What a heaven of great foods - Friday night, stressful weak, and quite a way to top it all off with a real fête! A lebanese diner cooked by none other than us. My friend, Yosef, organized this dinner in preparation for his workshop on sunday. He made shopping (I guess he took a large suitcase for all the ingredients ).

We made lots of good dishes:

Kibbeh - Ground lamb made with pine nuts, persely, etc... 

Shish Tawouk - Chicken on a spade - usually grilled

Waraa Anab - Meat, rice, persely, and coriander wrapped Grapeleaves (steamed)

Taboule - finely diced and chopped everything (parsley, coriander, tomatoe, cucmber, cuscus, etc...)

Fattoush - Salad (diced tomatoes, cucumber, parsley, mint, baked pita bites)

Hummus - boiled chickpeas mashed, oil, garlic, lemon, salt, and pepper

Baba Ganush - roasted eggplants mashed, mixed with good things (i think oil, salt, pepper).

We had some good red wine, and nice cookies, as well as a box of pralines I brought as gratitude for the host.

The diner was sooo good. True, we did work for 3 hours to make it happen, and just like any other thing in life, you prepare for a long time for a very short execution period - think about the attraction park in the summer - waiting in the rollercoster line (queue) for 2 hours to enjoy a 5 minute ride.

However, yosef says you should enjoy the food for as long as it took you to prepare it, and we kinda did. I think it took us close to 35 min to eat the platefool of goodness.

We then sat down and enjoyed good music and wine, talking about anything that came to mind.

It was quite an international feast. most lebanese people live abroad. in fact, 3 million live in the country, and 15 million leave outside. One could hear papiamento, levant arabic, english, spanish, and portugues spoken, and did I forget Dutch? Of course

I think the only thing we missed was a nice mandolin, or some other instrument to play - that would have made it completely the best of the best nights.

These cultural nights are quite common here in Delft. Such extravagance however is limited to once a month or every two months. typically we dine together (americans, chinese, indonesians, mexicans, italians, kazakh, etc...), however this was one of those really special nights when we gather our forces and prepare a large meal.

Below you can find pictures of the great even. I hope when you come here, you also organize such events - they are very rewarding.