Manaqish Fusion
Saturday 28 November 2009 by kinakoJam
I caught the train to Paris last weekend to visit friends, and was struck again by the decadent approach Parisians have to food. We visited the Saturday morning market on the Avenue de President Wilson in Paris (next to the Palais de Tokyo gallery), where produce was laid out in Bacchanalian abundance. Cheeses, gleaming charcuterie, and piles of wild mushrooms, lobsters and sea urchins.
Avenue de President Wilson, by the way, sounds like the title of a Serge Gainsbourg song.
But Paris has more to offer than traditional fatty cheeses and rabbit terrine.
The most appealing thing to eat on that chilly morning was something labeled as "galette traditionelle Libanaise": the Lebanese breakfast flatbread, manaqish, a cousin of the Australian delight known as meat pizza.
I enjoyed my "galette" smeared with za'atar (mix of wild thyme, sesame and olive oil) - the flavour was breath-fresheningly good. But the winner was my friend's gruyere cheese manaqish - a perfect blend of indulgent Paris luxury and Lebanese flatbread science.
there is another very similar thing called gozleme, which is Turkish...everyone in the middle east seems to have their own version of the ubiquitous "meat pizza"
gozleme! that looks good, - like a less greasy version of Börek? Or the calzone to Lahmacun's pizza?
Lahmacun is pretty ubiquitous over here... I like it best with pickled green chillies, parsley and lemon, rolled up.... yummo
Apparently there's another meat pizza variant, which I haven't seen before, called etli ekmek....
There are some Yemeni, Turkish, Lebanese & Moroccan flatbread recipes under this article:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/10/11/FDGHMLJPVP1.DTL