Omayah Atassi Preserves Syrian Heritage Through Her Mother's Recipes
Omayah Atassi is proving that food blogging can be an act of cultural preservation. As Syrian families scatter across the globe, recipes passed down verbally through generations risk disappearing entirely. From her kitchen in Dubai, this food photographer and recipe developer documents her mother's Syrian recipes with urgency and purpose. Her mission at Omayah Cooks goes far beyond delicious food - it's about survival and lineage.
What sets Omayah apart from other food bloggers is the weight of what she carries. These aren't recipes she discovered in cookbooks or adapted from restaurant meals. They're family recipes that traveled from her grandmother's house in Homs, Syria, through her mother's adaptations, to Omayah's contemporary kitchen. Each dish connects to specific memories - summer gatherings with dozens of aunts, uncles, and cousins around tables piled with mehshi qareh (stuffed squash) and ja'at (stuffed intestines). Those gatherings can't happen anymore. The family is scattered globally. For many Syrians, food has become the only part of their culture and memories they still possess.
The Heritage Keeper
Omayah's credentials combine professional expertise with deeply personal motivation. As a food photographer and stylist based in Dubai, she brings a decade of visual storytelling experience and professional cooking knowledge to every recipe. Her work appears in magazines, cookbooks, and commercial projects for restaurants and food brands across the Middle East. But Omayah Cooks, the blog she launched in 2018, serves a different purpose entirely.
The blog operates as both family archive and accessible recipe resource. Omayah receives recipes verbally from her mother - the same way these recipes have been passed down for generations. She tests them, measures ingredients that were previously taught by feel and observation, and documents every step with professional food photography. The result preserves not just the recipes themselves but the stories, cultural context, and regional variations that make Syrian cuisine so rich.
Her approach acknowledges the reality that Syrian recipes require time. Rather than simplify dishes beyond recognition, she breaks complex recipes into components and provides make-ahead strategies. She offers weekly recipes alongside monthly meal prep guides that include calendars, shopping lists, and preparation schedules. Her tagline captures this balance perfectly: "Everyday cooking with Syrian soul."
The urgency behind her work stems from understanding what's at stake. Syrian recipes trace to specific regions, ethnic groups, and families. With families separated from their homeland and each other, the risk of that culinary lineage dying grows each year. Omayah cooks to feed her family, yes - but also to ensure her children and future generations can taste the dishes from grandmother's table in Homs.
Featured Recipes
Fasolia (Syrian Green Bean Stew)
Omayah's Fasolia demonstrates why Syrian comfort food deserves wider recognition. This one-pot dish braises fresh green beans with lamb or beef cubes, tomatoes, garlic, and warm spices - allspice, cinnamon, nutmeg, black pepper, and cloves. It's her favorite of the Middle Eastern stews and always reminds her of home.
What makes her version distinctive is the use of fresh tomatoes rather than tomato paste or canned tomatoes. This keeps the green beans as the star while maintaining balance. The technique showcases Syrian cooking's building blocks: in-season vegetables cooked to draw out natural flavors, combined with meat and aromatics. A whole head of peeled garlic cooks low and slow with the green beans and meat, losing its pungency and developing natural sweetness and creaminess.
The cultural significance runs deeper than technique. Fasolia represents a category of Syrian dishes built on seasonal vegetables - you see the same approach in Bamiyeh (okra stew), Riz ou Ful (fava beans and rice), and Mnazelet Betinjan (eggplant and tomato casserole). Each dish celebrates a specific vegetable's peak season while incorporating the warm spice blends that define Syrian flavor profiles.
Omayah provides the practical guidance that makes this accessible: if you already have Arabic 7 spices mixed, use that; if not, combine individual spices. Don't have allspice or cloves? Leave them out - the stew will still be delicious. She addresses common concerns through her Instagram community's feedback, like how to cook from frozen green beans without mushiness. It's teaching grounded in real home cooking experience, not idealized kitchen conditions.
Omayah Atassi
Recipe: Fasolia (Syrian Green Bean Stew)
Ma'amoul (Date-Filled Shortbread Cookies)
Ma'amoul represents the intersection of celebration, tradition, and technique that makes Syrian baking so special. These buttery shortbread cookies, seasoned with mahlab (a spice from cherry pits) and stuffed with dates, mark the end of Ramadan for Eid celebrations and appear at Easter tables as well. Omayah loves them not just for their holiday significance but because they're genuinely delicious any time of year.
The dough combines all-purpose flour, coarse semolina (or farina), and mahlab - which gives the buttery cookie a flavor that's hard to describe until you taste it. The technique requires patience: forming smooth dough balls, pressing to create hollow centers, stuffing with date filling while maintaining quarter-inch walls, then pressing into traditional molds. Omayah's stop-motion video demonstrates the proper stuffing technique that makes these cookies possible.
These cookies traditionally appear in gigantic batches - her mother's recipe makes around 100 cookies because they keep well in airtight containers and are perfect for when family and guests come over for holidays. Omayah halved the recipe for home cooks feeding smaller groups, but provides the original quantities for anyone feeding crowds. It's the kind of practical adaptation that honors tradition while acknowledging contemporary cooking realities.
The cultural weight of Ma'amoul extends beyond individual recipes. These cookies carry memories of holiday celebrations, family gatherings, and the rituals that mark important occasions. For Syrians in diaspora, making Ma'amoul connects to traditions that feel increasingly distant. The act of mixing, shaping, stuffing, and baking becomes a way to touch home - even when home itself has become inaccessible.
Recipe: Ma'amoul (Date-Filled Shortbread Cookies)
Omayah Atassi
Why Syrian Home Cooking Matters Now
Syrian cuisine remains one of the most underrepresented in mainstream food media, despite its incredible diversity and depth. With 58 types of kibbeh in Aleppo alone (and about 90 varieties worldwide), Syrian cooking offers home cooks a lifetime of exploration. Yet most people outside the Middle East know only hummus and perhaps kebabs - missing entirely the regional stews, stuffed vegetables, holiday pastries, and spice-forward dishes that define Syrian home cooking.
Omayah's work serves multiple audiences simultaneously. For Syrian diaspora, her recipes provide connection to food memories and family traditions. For non-Syrian home cooks, she offers entry into a cuisine rich with warm spices, seasonal vegetables, and techniques that translate beautifully to contemporary kitchens. Her food photography makes every dish look as irresistible as it tastes, breaking down the barrier between "unfamiliar cuisine" and "must cook immediately."
The preservation aspect carries particular urgency in this historical moment. As more Syrians live separated from their homeland, the verbal transmission of recipes faces real threats. When recipes exist only in grandmother's memory and mother's practiced hands, displacement can mean permanent loss. Omayah's documentation creates a record that survives separation - recipes her children can cook even if they never visit Syria, techniques that persist even as families scatter.
But her approach never treats these recipes as museum pieces. The monthly meal prep guides, make-ahead strategies, and simplified variations demonstrate that Syrian cooking belongs in active home kitchens, not just nostalgic memory. By breaking time-intensive recipes into manageable components and providing modern conveniences like pre-measured ingredients and written instructions, she makes Syrian cuisine accessible without diluting its essence.
Bringing Syrian Soul to Modern Kitchens
Omayah Atassi's work at Omayah Cooks demonstrates that recipe blogging can serve purposes far beyond meal planning. Her documentation preserves endangered culinary heritage while making Syrian home cooking accessible to global audiences. The recipes carry stories of family gatherings that can no longer happen, regional traditions that risk disappearing, and a culture that persists through food even as displacement threatens other forms of connection.
For home cooks ready to explore beyond familiar cuisines, Syrian cooking offers revelation. The warm spice combinations - allspice, cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, black pepper - create flavor profiles entirely distinct from other Middle Eastern cuisines. The emphasis on seasonal vegetables prepared with meat and aromatics provides a template for countless variations. The holiday pastries and celebration foods connect cooking to ritual and meaning rather than just sustenance.
Omayah's professional food photography removes the intimidation factor that keeps many home cooks from attempting unfamiliar cuisines. When you can see exactly what the finished dish should look like, what the dough consistency needs to be, how the spices bloom in oil - cooking becomes guided rather than guessed. Her Instagram Reels add motion to still images, demonstrating techniques like stuffing Ma'amoul or browning meat for Fasolia in ways that text alone cannot convey.
Visit Omayah Cooks at omayahcooks.com to discover Syrian recipes that carry the weight of heritage and the warmth of home cooking. Explore dishes from Aleppo and Homs, learn the warm spice blends that define Syrian flavor, and connect to a cuisine that deserves far wider recognition. And when you're ready to cook these recipes hands-free, let ChefTalk guide you through each component - from browning meat to stuffing cookies - with voice guidance that honors both tradition and the realities of modern home kitchens.
Omayah Cooks: https://www.omayahcooks.com
ChefTalk: https://www.cheftalk.ai