My father-in-law came over for dinner tonight. My MIL is currently in Israel for work and they both used to live there. Since he didn't go with her to Israel, I brought his favourite Israeli dish to him! I know I know, all this food has its origins in various parts of the Arabic world and none of it is originally Israeli, but this dish used to be his favourite when he lived in Israel more than thirty years ago.

Everything except the pitta bread was freshly made! I actually made a batch of pitta bread dough in our bread maker but I didn't realise that the dough programme on the machine would take more than two (!!) hours. So I went for store-bought pitta, and we'll have freshly baked pitta (made with a mix of white and wholemeal flour) tomorrow with the leftover salad.

Falafel

Falafel recipe from forkinthekitchen.com. I went for this one because I can only get canned chickpeas here. These were fried in normal olive oil.

Hummus

• 3tbsp freshly made tahini (toasted sesame seeds blitzed until fine and then blitzed together with ample amount of EVOO and a little bit of salt)

• 1 can of chickpeas, drained

• juice of 1 lemon

• 1 clove garlic

• salt to taste

• some more EVOO

Blitz all ingredients together, slowly adding water until it has reached a nice consistency. To serve, create a nice swirl in the hummus using the back of a spoon, give it a light touch of EVOO and sprinkle on some paprika.

Salad

Combine equal parts chopped cherry tomatoes, cucumber and green bell pepper. Add some spring onion, fresh parsley, lemon juice and EVOO, all to taste. As you can see in the photo I also separately added some rocket, olives and red chillies.