Hassouni

Christmas dinner: Roast venison loin with a port/juniper berry pan sauce, roast carrots/fingerling potatoes/butternut squash/fennel/shallots/chestnuts, and red cabbage and apples braised in apple cider. Delicious!

Hey! Canadian cheese. Extra old aged 5 years Cheddar Cheese. Try it sometime! You have a point. In Britain you can get Canadian cheddar that's better than most of the domestic stuff. I've never seen it for sale in the US, though

What is Silan?

Cheese. I've never had an American cheese that knocked me out the way English, Dutch, French, etc, ones have. Also, soy sauce: the stuff produced here isn't nearly as good as what's made in Japan and China.

I do rinse it out, but I don't wash it with soap or anything. I'm guessing the mold is bad for me, right?

Hell, I keep my cast iron and wok in the oven!

I'm rather amused: in the US there's a product called "Israeli coucscous" where each grain is about 3-5mm in diameter. What you have there would just be conventional couscous stateside

So I have a mate gourd, and no matter how well I try to dry it, I get black mold spots in it that eventually have to be scraped off. When i got it I did the initial soak-'n-scrape, but perhaps I didn't scrape enough? Do the walls of the gourd have to be really thin to prevent mold?

That's essentially just Turkish coffee from the looks of the coffee and pot - the coffee is ground to a superfine powder, and the grounds settle at the bottom of the cup (best to wait a minute before the first sip). When you reach the end you definitely get the sludge, and it's best not to try to get the last drop! How strange that in Israel the pot is called finjan. In Arabic, Turkish, and possibly Persian, finjan is the cup! For Lior: in Israel, is it ground with cardamom? Very often in the Arab Levant it is, but never in Turkey.

Ahhhh the cucumbers of the eastern Med...the best anywhere

Oh my heavens those hedgehogs have just blown my non-confectioner mind. I'm curious, is the market for Christmas stuff from Israeli Arab Christians/Palestinian Christians?

I don't know about chubeza, but sabra is cactus fruit/prickly pear (good cognate with Arabic subbair, from the root word for "patience"). In Spanish I believe it's called tuna.

Fantastic start! The labne, za'tar, and bread (I think this is what in Arabic is called "khubz tannour") look out of this world. And yes, nana (or na'naa', نعناع) is mint, though it can be any kind of mint.

I can't believe nobody's brought up Cointreau and Courvoisier, among many other Frenchy alcohol names. For the unenlightend: kwahn-tro, coor-vwah-zee-yay ETA: Chartreuse -but I can't think of a good way to write out in the french "eu" in a semi-phonetic way. It's NOT shartrooss.

And the olive tree? My guess would be Lior - Israel right?

Please do let us know how it fares on chickens, and whether it chips or anything if you try cutting through joints.

Congrats on the Tojiro, I have two and I love them - a DP gyuutou and a Shirogami carbon steel petty (that I'm finding challenging keeping rust free, but GOD is it sharp). They're a great value for the money, it's hard to imagine much better performance. What do you plan on using the honesuki for? It's meant for cutting up chickens, isn't it?

Done! I can't stand it either. Everyone should just think Fawlty Towers...

Gyros of course is simply a calque from döner (which means "turning" in Turkish - think gyroscope in English), being invented in slightly different form in Bursa (western Anatolia) in the 19th century. (And shawarma is an Arab pronunciation of çevirme, Turkish for "rotating/spinning")

Mocha of course comes from the Yemeni city of Mukhaa, pronounced just as it looks (I can't really think of another way to break it down - perhaps m-oo like in "book" and kha with the a in "father" and of course a very hard "kh" in the throat, harsher than German - think Dutch.

Yeah I've heard it as a sort of "bun me" kind of thing

As an American who speaks other languages, I tend to pronounce them close to the original, though when speaking in English I don't go extreme and roll my Rs or do the correct intonation. Pecan is PEE-can. As far as gyros, I call it shawarma/döner

It doesn't matter what sort of container it is, Ziploc, tupperware, foil, whatever. Possible, but like I said it's nearly the same smell in every fridge I've ever used, both here and abroad, so I don't know

I can't be alone in this. Anything I freeze invariably ends up with a really unpleasant musty smell and taste. This only goes for things I freeze, not things I've bought already frozen. I've noticed this not just with my current freezer but with every other one I've used too. I don't have a vacuum sealer, but I do suck out as much of the air as I can with a straw through heavy duty freezer bags, and it does get to almost-vacuum status. Why does this nasty smell and taste happen, and what can I do about it? Edit: I should mention this happens whether there's freezer burn or not.