Middle Eastern halal recipes

These are dishes cooked across the Arab world, from the Gulf to North Africa, that do not belong to one country: shawarma, kofta, falafel, lentil soup and the sweet drinks served when a fast is opened. Where a dish has a clear home, such as Turkey, Persia or the Levant, it has its own page; this page holds the shared table.

Our Middle Eastern recipes start with a chicken shawarma bowl over basmati rice with tahini, lamb kofta with parsley and bulgur tabbouleh, and a baked falafel wrap with hummus and pickled turnips. Spiced red lentil soup, chicken shorba with vermicelli and shorba freekeh, made with roasted green wheat, are the soups that so many families open their iftar with.

There are lighter plates too: roasted cauliflower with tahini and pomegranate, sardines and eggs with za'atar for breakfast, a ten-minute chicken and hummus mezze plate. To drink, there is sahlab, a warm, thick milk drink with rosewater and cinnamon, a watermelon and mint cooler, and almond and date milk for suhoor.

Each recipe gives its calories, protein, carbs, fat and fibre per serving, worked out from its ingredients. How we work out our numbers