Nana's Middle Eastern Cookbook: Delicious, Home-cooking Recipes from Iraq and the Middle East (Paperback)

The richness and diversity of the recipes in this cookbook mirror the diversity in Iraqi and Middle Eastern culture. They run from simple everyday meals to more exotic preparations and include a broad range of dishes - and flavors - which Nana Victoria learned to cook during her extensive travels. These include characteristic and delicious dishes such as mezze, dips, stews, meatballs, wraps, breads, and desserts, originating in Lebanon, India, Egypt and Iran as well as Iraq. Inside this book are the varied dishes of northern Iraq, heavily accented with onions, garlic, sumac and yogurt; dishes from Baghdad such as the pacha, and eggplant and lemon-flavored maraka; and tasty dishes from further south, with their Indian-derived spices and flavors. Included, too, are the unforgettable sweets and confections such as halwa, zlabia, baklava and min al-sama. The author's mother Victoria Hanna Hendow ('Nana'), whose recipes feature in this book, was born in 1920 in a small village in northern Iraq, raising eight children over fifty years in Basra before settling in California in 1991. A grandmother of 18 and great-grandmother of four she picked up the secrets of ethnic Middle Eastern dishes from her mother, relatives, friends and neighbors and became well known in Basra for her sought-after pickles and home-brewed date vinegar.