Hi Friends.

This little site you are perusing on your favorite device’s screen came together like many things I get involved in - a bit of desperation and a healthy dose of naive confidence that it won’t be “that much work”. Like most everything, this project revealed how much more involved and difficult just about everything is in the world and how much skill, talent, and practice it takes to produce anything, let alone anything good.

One of those people who excels at making something difficult look easy and whom the inspiration to begin this project came from is my mom, Summer. Throughout my life she made the recipes found in this collection many times over, and made it look about as simple as filling up a glass with water each time she did so. As we attempted to recreate her recipes, her skill and preparation was evident in how far we fell from faithfully recreating her presentation and flavors of each dish.

Over the years, my mom has helped introduce cuisine from our family’s little corner of the world to millions of people from around the world via her cooking website, Mimi Cooks. Jonnie and I often tried our best to recreate our favorite dishes, but since we were always welcome to dinners at her place, we never had to try that hard since she was always ready and willing to host us at her home.

In 2013, when Jonnie and I moved to Seattle, we found ourselves without easy access to my mom’s dinner table. With a lot of time on our hands and not a lot of options for our favorite meals, we got the idea to put together a little recipe collection of our favorite dishes for ourselves that we could share with our friends and family. Though all of the recipes are found on this site, you can purchase the booklet at Amazon in case you want it for your bookshelf at home.

These are recipes that I mostly grew up with and I’m sure that if you ask ten Palestinians how to make any of these dishes found here you will likely get ten different responses. For as small of a place Palestine is, you’ll find a comically wide range of disagreements from town to town in everything from their accents and vocabulary to the ingredients they use preparing the same dishes.

You’ll also notice that there are many vegetarian or vegan dishes in this book. While that’s quite common for Palestinian cuisine, it’s even more common at my household since my father has been a strict vegetarian his whole life and so we grew up eating modified versions of a lot of the classic Palestinian dishes.

I hope you all get a kick out of this collection and maybe even try some of these recipes yourselves. We had fun putting it together, even if we did feel a little silly taking pictures of our food.

Thanks to Jonnie for putting up with this and so many other of my silly ideas. Like most holes I find myself digging, I couldn’t have made my way out without her help.