Egg

This makes a lovely snack meal. Merguez are spicy North African sausages. If you cannot find them, you can substitute hot Cajun or Creole sausages.

This is one of my favorites.

This simple herby omelet is particularly delicious. Use a good-quality feta cheese, or try another cheese. It can serve as a main dish or an appetizer.

A simple and delicious snack, it can also be served as an elegant appetizer.

Serve this as a main dish with salads and yogurt.

A dish of Tunisian origin that is eaten in most Middle Eastern countries, it makes an ideal snack meal. There are many versions. I like this one, called “nablia,” which is a specialty of Nabeul.

This Turkish way of embellishing poached eggs is also good with fried eggs.

In this lovely Turkish soup, the egg yolk and the flour prevent the yogurt from curdling. The rice is best cooked separately and added in before serving, as it gets bloated and mushy if left in the soup too long.

This wonderful creamy Turkish pie is something between a savory flan and a cheese lasagna. The fillo turns into a soft, thin pasta, so don’t expect it to be crisp and papery. It sounds complicated but it is quite easy, and you will be delighted by the lightness and the variety of flavors and textures.

The filling is a traditional one for the famous Greek pie. A milder-tasting alternative was adopted in Britain by my contemporaries from Egypt. Both make a lovely teatime savory as well as a snack meal accompanied by salad.

This rich Tunisian pie makes an interesting main dish.

Many Middle Eastern dishes call for yogurt as a cooking liquid or sauce which needs to be cooked—boiled or simmered—rather than just heated. Salted goat’s milk yogurt, which was used in similar recipes in olden times, can be cooked without curdling, which explains why medieval recipes do not give any indication of ways of preventing yogurt from curdling. Cooking, however, causes yogurt made with cow’s milk to curdle, and stabilizers such as cornstarch or egg white are required to prevent this.

This simple herby omelette can be served as a light main dish accompanied by a salad. It can be served hot or cold. To serve it as a mezze, cut it into small wedges, or make tiny pancakes (see Variation).

For this fresh-tasting soup, I blend the tomatoes to a cream in the food processor without peeling them and cook them only a little. The egg and lemon finish gives it a creamy texture. The rice should be cooked separately and added just before serving as it goes mushy if it stays too long in the soup. Spearmint is commonly used but you can use other types of mint.

Fried onions, feta cheese, and herbs lift what is otherwise a bland vegetable. These little fritters can be served hot or cold. They can be made in advance and reheated.

This thick omelette can be made in advance. Served hot or cold, and cut into big or small wedges, it makes a substantial first course or vegetarian main dish.

The addition of feta cheese gives this frittata a rich, pungent flavor.

Here’s a super way to use up leftover cooked green vegetables.

This is good with either of these greens, but try it in late summer or early fall when gardens are overflowing with Swiss chard.