A Mediterranean Feast (In Several Installments)

I have a few friends with whom I love to cook. Luckily for me, one of them came out to Berkeley for a visit recently. I had not seen Nadia in a long time but once we'd covered the basics, we spent a lot of time talking about food.

Nadia's interesting heritage (her mom is from Italy and her dad is an Armenian from Syria) has exposed her to a wide range of flavors and spices and her enthusiasm about food is infectious. We decided to wind up her visit by making a big mediterranean feast for dinner.

After spending some time leafing through my voluminous recipe files, we settled on:

• Spiced lamb kabobs
• Tzatziki
• Tomato jam
• Lemon-scented quinoa with tahini and chickpeas (courtesy of Heidi at 101 Cookbooks)
• Hummous with caramelized onions & garlic topped with yellow beets, pinenuts, and greek yogurt
• Green salad with a light citrus dressing
• Toasted pita bread

We shopped in the morning and then prepared the quinoa, hummous, tomato jam, and tzatziki, saving only the salad and kabobs for the evening. I had made all but the tomato jam and quinoa dishes before so I was pretty sure the results would be good.

But I was pleasantly surprised by how delicious everything turned out. The combination of flavors was perfect (luckily, we had enough for leftovers for the next day, too.) And, of course, the company (Nadia and her boyfriend, Martin) was a big part of what made the meal so good!

Since this meal includes far too many recipes to post in one fell swoop, I'll leave you with this taste of the meal and will post each recipe separately (minus the tzatziki, since I've already written about that - you can find the recipe here, the green salad, since it was so straight-forward, and the pita, since it was store-bought) over the next week. I will also link to the recipes from this post once they've been posted to make your browsing easier.

Here's to good friends and good food!