Hummusgirl's Blog

Culinary school completes me.  The past three weeks in class we learned about beef, chicken, and fish.  Beef was a disaster for me, but chicken was surprisingly fun because we got to cut them up.  One of those weeks, the senior culinary students cooked Mediterranean cuisine such as bakliva, baba ghanoush, and of course hummus.  According to the book, “Secrets of Healthy Middle Eastern Cuisine, by Sanaa Abourezk, there is a Mediterranean food pyramid that offers beans, legumes, and nuts as a daily food to eat, while the US Department of Agriculture just lumps them in with meat.  You can see it to the left.

So the fact that I’m studying about all these “fatty” foods like eggs, dairy, and meat (well we did learn about vegetables and fruits one week) is all the more fascinating because the higher level classes learn about different cultures’ cuisine and that seems more healthy (though there was meat in some of their dishes).  And just flipping through this Middle Eastern informative cookbook shows me that maybe the vegetarian cuisine that’s becoming more and more popular in America could work well for Middle Easterners.  Just a thought…