Mediterranean Street Food by Anissa Helou. Anissa Helou, born in Lebanon and living in London, is an experienced culinary writer who appears regularly on British TV and writes a column for the Financial Times. She is also a photographer and the book is nicely composed and presented with her black and white photos throughout. Helou states in her introduction that as a kid in Beirut she was never allowed to eat street food in as much as
“ . . . girls from good families don’t.” That set the stage for her enduring fascination with street food vendors and their dishes.
As I read on, I began to wonder if she was going to address the health risks of non-natives eating street food. (I ate the stuff without regret in Japan and Hong Kong, as a young dashing naval officer, but I doubt if I would do it now.) She views a perceived lack of hygiene as often more apparent than real, and leaves it at that—save for a note to herself to carry her own cutlery when next in Cairo. Mmmm.
If you give a thought to what street food in all about (quick and/or uncomplicated), the chapter headings here are intuitive, namely soups, snacks-salads-dips, breads and pizzas, sandwiches, BBQs, one-pot meals, sweets, desserts and drinks. She presents about 135 recipes, most capable of being prepared quickly without the need of much more than fire, a pan, product, spices and oil.
Readers of Wright’s A Mediterranean Feast or Wolfert’s Couscous and Other Good Food From Morocco will find much familiar here. If you have prepared some of Wolfert’s dishes or my tagine dishes you have the pantry and spice rack to tackle Helou’s Mediterranean street food.
We did her Moroccan Eggplant Salad the other night following the recipe, which was straightforward. It was delicious, though a bit too oily. This led me to check her other recipes to determine if Helou is a bit heavy on the olive oil. She is, at least in her salads. So, as you should do with all recipes, mark them up to your liking after following the author’s recipe. Fair enough. Next time I do this dish, I’ll cut the oil by 20%.
We’ll try, I’m sure, some of the snacks, salads and dips as well as the kebab BBQ’s. Her one-pot meal recipes look good and I should try one or two as quick-prep variants of the more elaborate lamb dishes that I favor. But, given the cost of fresh lamb shanks, maybe I won’t.
I bought the book because I liked the concept. You might too. It’s a welcome addition to the two related books, aforementioned.
The hottest shop in town is Peppers of Key West, where thousands of bottled hot and savory sauces line the walls. A knowledgeable staff tends a bar where samples from squeeze bottles are offered in tiny paper cups with crackers–the place is packed–gotta wait for a bar stool. We bellied up and then told our bar tender that we were interested in hot and savory sauces with culinary value, that is, sauces with complex tastes that survive to the back of the tongue and not be overwhelmed by heat. “I have no interest in ‘metallic’ hot sauces with bragging rights,” said I. Undaunted, she presented four sauces. We bought a mixed case of three and passed on the fourth, which had nice notes of rosemary that got lost in a serious rush of high heat. Still, I had to come back the next day to try that one again only to conclude that it was indeed too hot to work with. 
Here are the three sauces we shipped home. The first is PKW’s own sauce, described as Caribbean-inspired and banana-infused hot sauce. It has lots of ingredients, which combine nicely into a hot sauce with depth, complexity and sufficient heat. We will use this stuff and give a few bottles to valued friends as house gifts. The Harissa Moroccan Sauce is a chunky savory sauce with finely chopped onion, tomato, pepper and garlic with oils and citrus. It has coriander in it but not cumin or caraway (thanks) that are traditional in Tunisian harissa sauces. This will serve well as a bracing addition or topping to meat loafs, soups and other dishes, as well as a dip for chips, et al. It’s almost mild enough to eat by the spoonful. The Runcon Heat originated in Puerto Rico and is comparatively a straight forward, tomato based, hot sauce, not unlike 
There are few household kitchens in the US, inhabited by home cooks our age, that don’t have a Bundt Pan. They’ve been around for fifty years. It’s a heavy cast aluminum cake pan with a metal tube in the center, which promotes more even baking. Nordic Ware, the manufacturer of the Nordic Ware Bundt Pan (a registered name), admits that the idea originated in Europe where “bund cakes” have been baked for special occasions for generations. The classic round and rectangular pans have been joined, of late, by some really neat designs (see photo), the products, I’m sure, of computer design technology.