A culinary tour of lebanon
Posted 11 July 2010 by Paul
The only time I have had Lebanese food before was when I went to the Levant restaurant in London for the 2009 Food Bloggers Connect event – and it was delicious. So when I saw that Bethany Kehdy of Dirty Kitchen Secrets (she is the one who organised the Food Bloggers Connect event) was organising a Culinary Tour of Lebanon in September, I jumped at the chance to go!
The highlights of the 7 day tour include:
- Fish your own - boat trip
- Harvest your own - short discussion on local farming
- Demonstration on Arabic bread and the extra-thin mountain bread on Saj
- Demonstration on sujuk & basterma (Armenian sausage & cured meat)
- Demonstration on Kebbeh making (national dish)
- Demonstration on baklawa/and or halawet el jebn (Lebanese desserts)
- Kitchen Workshop on Lebanese mezza
- Visits to Souks - ancient and new
- Visit to a seven-story Middle Eastern sweets castle
- Visit to a dairy farm
- Visit to a butcher & bakery (watch process of sfiha, miniature minced lamb pies, from to start to finish)
- Visit to olive groves & olive oil pressing
- Visit to a vineyard with wine tasting
- Visit to a Arak distillery (Lebanon’s national drink, similar to ouzo and pastis)
The dates are 23rd September – 1st October. We will be staying in the Hollywood Inn hotel and visiting Beirut, Byblos (seaside), Batroun (seaside), Tripoli, the North, Mount Lebanon, Baalbeck and the Beqaa.
For full details of the tour (and if you would like to join me and the others), see the Dirty Kitchen Secrets website.
As well as this tour, I have decided to extend my stay there a little bit. I will arrive there on the 22nd September and returning on the 3rd October.
I haven’t been to Lebanon before and I have only had Lebanese food once before, so I am super-excited! So if you have any suggestions on what I should see, do and eat there, I would love to hear them!
