Palestinian

Every salad should have pita chips.

These sautéed tomatoes are rich, silky, and endlessly versatile. 

A Palestinian staple of slow-cooked chicken smothered in sweet, silky onions and bright, lemony sumac, served on top of flatbread for sopping up all the flavors. 

In this recipe, summer produce gets stuffed with spiced ground lamb and cooked in an oniony tomato sauce. Top it off with crispy garlic, herbs, and yogurt.

This zesty dish sits between a stew and a soup and is flavored with garlic, cumin, chile flakes, and tons of fresh herbs. Serve it with rice or crusty bread for a hearty, comforting dinner.

You can serve these flatbreads as is or wrapped around a filling.

This brothy beans-and-greens stew is all about the spicy chile-herb "smash" that gets scattered on top.

Arab salad, chopped salad, Israeli salad—whatever you choose to call it, there is no escaping it. Wherever you go, a Jerusalemite is most likely to have a plate of freshly chopped vegetables—tomato, cucumber, and onion, dressed with olive oil and lemon juice—served next to whatever else they are having. It's a local affliction, quite seriously. Friends visiting us in London always complain of feeling they ate "unhealthily" because there wasn't a fresh salad served with every meal. There are plenty of unique variations on the chopped salad but one of the most popular is fattoush, an Arab salad that uses grilled or fried leftover pita. Other possible additions include peppers, radishes, lettuce, chile, mint, parsley, cilantro, allspice, cinnamon, and sumac. Each cook, each fmily, each community has their own variation. A small bone of contention is the size of the dice. Some advocate the tiniest of pieces, only 1/8 inch / 3 mm wide, others like them coarser, up to 3/4 inch / 2 cm wide. The one thing that there is no arguing over is that the key lies in the quality of the vegetables. They must be fresh, ripe, and flavorsome, with many hours in the sun behind them. This fabulous salad is probably Sami's mother's creation; Sami can't recall anyone else in the neighborhood making it. She called it fattoush, which is only true to the extent that it includes chopped vegetables and bread. She added a kind of homemade buttermilk and didn't fry her bread, which makes it terribly comforting. Try to get small cucumbers for this as for any other fresh salad. They are worlds apart from the large ones we normally get in most supermarkets. You can skip the fermentation stage and use only buttermilk instead of the combination of milk and yogurt.

At sunset throughout Palestine during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan you will find vendors with hot plates lining the streets preparing these flat cakes. They are made in many different ways; this version is filled with cheese and nuts and then fried. Instead of the syrup, you can also top the cakes with cinnamon sugar.