflammatory marker linked with … Continued
BY: Linda Dalal Sawaya/Contributing Writer A year ago I began writing my weekly food and garden column inspired by what is growing in my garden at the moment, and what to do with it in the kitchen. Although my garden is in Portland, Oregon, the slant is Mediterranean, and primarily Arabic, Levantine, and more specifically … Continued
green almonds (louz ahdar) © linda dalal sawaya 2016 BY: Linda Dalal Sawaya/Contributing Writer Another native to the Middle East, this fruit that is typically considered a nut is really a drupe, and when it appears marks a sure sign of the arrival of spring. The green almond, or louz ahdar, is famous in the Middle … Continued
Associated Press
The kitchen hums with activity. Rachana Rimal is at one table, making momos, the traditional dumplings from her native Nepal. Next to her, Iraqi immigrant Dhuha Jasif mixes some pureed eggplant for baba ghanouj. Containers of adas, a lentil stew from the East African nation of Eritrea, sit on a counter.
The unusual mix of cuisines is how it works at Eat Offbeat, a Queens-based food delivery service. All seven employees are refugees or asylum seekers who fled their home countries.
None had any professional cooking experience before coming to work for the startup, which launched in November.
The company has committed to hiring refugees and teaching them culinary skills, partly for altruistic reasons and partly as a business strategy. In a city filled with good ethnic food, it is a way for the cuisine to stand out.
“We are really focusing on these new and off-the-beaten-path cuisines,” said Manal Kahi, who founded the company with her brother, Wissam Kahi. “Refugees are coming from countries that have cuisines we don’t really know. … It’s not cuisines that you find at every corner.”
A Lebanese immigrant who came to New York for graduate school, Manal Kahi started thinking about a food business in 2014 after getting rave reviews from friends for the hummus she made from her grandmother’s recipe.
At the time refugees were also on her mind, since many Syrians had started fleeing their war-torn home for next-door Lebanon.
“I was feeling very hopeless about it,” Kahi said. “When I got this idea of making hummus, I thought maybe Syrian refugees could be making” it.
As the idea for the scope of the company grew, the thought of employing refugees stuck.
“We thought they were more in need than any other immigrants,” she said.
She and her brother partnered with Juan Suarez de Lezo, a chef who has worked in high-profile restaurants around the world, and contacted the International Rescue Committee, a humanitarian organization that helps resettle refugees and asylum seekers.
Rimal was one of their first hires. The 52-year-old was granted asylum after coming to the U.S. in 2006, at the time leaving behind her husband and two of her three children. She was reunited with most of her family in recent years, but her son is still in Nepal, making her reluctant to talk about what drove her to seek asylum. When she left, an armed conflict between the Nepal government and the Communist Party of Nepal had been going on for 10 years, leaving at least 13,000 dead.
She’s been a cooking aficionado her entire life, having learned from her mother and grandmother. When the opportunity came from Eat Offbeat, she jumped at it. Since then, momos have become a standard offering on the company’s menu, and she’s taught the other women how to make them. Another favorite is her cauliflower Manchurian, which comes in a spicy sauce.
Rimal has had to change her recipes somewhat to accommodate an American palate, and she’s often tired from the work, but “I’m so happy to be here,” she said.
Kahi said the company is making close to 200 meals per week now out of the professional kitchen they rent in Queens.
They offer food delivery to groups of at least five people, with hopes of growing to the point where individual meal delivery becomes economically feasible.
If someone leaves, as the Eritrean refugee who brought the recipe for adas to the company did, Eat Offbeat is likely to take that person’s dish out of circulation even though the other employees would have learned how to make it, Kahi said.
That’s because it’s not just about the food, but also the people making it, she said. “We want to keep it tied to them.”
Source: www.watertowndailytimes.com
BY: Linda Dalal Sawaya/Contributing Writer As an artist, cook, and gardener, for me the Pacific Northwest is nirvana for cooking seasonal Mediterranean cuisine, painting en plein air, and for planting almost anything. Right now in my garden the flat leaved Italian parsley, Petroselinum crispum neapolitanum, the straight alternate to curly parsley Petroselinum crispum, has thrived over our mild Mediterranean-like … Continued
mamouls—totally fabulous Easter cookies © linda dalal sawaya 2016 These traditional Easter cookies are made in Lebanon and other parts of the Levant in press molds called ‘aalib. My beloved mother, Alice, and grandmother (sitto or teta in Arabic) preferred to devise their own method of decorating these scrumptious walnut-filled cookies—Mother says it was out … Continued
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