Month: April 2016

Spaghetti alla Libanese

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Italians and pasta connoisseurs beware this post is definitely not for you. In Lebanon, we tend to lebanify food and sayings that belong to other cultures, yet are very much part of our every day fabric. Words like chérie, become charchoura, to google a word we say gawgela. At dinner parties sushi cake ingeniously feeds a big number of guests. In a very friendly way we reply Bonjourein (two bonjours) when one greets us with a bonjour. We say things like “angaret ma3eh” which is derived from the word anger, meaning I got really angry, to express how we feel. We say “sachwaret sha3reh” (from the word séchoir, meaning I just had a blow dry). There are so many words and things that are part of our cultural, colonial, and historical background and are now so quintessentially Lebanese.

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The Art of Ambarees

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Sirdele

Labneh (strained yogurt) is a daily food in the Lebanese diet and known by everyone and mainly eaten at breakfast. Go deeper in the country, into the Bekaa Valley or the Shouf Mountains, and another delicacy will unfold made in a terra-cotta bowl (labnet al jarra), where baladi and shami goats are respectively the main grazing animals that produce it.

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Tannourine in my Heart

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tannourine_lg-1

Winter casts a veil of snowy white upon our mountains, as spring breathes life into our rivers and waterfalls. Listening to the sounds of nature and discovering hidden gems make life in this small country an absolute dream. As you drive up from Batroun along a scenic road up the hills and mountains, Tannourine with its entire natural splendor opens up like a woman’s bust embracing the horizon beneath it.

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The Godfather of Lebanon’s Underground Music

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zeid-by-Gigi-Rocati

Zeid Hamdan, born in 1976, is a singer, songwriter, musician, and pioneer of the underground music scene. He is the music producer behind some of the most successful bands on the Lebanese and regional alternative scene. He created the website http://www.lebaneseunderground.com that often features some of the most interesting projects on the Arab music scene, deservedly earning him the title of “godfather of Lebanese underground music” after almost two decades of experimentations with music.

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