Hi, I’m Rayan

I run EverydayMedDiet, a small kitchen with one obsession: real Mediterranean dinners you can actually cook on a Tuesday.

From my mother’s kitchen in Tangier

I learned to cook the way most people in Tangier do — not from a book, but standing next to my mother, her sous-chef with my hands in a bowl of semolina before I could see over the counter. She never measured anything. She’d push my hand into the dough and say, stop looking with your eyes, look with your fingers. I still cook like that: by feel, by smell, by tasting as I go.

Then France humbled me

I moved to the south of France and stayed ten years — and here’s the embarrassing part: cooking for myself for the first time, I realised I was a complete amateur. Being your mother’s sous-chef, it turns out, is not the same as feeding yourself. So I taught myself the rest the hard way: one scorched pan, one watery “tagine,” one collapsed loaf at a time.

Marseille, Nice, the markets, the fish straight off the boats — that decade is where the French side of my cooking comes from. So what you’ll find here comes from both shores of the Mediterranean: Tangier’s fire (cumin, chermoula, charcoal) and the French coast (salade niçoise, burrata with ripe tomatoes, mussels eaten by the sea).

What you’ll find here

Real Mediterranean dinners, cooked and tested before they go up. No 40-ingredient projects, no hard-to-find specialty items — vegetables, good olive oil, fish, legumes, herbs, and the occasional roast. I teach one dish at a time, properly, the way it’s actually eaten at home.

And I’ll never sell you “low-fat Mediterranean” — that’s a tragedy. The olive oil is the point. Flavour comes first; the fact that this way of eating happens to be good for you is just the happy side effect.

One confession

I am incapable of cooking for two. Tell me “a light dinner for four” and some deep instinct starts preparing for a caravan of thirty to turn up at 9 p.m. My fridge is an archive of tupperware I refuse to throw out. You’ve been warned.

Come cook with me

Pull up a stool. Start with the recipes, and if you want the good ones in your inbox each week, the sign-up’s on the home page. I’m glad you’re here.