Weeknight Meals

Serve with mashed potatoes.

Serve with potatoes.

This Lebanese specialty is served as an appetizer, but it is also good as a main course accompanied by mashed potatoes. Calf’s liver has a better flavor and texture, so use it if you can.

The dish takes its name from the Ottoman pasha who administered Mount Lebanon in the nineteenth century. Serve with rice or mashed potatoes. The meatballs are usually fried, then cooked in a tomato sauce, but baked this way they have a light, fresh flavor.

This is common throughout the Middle East.

From the Greek word for “doll,” these Greek meatballs make lovely finger food, as good cold as they are hot.

This is an old family recipe which originates in Syria. It is easy to make now that dried pitted sour cherries are available. We used to have to pit them. Serve it with rice or, as was usual in the old days, on miniature pita breads split in half, soft side up.

Meats grilled on skewers have become the best-known Middle Eastern foods as the standard fare of Lebanese, Turkish, and Iranian restaurants abroad. They are a symbol, in particular, of Turkish food. Turks say that this way of cooking meat was created during the conquering era of the Ottoman Empire, when Turkish soldiers, forced to camp out in tents for months on end, discovered the pleasures of eating meat grilled out of doors on wood fires. Twenty years ago, on a gastronomic visit to Turkey, I went with an interpreter on an arranged tour of kebab houses in Istanbul. At every stop I was invited to eat. It became a grand marathon—une grande bouffe. At the fifth establishment they opened the refrigerated room and showed me all the prize cuts, which were later presented to me straight from the fire on a gigantic plate. As well as the kebabs and ground-meat kofta kebab on skewers, there were small lamb chops, kidneys, slices of calf’s liver, beef steaks, sucuk (spicy beef sausages), and pieces of chicken. It was a gourmand’s dream, but for a woman already satiated from eating elsewhere and afraid of giving offense, it was a nightmare. In Greece and Turkey, alternating pieces of onion, tomato, and bell pepper are threaded onto the skewers in between the cubes of meat. This looks good, but it is not a good idea, as the meat and vegetables take different times to cook and the meat becomes wet and does not get properly seared. So, if you must have roasted vegetables, have them on another skewer, or straight on the grill. In some countries, lumps of fat are pressed between pieces of meat to keep them from drying out as the fat melts.

This Syrian dish is made with a type of pasta called lissan al assfour (bird’s tongues) which looks like large grains of rice. It cooks in the sauce from the chicken and acquires a rich, spicy flavor and light-brown color. You will find it in Middle Eastern stores as well as in the pasta section of supermarkets, where it is called “orzo.” An apricot sauce, salsat mishmisheya, sometimes accompanies the dish .

Grilled chicken on skewers is part of the Arab kebab-house and restaurant trade. The flavoring here is Lebanese. Look at the variations for alternatives, and be careful not to overcook, as chicken pieces dry out quickly. Leg meat remains juicier than breast meat.

Djaj is the Arabic word for chicken; ferakh is an Egyptian term. Every day, the trams and buses coming into the towns from the villages are crowded with peasants carrying crates of live, cackling poultry. The chickens are killed and plucked at the market or poultry shops. This is a simple and homely but delicious Egyptian way of cooking the birds.

This is a quick and simple way of cooking chicken.

This was a family favorite that my mother often made.

A wonderful dish. Even those who think it is not worth cooking quail because the birds are too small think this is delightful. In Morocco, ground ginger is used, but with fresh ginger it is particularly delicious. I peel and cut the root into pieces and squeeze them through a garlic press to obtain the juice. But if you are used to grating ginger, do that.

Every year, migrating quails fly over the Mediterranean to Alexandria. Hundreds of the small birds fall, exhausted, on the dunes of the beaches of Agami, to be caught in large nets and collected in baskets. They are plucked and cleaned and marinated in a rich sauce, then grilled on the beaches over numerous little fires. Now quail farms are an important part of the local economy. Broiled quail are also a specialty of Lebanese restaurants, where they are served as mezze. The flavorings here are those of Alexandria.

You can buy tamarind paste (page 46) from Middle Eastern stores. Serve the scallops as an appetizer accompanied with a leaf salad.

This is a very popular Arab dish. There are white and brown versions, which depend on whether you let the onions go brown or not. Use skinned fillets of fish such as bream, turbot, haddock, cod, or halibut.

A Greek way of cooking mussels.

A Moroccan way with shrimp that is quick to do and really delicious. If you buy the shrimp frozen, let them thaw in the refrigerator before peeling.