plnty

plnty: Incredible Lebanese homemade fresh pasta

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by • Featured, Must-Try Foods • Tags: , ,

With the soaring prices of everything imported in Lebanon, especially in the F&B segment, the search for not-so-hidden Lebanese gems has become a must. I know that we live in times where a lot of people are barely surviving, but so are small businesses that are still trying to make it despite it all, and that desperately need our help. When we help a small business, we are keeping a shop open, a person still employed, or a family fed.

It reaches an even higher level of commitment when that business makes incredible food and must be, by all means supported. And this is where I want to shed the light on plnty, a Lebanese love-brand of homemade, fresh pasta that is solely made of flour and free-range eggs. No preservatives, no chemicals and probably a lot of love are added to the mix of the most tasteful pasta I’ve had.

It cooks in just 3 minutes but since it is made from fresh eggs, you will need to let it cool down before you serve it or mix it with sauce. It goes perfectly well with any of the regular pasta sauces and has an incredible texture that just makes it melt in your mouth.

So people, forget your Barilla, Panzani and other imported industrial brands and go get yourselves a pack of plnty pasta – I’m sure once you’ve tried it, it will become a regular item in your pantry.

You can find the points of sale on their website: https://www.plnty.co/

 

white-wine

The Lebanese white wines to enjoy this summer

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by • Drinks, Featured • Tags: , ,

It’s summertime! What better than to enjoy a good bottle of chilled white wine, paired with great food or with just some snacks? As you probably already know, I’m a huge fan of wine. There isn’t a single week that goes by where I don’t enjoy at least once a good bottle of wine, with my husband, my family or my friends.

I have been meaning to write about my favourite list of Lebanese white wines for a while now, but I’m glad I didn’t because I recently had the pleasure of discovering new white wines that are an absolute delight. So now my list is more complete and I feel I can give really good advice on which wines you should be enjoying this summer. Some of the below wines are so good, they will be having their own particular blog posts :). Meanwhile, here are the wines I recommend – I hope you like them (PS: they’re in random order, so go ahead and try them all)!

  • Chateau Qanafar – Blanc de Qanafar
  • Karam Wines – Cloud Nine
  • Domaine de Baal White
  • Chateau Trois Collines White
  • Sept Winery Viognier
  • Chateau Kefraya – Comtesse de M
  • Batroun Mountains – Riesling
  • Massaya Blanc
  • Ixsir – Grande Reserve White
  • Chateau Marsyas White
  • Domaine des Tourelles White

I must admit, there are Lebanese wines I haven’t tried yet. So the above wines are the ones I recommend from what I have tasted so far. I am sure that I will be trying new wines this summer, and I’ve love to share more recommendations with you as my list grows. Cheers!

 

*Originally published on June 27, 2017.

Burned Basque Cheesecake

Homemade Basque Burnt Cheesecake

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by • Featured, Must-Try Foods, Quick Fixes • Tags: , ,

I have a student who is totally passionate about cooking. She left her previous studies so she could enroll in Culinary Arts at USJ, and this is how I came to know her. She has an incredible Instagram account where she posts the recipes she creates or prepares.

One day, I saw a picture of the Homemade Basque Burnt Cheesecake that she had prepared, so I asked her for the recipe and decided to give it a try. For the recipe, here it is, as sent by Mounia:

Basque Burnt Cheesecake (for a 15cm cake)

What you’ll need:

  • 430g cream cheese, room temperature
  • 120g caster sugar
  • 3 large eggs, room temp (approx 150g of eggs without shell)
  • 270g heavy cream/thickened cream (35% min fat content)
  • 20g cake flour
  • 1 tsp vanilla extract
  • 1 tsp lemon juice

Making it:

  • Line circle cake tin with 2 layers of baking paper and trimmed to have an overhanging amount of about 3-5cm.
  • Beat sugar and cream cheese together on medium until smooth and you can’t feel the sugar granules any longer. Scrape the bowl.
  • Add eggs one at a time and beat on medium until smooth. Scrape the bowl again to ensure that nothing sticks to the sides for even mixing.
  • Add the vanilla and lemon juice and beat until just mixed.
  • In a seperate bowl, mix flour and 1/4 of the cream and mix until smooth. Add another 1/4 more cream, mix, and then add the rest and mix until smooth. (Adding the flour a small amount at the time allows you to mix out any lumps that may form by creating a paste at the start.)
  • Slowly pour the cream/flour mixture into the cheese mixture whilst the mixer is beating on low until mixed through. Increase speed to medium and mix for 15 seconds just to ensure it’s all combined.

Baking it:

  • Preheat your oven and bake at 240C for 30-35mins until top is dark amber and almost charred at parts but the middles still has a wobble to them when you give the pan a jiggle.
  • Let cool in the tin fully on a wire rack at room temperature to allow the cheesecake to set.
  • Remove from the baking tin and enjoy at room temperature.
    For a less “gooey” center, place into the fridge after cooled to allow it to chill and set and serve cold.

The only change I did to this recipe was to replace caster sugar with brown sugar. Let me tell you that the house smelled incredible and the cake was entirely eaten in the same afternoon . It has a fantastic taste and can be enjoyed with red berries, strawberry coulis or jam, or even red berries ice cream.

I strongly recommend this treat as it will definitely be enjoyed by the entire family!

If you want to discover incredible food preparations, follow Mounia’s Instagram account @moniscuisine.

IMG_0124

Abou AlHasan: making amazing lokum since 1882

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by • Featured, Must-Try Foods

Lokum, or ra7a in Lebanese, is a traditional Turkish delight that we inherited and make in Lebanon as well. It is based on starch and sugar, with aromas like musk and rose water. The Lebanese version is mostly eaten with plain biscuits, where you add a layer of lokum inside 2 layers of biscuits.

A combination of COVID-19 confinement and economic crisis has led me to go back to the roots and focus more on Lebanese products, especially products with a longer shelf life. It had been a long time since we ate biscuits and ra7a and home, so bringing this back was a real delight for the entire family.

However, it was a struggle to find good lokum, that would not harden the minute you’d open the box. Most brands I bought had a thick layer of caster sugar on top, added to preserve the lokum, but also making it impossible to enjoy them after a while because they become too hard few days in.

Then one day I saw boxes of Abou AlHasan in one of the supermarkets, so I decided to give it a try. Their lokum have barely any sugar on top, which makes them just perfect in terms of taste. They’re still sugary, but without the extra coating that almost give you heartburn. They are soft and remain so even after few days from opening the box. And their taste is really, really good! Of course, if you want to give them a try à la libanaise, you will have to eat them with Gandour 555 biscuits, just like it has always been eaten in Lebanon.

I am adding a picture of the box here so you’d know what it looks like anytime you’re looking to buy this product. Cheers!

Strawberry jam

Going back to homemade everything (or almost)

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by • Featured, Quick Fixes, Tips • Tags: , , ,

Spoiler alert: this is not an influencer picture. Meaning this is not a picture aimed at showing you how perfect my life with my kids has been during this confinement. Because it is not.

The only reason this picture looks almost perfect is because we took it to send it to Lynn’s teacher, and it is exactly the same reason we made strawberry jam in the first place.

We got an assignment to make strawberry jam as part of “Fruity Friday”. So we got a strawberry pack, washed the strawberries, cut them, and added half a cup of brown sugar and a dash of lemon juice. We stirred at low heat until the sugar was completely dissolved then brought the heat up to let it boil for 10 minutes.

I am not teaching you anything new, you probably know how to make jam much better than I do. But I want to talk about two main things. First, the use of unrefined brown sugar is healthier than using white sugar – and you would need a lesser quantity to have the same level of sweetness.

Second, while cooking jam is not my specialty, tasting it obviously is 🙂 and let me tell you this is the best jam I have had in my life. Was it because it was homemade? Maybe. Was it because of the ingredients? Could be. Was it a combination of everything we did? Definitely.

But it led me to thinking that the cost and time it took to make this wonderful, healthy treat is so much better than to buy it from the supermarket. Add to it the satisfaction of making your own food from scratch and you have just the perfect recipe you will spend an hour one afternoon to make.

So here we are, in confinement and in a deep-rooted economic crisis where every cent, but also every second matter. Can we make use of this situation by trying, realistically and to some extent, to produce our own food? To some extent, why not…

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