"The whole breakfast bit made me think of my jaundiced attitude to big breakfasts, but if it is what you like, you should know that Israel has a tradition of enormous breakfasts. Perhaps it's the legacy of British rule, the influence of Arab hospitality, and the impact of Jewish maternal guilt. Not sure why, but a regular breakfast at a decent hotel will include:
6-7 kinds of yogurt, labneh, cottage cheese
gigantic fruit plates
enormous dried fruit plates (figs, raisins, dates, apricots, etc.)
eggs in every form
sweets, pastries, halvah, danish, bagels
hummous, babaganoush, matbucha
fried vegetables (cauliflower, eggplant, mushrooms)
waffles, pancakes
jams
coffee, tea, espresso"
Thanks for that, Nancy. This is now on my must-try list, I'll be wearing the fat pants for this one. I didn't even know there were 6-7 kinds of yoghurt.
Just a quick explanation of some of the less well known things: halvah is a sweet, fairly hard cake of which there are two kinds. My favourite is the one made of nut butter and has pistachio nuts embedded in it, the other sort is made of flour. Babaganoush, also known as poor man's caviar by some people, is a paste made of barbecued aubergine (eggplant), where the skin has been peeled from it and the innards have been mashed into a pulp. This dish fully deserves its name, it tastes rather smokey and is absolutely delicious. Labneh is a yoghurt from which the whey has been strained, leaving behind something like cottage cheese. I had to look up matbucha, but Wikipedia.org easily provided answers. According to Wikipedia it's "a cooked dish of tomatoes and roasted bell peppers seasoned with garlic and chili pepper". It sounds pretty good, I think I'll have to try this enormous repast at some point.
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