Beiruti Mfatta’a

A traditional Job’s Wednesday turmeric & tahini rice pudding from Beirut

The ongoing attacks on Lebanon, and I say Lebanon because the attacks on Beirut stopped (for now) a few weeks ago, have made me feel demotivated about sharing stuff. The things that I do often; writing, posting, sharing. I haven’t touched my camera since January. This is not a post for pity, but an attempt at narrating reality. Or at least my reality. What I am experiencing. Others might not be feeling the same way. Others might be resuming their daily routines as if nothing happened. Some never had their routines disturbed at all. Mine have been.

I see people doing stuff. I don’t know if it’s true or it’s what I see through my perception, but I feel that everyone is faking it, doing it for the show—and that’s not a judgement, but an observation. I want to resume doing things for fun. I want us to be happy for real, not as a distraction or out of “resilience”.

Continue reading →

The Spill: August 4 Aftermath

This is the year where people either found a great success as the silver lining of things, or utter failure and disappointment.

In Lebanon, our government took it on itself to give us the latter, no matter how hard we tried to pull ourselves together. Despite our revolution attempt and all the other attempts that followed, we couldn’t cope with the economic crisis and the unrecognized collapsing of the local currency which preceded a worsening state and verified one governmental failure after the other. The cherry on top was the Beirut blast that took place on August 4 at around 6:07 pm.

Continue reading →

The Spill: Food is Political

Food is political
In my country food changed from being a commodity into a tool used by the ever-ruling parties to tame all the citizens especially those who dissed those parties when October 17 felt like a breath of fresh air.

The Spill Political Food cookin5m2

Food is political.
And politics is now dictating what we eat and how we cook.
With the soaring prices of everything due to the inflation and the collapse of the local currency against the dollar, people resorted to looking for alternatives. Imported goods have tripled if not quadrupled in price, which affected most of the local industries as they heavily rely on imported raw materials, which caused their price to also spike, since their only way of getting dollars is at the higher black market rate that is almost reaching 6 to 7 times more than the official rate. With the –expected– lack of support from the government, it is the least described as hell. Continue reading “The Spill: Food is Political” →

The Spill: Post-Pandemic & Online Foodies

This is not a pity party. This is what goes inside my head when scrolling on facebook and Instagram, and I see stories and sponsored posts.

Food topics are something that will always get me going. If the talk didn’t start there, it will go there eventually. TRY ME. It is something I am very passionate about and I’m always looking for ways to learn more and share the knowledge to my circles, the actual or virtual ones.

The Spill 12 cookin5m2.jpg

We can all agree that this year has been a very shitty one, and particularly being in Lebanon has not made things a little more digestible. Now that lockdown is not enforced anymore, and social distancing is not being practiced except in establishments that might get fined for violations, I am seeing little changes in behaviors related to food, and some behaviors that have not changed, and in my opinion they should. Continue reading “The Spill: Post-Pandemic & Online Foodies” →

The Spill: Pandemic in Lebanon Edition

Mask hisham assaad coronavirus.jpeg

I cannot pretend now that we are not in a pandemic no matter how much I try to avoid and ignore it.
A big part of the world is on lockdown and living in stress due to home captivity and the looming dangers of the virus. While in Lebanon, we are blessed with an incompetent government that failed (not only now,… it is an ongoing series of failures that were somehow hidden for over 30 years) to provide a decent living for its citizens, with a pandemic/crisis or without.

Now, it’s been a little over 2 months since the unofficial state of emergency and lockdown in action. I was in Amman-Jordan in the beginning of March for a workshop and came back on March 11th on the last flight from Amman before stopping all flights to and from Beirut. We didn’t expect this to happen. I was sort of considering skipping the flight and staying in Amman, but since it is been 2 months and we’ve seen barely any changes, I am glad I didn’t. Continue reading “The Spill: Pandemic in Lebanon Edition” →