• Jenny on March 27, 2019

  Anissa Helou, the award-winning chef and authority on the cooking of North Africa, the Mediterranean, and the Middle East, shares her extraordinary range of beloved, time-tested recipes and stories from cuisines throughout the Muslim world. I cannot say enough about how incredible this book is - encyclopedic while beautiful, stunning photographs and the cuisine of the Islamic world brought to our fingertips. Another best book of 2018, if not the best.

Notes about Recipes in this book

• Bengali vegetable "risotto" (Bengali khichdi)

  • Nichill on February 15, 2021

    I've not cooked anything like this before, but found the recipe less than fully helpful. I think she's missed 500ml of water somewhere. I may have added an extra litre by the end. The sauteeing the spices at the beginning resulted in everything becoming fused to the bottom of the pan, so we had to add liquid to deglaze with the tomatoes. As always, the potatoes took longer to cook (we used large dice) than the allotted time, though if we'd started with more water that might have helped. However, it was delicious and interesting. We might easily try it again, or look for a different rice & lentil dish to try.

• Egyptian-style ful medammes (Ful medammes 1)

  • Hansyhobs on May 21, 2022

    Really nice, I also added a soft boiled egg as a topping. Don't let the peas dry out too much before mashing

• Slow-cooked biryani (Dumpukht biryani)

  • mlondoner100 on May 21, 2021

    This recipe didn't 100% work for me. I think the recipe calls for a lot of liquid, and in the end the biryani was far too wet. The end product tasted great in terms of flavour, but it was very sloppy and in a bid to reduce the water, the rice overcooked and became mushy.

• Lamb stewed with cumin (Tangia)

  • Ishie1013 on January 11, 2023

    I cooked this to the letter after success with a different recipe in this book, and it is absolutely awful. There's nothing to sauce out or stew the lamb other than it's own juices, and it does not produce enough for this to be anything but an overcooked tough burned mess. I had the burner on low, and 40 minutes short of the 1:15 cooktime, the smell became too much to ignore. While not totally burned, this was never going to return to tender or well cooked and it was a huge waste of a lamb leg. I cook well; I should have known not to follow this recipe.

• Stuffed cabbage leaves (Mehshi malfuf)

  • Ishie1013 on January 10, 2023

    Excellent take on cabbage rolls. I've never made them before, so I watched a youtube video for the technique, though the book does go into detail, but these came out great! I did incorporate 7 spice I brought back from Jordan into the stuffing and used arborio rice, which is a good stand in for Egyptian rice as mods. I recruited family to help cutting and rolling, which made the process go quickly.