Super food
B’klyn chef pens healthy Middle Eastern cookbook
THERE’S a lot more to Middle Eastern cuisine than what you can buy at sidewalk food trucks or in a tub, says Rawia Bishara, the coowner of the acclaimed restaurant Tanoreen, which has been luring chowhounds to Bay Ridge for 20 years with its fresh, flavorful dishes.
“The reputation of Middle Eastern food is just shish kebab and hummus,” the 63-year-old Bay Ridge resident tells The Post. “People forget that our mothers cook at home, and it’s very healthy.”
With her new cookbook, “Levant: New Middle Eastern Cooking From Tanoreen” (Kyle Books), Bishara offers up recipes that make the already nutritious Mediterranean diet of her native Palestine even more wholesome.
Many dishes are gluten-free, packed with vegetables and combined with the kinds of superfoods her two children, daughter Jumana, 42, and son Tarek, 38, have introduced to her.
Both of her children hit the gym often, “so we cook healthier foods [for them],” she says. “But this is what we are all supposed to eat!”
Tarek, an actor in Los Angeles, suggested she use quinoa instead of bulgur in traditional dishes and, after tinkering with it, she’s come to love the proteinrich grain. She now eats tabbouleh made with quinoa every day.
“I didn’t want to change Middle Eastern food, and I didn’t want to deconstruct it,” Bishara says of the dish and her new cookbook as a whole. “I wanted to freshen the food. Enliven it, make it according to our time.”