What is the difference in flavor between Middle Eastern Green wheat (frika/farik) and the German roasted type (gruenkern). I have tasted farik and it is very smoky, is this similar to gruenkern?

Baking soda is also used when the water source is very hard.In cases like this beans do not soften even after hours of cooking. Solution- a bit of baking powder or use filtered water in the soaking or cooking liquid.

What a wonderful and intersting article. I would love to start a neighborhood organization like the kind you mentioned. I hate to say but when my fruit trees ripen, I always have more than I can use and much of it goes to waste. Wouldn’t it be nice to trade it in for something else. I love to identify plants but don’t usually forage because many of the wild edible plants here are scarce and now protected.

it took me 10 days to remove the bitterness, so it is time consuming. The solution was a 10% brine solution with 1/8 vinegar which took about 1-2 months to cure (manzanillo variety). I keep them at room temperature covered with olive oil. Next year I would like to cure black olives, which I couldn’t obtain because it was a very bad season for olives here

thanks for introducing me to an interesting and pretty foodblog from a place I know very little about

I think that whatever you bake together has got to be perfect, science or not. A few days ago I baked simple cookies with my 4 year old who was so proud to showoff his work to his older siblings.

besides Paula Wolfert’s Cooking of the Eastern Mediterranean, I highly recommend Nawal Nasrallah’s Delights from the Garden of Eden, a wonderful and informative Iraqi cookbook containing many whole grain recipes such as bulgur, cracked wheat and many vegetarian dishes.

Best way of making them is to salt the lemons so the juice is extracted without adding water or lemon juice. The juice so extracted can be used to preserve the next batch of lemons. I used brine last year and the flavor was lacking.