Anissa's Blog

No Facebook, and no You Tube. For two weeks! Not that I am addicted to either but it came as a real surprise. I thought Syria was opening up. Lucky I didn’t have much time for either. I had two groups, one after the other, the first with several food writers, all listed now in…

It was a pretty gruesome, although irresistible shop sign: a camel’s head, dripping blood and hanging from a hook right on the street outside a butcher shop. And I almost knocked into it — I did stroke another less bloody head later. I had never seen anything like it before. I went in to ask…

For years I made m’hanncha with the same dough as that for cornes de gazelle and with the same filling, just shaping it differently. Until I met Bushra, a wonderful Moroccan cook who helped me in my classes in Marrakesh. One day I was teaching how to make cornes de gazelle and said to the…

I have been travelling quite a lot recently. Everywhere I have been, there has been talk of the credit crunch: friends losing their job, others losing much of their investments, companies going bust and property prices plummeting. Not so in Lebanon. I have been here for a few days and the place is booming. Cranes…

I was asking my friend Aylin Tan what she thought of my menu for the Turkish lunch I am organising for the Oxford Symposium when she very kindly offered to bring pismaniye from Turkey for dessert. I knew that pismaniye was like the Arab Ghazl el-Banat but I thought I would check if I could find a…