Recipes for a Middle Eastern Feast: Baklava

No feast would be complete without dessert, and for many Middle Eastern feasts, this means baklava.  It is probably the most well-known of the many dessert options, and the ingredients are inexpensive and widely available.  One of the appeals for me of serving baklava on special occasions is that it is such a unique dessert.  Obviously, it is not a cake, pie, or cookie.  It also does not fall into the category of "frozen dessert."  It is a filled pastry, but it is a completely different creature from a creme puff or chocolate-filled puff pastry.  It takes less than an hour of hands-on time to make at home, and like many Middle Eastern dishes, it can be made the day before the event.  You can also purchase baklava in many bakeries and grocery stores.

For years, that's exactly what I did.  I purchased my baklava along with my pitas and hummus to go along with the other dishes that I was making.  Phyllo dough scared me, and the dessert looked complicated and time consuming to make.  Moving to a small town a few years ago forced me to change my opinion.  The only baklava here is in the fancy pastry section of the local bakery and costs as much for two tiny pieces as a whole tray of it in any other place that we lived.  So I rolled up my sleeves, looked up half a dozen recipes, and went to work figuring it out.

Recipes for a Middle Eastern Feast: Chicken with Olives and Preserved Lemons

One of the things I love most about Middle Eastern cooking is that so much of the food is made with healthy, fresh ingredients.  With the obvious exception of pitas, desserts, and anything made with phyllo dough, the grains are usually whole.  In Middle Eastern dishes, the vegetables are plentiful, the herbs are fresh, and the flavors are exotic combinations of spices that by and large, you already have in your pantry.   (And if you don't, most of them are easy to obtain at a regular grocery store.)

The other thing that I love about Middle Eastern cooking is that most of the dishes can (or should) be made or at least mostly prepared ahead of time.  This makes it ideal company food.  A few hours of food preparation time the afternoon or evening before the event can yield a menu that requires only about half an hour of hands-on cooking the day that the company is coming, leaving your hands free to wipe off counters, set the table, and fix your hair before guests are due to arrive.  (Bedhead is one of those iffy things.  It might make it look like you are such a fabulous cook that you had time to hang out in bed all day before tossing this feast together, but it could also make you look harassed and incompetent.  So, go fix that hair.)

Recipes for a Middle Eastern Feast: Beef Phyllo Rolls (Burak bi Lahm)

Family reunions are a feature of American life. When families are spread out all over our nation (a five day drive coast to coast), it prevents regular family time except for that glorious day (or week) during the summer or during the holidays when everyone gathers to catch up, show off the grand kids, and eat copious amounts of food.  Even if most of your family lives within a two hour drive of Grandma's house, family get-togethers are a treat--a time for remembering and sharing and passing down things that shouldn't be forgotten.  It's a time for heritage.

Food is part of that heritage.  The Mattson family reunions of my youth seemed to feature typical American fare dotted with the occasional traditional dish from the Swedish/Welsh heritage we all shared.  Hoagies, tuna salad, and egg salad sandwiches would be piled on plates and set down on one end of a picnic table along with the bucket of KFC chicken that someone who had just flown in that morning had picked up on the way over to the park.  There were jello salads and green salads, fruit salads and pasta salads.  And then there were the obligatory bowls of something that I have dubbed the Mattson Potato Salad--the magical concoction that no one had a recipe for but somehow could be produced identically by at least four of the aunties and adult cousins besides my mother.  It wasn't a real reunion without it. 

Similarly, it wasn't a real Solomon family reunion without a big bowl of Tabbouleh sitting next to the pile of hamburger patties that one of the uncles had been grilling.