Bethany Kehdy

This food blogger learned to cook Lebanese food from her teta, and works it as an ex-pat and entrepreneur. She tells Time Out Beirut about her blog, Dirty Kitchen Secrets.

So, what’s dirty about your kitchen?
Everything, including myself! When I cook it’s like a hurricane ran through it.

How do you distinguish yourself from thousands of other food bloggers?
Ah, to distinguish! I did that a lot when I first started blogging and I think this very thing constantly preoccupies a lot of bloggers, which it shouldn’t. We should just do what we do.

What’s the dirtiest blog comment you’ve ever received?
LICK ME!

When you come back to Lebanon, where’s the first place you go to eat?
Home, but I pick up a lahme be3ajine with a generous squeeze of hamud for the road. Restaurants I currently love: Seza, Chez Maguy and Tawlet. I recently had dinner at Le Gray and everything we ordered was perfectly cooked.

What do you order?
I like to order things that we don’t often cook at home, particularly in the UK. I order little birds, sheep’s brains... I absolutely love raw sheep’s liver and of course one must have the rest of the mezze to boot.

What’s the best thing about being a Lebanese American living in London?
Having a fresh, different perspective and learning the intricacies of a new culture.

What’s Food Blogger Connect?
I founded FBC in 2009 because there was a real lack of support and community for food bloggers in the UK and Europe. FBC has become Europe’s first and only conference and forum for food bloggers and food industry folks bringing together award-winning, star-profile guest speakers and attracting bloggers from all over Europe and beyond.

What are you getting excited about in the kitchen right now?
Developing modern, Lebanese-influenced dishes. There are some traditional dishes that should never be touched, but I love the liberating feeling of breaking boundaries. I also want to explore more of the lost dishes and recipes and try to reinterpret them in a way where people feel comfortable recreating them in their home.

Tell us a dirty kitchen secret...
I love to slurp tabbouleh zoom, so much that sometimes I do it in public – as discretely as possible, that is.

Author: Ellen Hardy