Food, food and food...

Certain foods are essential in our kitchen. The freezer always contains fresh full-grain pita to just put in the oven for a few minutes before serving. The Hummous we buy is topped with whole chickpeas, pine nuts and olive oil and every time when we open a new can there is a battle going on because everybody wants their share of the topping, which is truly delicious. In contrast to the pine nuts that are imported to Sweden, the pine nuts you get to taste here actually have a taste of pine! When the topping is gone we drizzle ground sweet pepper on and some more olive oil. Labane is the other dip besides hummous. We buy a ready-made thick one, topple it with Za'atar and olive oil. We also make Tahina dip pretty often and then we also use a full-grain Tahina, stirr with lots of lemon juice and some water and then top it with chopped parsley. Olives are of course important and we get a green version and a black dried and wrinkled version, both in a slightly spicy marinade.

When I lived in Sweden I always had red and black berries in the freezer, or fresh during season, since it is such a great source of extremely healthy antioxidants. When I arrived here I was contemplating over what to add instead, since raspberries and blueberries are quite expensive import items here. Then I realised that what is expensive here is cheap there and the other way around and now I eat dried cranberries like candy, on the yoghurt or just on the run, together with some walnuts.

Vegetables is really a separate chapter and everything is multiple size of what you find in Sweden. If you have more or less an avocado fetish like me, it is heavenly to have perfectly ripe huge avocados available all the time. The broccoli heads at home are like one sub branch of the heads here and one head is enough for a weeks consumption.

We have a butcher close by, Samir, who makes the best meat balls I think I have ever tasted. He mixes minced veal with lamb fat, spices and herbs. When you fry them the fat melts off, but leaves the most exquisite taste in the meat. He also makes spicy, fresh sausages that you also fry in a pan.

Now I got hungry from writing... Better eat something before aikido. Pita with hummous?