Nadia's Blog

Hi! I'm Nadia and I founded Sweet Pillar™ to continue my family's Middle Eastern traditions from Damascus. It's been quite a journey starting this food company especially with no history of formal food training. I get a lot of questions via email and figure it would be best to be more accessible. If you have any questions about how to start a food company, what camera I use for my photos, where to find Sweet Pillar™ products, or if you just want to comment and encourage/ motivate/ inspire me this is the place to do it! Thank you so much for visiting my page.

I know I know it's been a long time and I really missed photographing and writing. I did some photographing actually but not so much the writing. It's been a rough and tough couple of weeks, maybe I'll go into detail next time. Side note, my mom came to visit me from New Jersey and I always have lists upon lists of all these dishes I want to make/learn from her, places I want to take her to, and things I'm going to show her and it never fails that somehow we run out of time before I am even able to pull out my list.

My mom is a funny lady, literally great sense of humor and just one of those moms thats so amazing and always leaves you wondering how she did it all. She came to the US pregnant with my younger sister, I was not even walking and my older sister was still a toddler too. In Syria, almost everyone at the time was educated in French not English so she didn't speak much English. She raised 5 of us, almost all of us are a year or two apart. We always had breakfast, lunch and a full dinner at the table. She managed to always be optimistic, upbeat and happy even through the brutal New Jersey winters! She functioned on little sleep and barely drank coffee. Tea of course is another story, she drinks that several times a day. Now that I have my daughter, I think about how my mom did it, almost on a daily basis. How did she juggle it all. I'm bringing this up now, because when she came here she of course cooked and baked daily. Heaven for me of course because I wanted to soak it all up, photograph everything, write things down. But like a true natural mother, before I even had the chance to grab my laptop or pull out my camera, she already finished the dish and made something extra that she whipped up with some left over ingredients. There was no way she was going to slow down for me to measure her ingredients. Day after day, I would leave to drop my daughter off at preschool and I would come back and 3 dishes were made and I couldn't take step by steps or write down recipes. I was upset but amazed at the same time. Will I ever be that mother that just whips up a few gourmet snacks, dinner, and dessert so effortlessly?? This is starting to sound like a Mothers Day shoutout but I got carried away thinking about the last few weeks. I'll go into detail next time.

Back to the food at hand. Syrian cheese pizza. This cheese combination can be tossed with pasta like I did HERE , made into rolls, made into pizza, baked into savory pies called fatayir. On @sweetpillarfood instagram I asked if anyone can guess what I was making and it was so cool to see all the different responses. People said fatayir, barak, carbonara, cheese rolls, bourek, quiche and so many other things which are essentially the same thing. It really showed me that all across the world our roots are all the same, we enjoy the same things but add our own little twist to it.

Fatayir, the Arab word for it, is something that I like to always have at home for those times when my hubby is hangry and I need to give him something quick, or when Ayla is hangry and I need to give her something quick haha. They are so similar those two. Or if I don't have time to eat anything and I'm on the go I'll grab a few. They make them with a variety of fillings, spinach and cheese are my top favorites but there are meat fillings and zaatar and the list goes on. They're basically the Arab version of empanadas. I plan on making and photographing a variety of them soon (if you follow me on snapchat @nadiahubbi you would've seen that I made the spinach ones today! ) but in the meantime I used store bough pizza dough and this was so easy to put together as a result. The combination of parsley and cheese is just so good I can't even handle it.

Ok I am obsessed with cheese. Like Cheese > Chocolate any day of the week. I don't even discriminate, I am equally obsessed; Brie, Blue, Chedder, Halloumi, Havarti, Nabulsi, Gouda, the list goes on. This super super super easy and amazingly tasting appetizer is so perfect for entertaining. It literally takes almost zero effort but looks impressive and taste amazing.

So Brie is not a commonly consumed cheese in the Middle East so for this interpretation of the dish I made it a bridge between modern and middle eastern ingredients. During the holidays cheese related appetizers float all over the internet but I was inspired to make this from a post Gaby did on her site Whats Gaby Cooking.

I first made slight incisions on top of the brie and inserted thinly sliced garlic into the incisions. This will give a nice slight garlic taste in the cheese which taste oh my God so friggin amazing. Okay moving on.

In order to make a perfect cut splitting the Brie into two I use this little trick that makes a very clean cut through this otherwise creamy and sticky cheese.

I first make a slight incision all along the outside of the Brie and then I use dental floss and wrap it around and inside the incision and just pull through, and thats it. Once I have the two pieces I bottom side with chopped up Medjool Date but feel free to use any kind of jam or fruit. I then put the two halves together and this is very important, put it BACK into the little wooden case it came in. I tried making this once with the cheese NOT in the case because I was so paranoid about it catching fire in the oven and naturally the cheese melted and looked like a big blob. If you want it to look presentable and in tact it must be in the oven in the wood case.

Feel free to top it with any other fruit or jam

In order to make the crostinis I used fresh sourdough baguette from the local bakery. Make sure to cut them into thin slices and top with olive oil and zaatar and bake in the oven. It's literally as easy as that!