Am I a "Beginner Arab" and Other Questions of Cultural Identity

A few weeks ago, my five-year-old daughter was comparing the color of my skin to hers and noticed that mine is slightly darker.

Mommy, she said, my skin is lighter than yours, because I am just a beginner Arab.

Later, she added: You are a middle Arab and Teta is an advanced Arab.

I laughed, and we have joked about it since then. But I can't stop thinking about it. I am haunted by this sentence: I am a beginner Arab.


Teaching my daughter to roll out Arabic bread.

 

Lamb in Yogurt Sauce, or Mansaf for Beginners

Palestinian mansaf is not humble food, served just to your family, like mujjadara and fasoulia and shorabat addas.  This is celebratory food, kill-the-fatted-lamb food, the centerpiece of a feast, and often served at weddings, graduations, or prepared for an honored guest.

And this meal is as ancient as the land.  It tells a story of the land and how people used to eat long ago, how they preserved and cared for their foods.

Mansaf is boiled lamb, served in a rich sauce made of yogurt.  Today, it is served over a bed of rice, but since rice is a relative newcomer to the Middle East, it was probably originally served with bread.  It is often eaten by hand, served from a communal dish.  What makes this dish distinctive is the sauce in which the lamb is simmered, a sauce made from a traditionally prepared hardened yogurt. 

"Banana Swirl" - A Two-Ingredient Cultured Ice Cream

I have to credit my daughter for this one. 

She enjoys the PBS Kids show Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood, and last week, a recipe for blended frozen banana puree was featured on the website.  She was so excited about it that she had to write it down.  (Maybe we have a little foodie-in-training?)

But on our first attempt at Banana Swirl, we didn't follow the recipe exactly, so a new recipe was born. First, I left the bananas in the freezer overnight instead of twenty minutes.  That meant that the bananas were so frozen that we could not blend them by themselves, as the original recipe called for. Usually, I would add milk or yogurt or cream in a situation like this, but this time, I reached for my jar of cultured cream.  I added a few large spoonfuls, until I could process the bananas.  To our delight, the result was:  ice cream!  Creamy, rich, gently sweet, without any added sweeteners - and full of the goodness of cultured cream - a perfectly nourishing treat!

Can you tell that I'm a little bit excited? 

Cultured Cream, or My Approximated Shemenet

One of the first foods that I fell in love with, when I was three years old, was fromage blanc.  Fromage blanc is a French white cheese. It's a soft, spoonable cheese, a little like sour cream, a little like cream cheese.   I remember it as creamy and decadent, and that I couldn't stop eating it.  This was exciting for my mother, because I was a poor eater, one of those children who just can't be bothered to eat.  But this, I ate. 

Then we moved to Egypt, and I wept for my fromage blanc.

Later on, we moved to Jerusalem, and there my mother found another dairy product that was similar to  fromage blanc.  Rich, creamy and slightly tart, we bought this yogurt-like cultured cream from the Jewish side, and it was sold in small plastic cups, right next to the yogurt.  It was called shemenet.   It was so thick that when we inserted a spoon into the cup, the spoon could stand straight up.  Shement came in several varieties, with higher fat versions (30 percent or higher), and lower fat versions, (I think 18%).  My mother used it as a substitue for sour cream and stirred it into sauces and spread it on top of her cheesecakes.  While we did sometimes eat it straight, it was so rich that we usually only had a few tablespoons at a time, and would spoon it over fruit, or mix it up with a little jam for a special treat. 

And now that I no longer live in Jerusalem, I miss my shemenet.

Last summer, while in the midst of one of my shemenet laments, my mother said to me, you know, you can make shemenet.  Just turn cream into yogurt.  So, I tried it. I simply cultured some cream with a little yogurt.   And it is so, so good.  If I had known how easy this was to make, I would have started making this years and years ago. 

Is this shemenet?  I am not sure.  I can't seem to find any information on what shemenet actually is.  But it tastes similar to shemenet, creamy and full bodied, just a little less tangy, possibly due to the difference in the yogurt culture.  Still, I'll take it. 

 

Musakhan: Roasted Chicken with Carmelized Onions and Olive-Oil Drenched Bread

Put away your forks and knives, friends.  This is finger food. 

 

Now, this is a favorite Palestinian feast.  Tender chicken pieces, seasoned with lemony sumac, roasted with loads of sweet caramelized onions and olive oil, baked onto soft bread that absorbs the juices of the chicken, and topped with buttery pine nuts . . . I think of it as the Palestinian version of fried chicken, because of the generous amounts of olive oil used here, which soak into everything and transform a simple chicken and onion dish into a rich, melt-in-your-mouth experience.  Plus, this meal is traditionally eaten with your hands. 

A New Cookbook on Traditional Palestinian Cuisine: The Gaza Kitchen

Please excuse me while I curl up with a cup of tea and a new cookbook.  

I just got this in the mail, and it was just like Christmas. But I am dragging myself away from it in order to share it with you, because it's just too good to keep to myself. An old friend of mine (thank you, Jeanette!) told me about this cookbook and I was immediately intrigued. This is a brand-new book that just came out a month ago! The Gaza Kitchen was written by two women, Laila el-Haddad and Maggie Smith, and published by Just World Books.

As the name suggests, this book is an in-depth exploration of Gazan food, and it is so much more than a cookbook. It does what I love best, and weaves together story, history, and recipes. Well-written, and beautifully photographed, it captures the spirit of Gaza. Every few pages you turn, the authors take you into another Gaza kitchen, as they focus on one person or family. You hear the story of that person's life, and feel like you watch her prepare her signature dish. There are snippets of information scattered through out- which show the dynamic relationship between the political situation and the food that people live on. I quickly become lost in this world, as I bounced between the current world - fishing limits and food aid and malnourished children - and the past world - descriptions of clay ovens, and rendering fat from sheep tails, and foraging for wild greens. In a word, this book is rich.

Zayt-and-Za'atar Sourdough Crackers

Zayt (olive oil) and za'atar is to Palestinians what peanut butter and jelly is to Americans. Zayt-and-za'atar - they just belong together.  We love to dip fresh bread into olive oil, and then into a bowl of za'atar.  I thought:  Why not make a cracker that does it for you?

Zayt-and-za'atar crackers!

Tahini-Lemon Cauliflower Bake

Do you have a gorgeous head of cauliflower?  Instead of making a cauliflower gratin, try this simple and easy recipe - cauliflower baked in a tahini-lemon sauce. 

Cauliflower is such a versatile vegetable and its mild flavor pairs well with creamy sauces.  The nuttiness of the tahini is particularly lovely against cauliflower.  And given all of the health benefits of tahini, I am happy to see my children eat this nutrient-dense side dish. 

This is a rich and hearty side dish, perfect served alongside fish, grilled or roasted chicken, or even spooned over brown rice as the main course.  While not a standard Palestinian recipe, this is the kind of food that my mother and I like to  make, day in and day out:  simple, flavorful, nourishing.

Za'atar Bread, or Mana'eesh

Salty, lemony-herbed, olive-oil soaked flat bread.  Add a hot mug of sweet mint tea, a fried egg, some oil-cured olives, ripe tomatoes and cucumbers, maybe a little white farmer's cheese, and you have yourself a proper Palestinian breakfast.

Mana'eesh, or in more classical Arabic, manaqeesh, is a flat, round loaf of bread - the same dough used for basic Arabic, or "pita" bread - topped with olive oil and za'atar, a thyme, sumac and sesame seasoning blend (click here to read more about za'atar).  The word mana'eesh is actually the plural form of the word, so one loaf is called mana'oush, which means to carve out.  Instead of puffed bread that forms pockets, this bread is flat, pressed down by the weight of the toppings.

An Evening Blessing for Your Kitchen

My kitchen has a rhythm to it.  Some days are baking days, some are cooking days.  Some are rest days.  Every evening, I look ahead to the next day and begin the preparations - the soaking, or feeding my sourdough starter, or refreshing my kombucha, tending my broth, or preparing my yogurt.

Those of us who cook real food, find ourselves working in the kitchen. We believe in food, and that the preparations of real food is good work, valuable work for us and for those we feed.  We are willing to put in the hours, and soon this becomes natural and normal.  But it is work. 

Sometimes I get to end of a day, even a lovely day in which we have had lots of giggles, played hard, cooked hard, read books and had bubble baths and everyone is tucked into bed and I have finally finished cleaning up and preparing for the next day, I look at the kitchen and think:  tomorrow I have to do this all over again.  Or I count all of the tasts that I didn't accomplish, ignoring the ones that I did. 

To work is human.  To dread work, or to overwork is more human. 

But to work, to create out of the gifts that you have, and then to stop, and recognize the work that you have done and to call it good -- that is divine. 

Spotlight on Ancient Herbs: Za'atar and Sumac

Za'atar

Za'atar (also spelled zaitar, zatar, zattar, zatr) means two things in Arabic:  it is the Arabic word for the herb thyme, and it is also the word for a thyme spice mixture.  The recipe varies across the Levant, and even varies within regions, as families grind their own cherished blends, but the Palestinian za'atar that I am most familiar with, the one that my mother makes, contains ground thyme, ground sumac, toasted sesame seeds and salt.  This spice mixture, collected from the land that they live on, holds in it the heart of the Palestinian.  To eat zait-and-za'atar, olive oil and this spice mixture, is to partake of our land. 

How to Make Really (Smooth) Authentic Hummus

Hummus . . . a creamy, garlicky, lemony,  protein-packed dip.  It's all the rage in this country now, the most ubiquitous Arabic food to reach the American table.  I am not sure when hummus became so popular here, because when I would travel back to the States as a child and teenager, most Americans approached our plate of hummus with a great deal of, um, suspicion, and rarely tasted it enthusiastically. My, how things have changed. 

The word hummus is the Arabic word for chickpea (also known as a garbanzo bean).  In fact, this dip is technically called hummus bi tahini, meaning chickpeas with tahini.