A Month with Rhoda, and A Question for You

It's that time of year again. 

Time to pack up the car and head to our family home near Lake Michigan, where the whole clan convenes.  We play hard, feast on my mother's cooking, and enjoy making memories. 

And I get to eat a lot of this: 

And then we all fight over who is going to eat the last of this: 

How to Make Tahini, or Sesame Paste

If you want to cook Middle Eastern foods, you're going to want to have a jar of tahini in your pantry.  This creamy, nutty sesame paste is the cornerstone of so many wonderful Middle Eastern dips and sauces (hummus! kefta! baba ghanoush! tahini-lemon sauce!).  Plus, it has the shelf life of a jar of peanut butter, and is highly nutritious to boot (read more about its health properties here). What's not to love? 

Well, the price, for one.  Tahini can be expensive.  Also, in some parts of the country, it can be difficult to find in your regular grocery store.  This would be a serious impediment to making many Arabic dishes, so when several readers asked me if I knew how to make tahini, I started to play around in my kitchen. 

After a few false starts, I was delighted to see a beautifully creamy sauce coming together in my food processor.  This sauce is rich and nutty, and while a little grainier than commercially prepared tahini, I think it will be wonderful in many Palestinian dishes.  I was surprised by how easy and utterly affordable this tahini is.  The whole process takes about fifteen minutes, and costs a fraction of what store-bought tahini costs.  I think I might have to switch to homemade tahini for some of my recipes. I haven't tested this tahini in my recipes yet, but I think it will work especially well for dips, such as hummus and zucchini dip (recipe forthcoming!). 

Pistachio Ice Cream with Pomegranate Syrup

Move over, neon green ice cream. 

How about a honey-sweet ice cream, mixed with fresh, chopped pistachios?  And for a more sophisticated twist, why not top it with some sweet-tart pomegranate syrup?

This is a flexible recipe.  If you don't have pistachios, add in another kind of nut, or leave it out all together for some lovely honey ice cream.  Guests to impress?  Layer pistachio ice cream with the syrup and then scoop it out to reveal pretty ribbons of pomegranate running through the pistachio ice cream.  Don't feel like fussing?  Just pour the pomegranate syrup on top, for a sundae effect.  Or skip it altogether, and serve your pistachio ice cream plain, maybe with just another sprinkle of pistachios.  You won't regret it. 

There are no rules here, friends. Just lots of ice cream!

Praying for Nourishment

My father used to pray the same prayer every day, as we sat down to eat:

        Father, bless this food, and let it nourish our bodies.

It was a simple prayer, but a good one.  My busy childish mind didn't linger too long on it, but I heard it every day, at every meal:  Bless this food, Father.  Allow it to nourish our bodies.  Now a mother herself, my wonderful sister turned it into a little song for her children to sing as a mealtime prayer:

          Thank you, Lord, for this food
          You always provide for us
          Bless this food to our bodies
          Let our bodies do your work.
                            Amen

Whether I was sitting at the family table, or in a school cafeteria, or feeding my baby mashed avocado, I prayed this prayer.  It was part of our ritual of eating, this song of joy and thanksgiving before meals.  Some days my mind did not rest fully in the words, like a pebble skimming over a pond. Other days, I plunged more deeply.  I regarded this prayer as a pointing-to my greater sense of thankfulness, for all of the many provisions I have received from the Father, from my shoe laces to forgiveness and grace.

I remember the first time I prepared a traditional nourishing meal for my children and sat down with them to eat it and prayed this prayer, once again: Father, let this food nourish our bodies.

Grilled Lamb Shawarma with Cucumber Mint Yogurt Salad

Just in time for Father's Day, here is an easy but festive meal that is great on the grill and will warm any father's (and mother's!) heart.  Well-seasoned leg of lamb, grilled and sliced, folded into fresh warm bread, topped with a cool minted cucumber yogurt sauce - now that's enough to entice me to dust off our grill and sweep off our patio. 

My mother still tells the story of her first encounter with lamb in America.  As a young bride, she spent several months in her mother-in-law's house, and learned to eat American food for the first time.  For some special occasion, my American grandmother served her lamb with mint jelly.  My mother said that she tasted the lamb and it was good, but she couldn't figure out what the green gel on the side of her plate was.  She tasted it and found it very unpleasant, and so bizarrely sweet; for Arabs love lamb, and love mint, and even lamb with mint, but never sweet with savory.

This meal is a nod to that mint-and-lamb combination.  Both the lamb and the yogurt salad are traditional Palestinian recipes, but Palestinians would serve the yogurt salad on the side and use this tahini-lemon sauce on the shawarma. 

Curried Sweet Corn and Zucchini Succotash

My mother loves to buy lots of produce.  But she also despises wasted food.  I mean, hates it with a passion.  She follows recipes loosely, makes up her own, and always incorporates whatever she needs to use up in the fridge. 

That is why, other than the traditional foods that we enjoy in her house, we rarely eat the same meal twice.  Created on the spot out of the contents of her fridge, flavored by my mother's intuitive understanding of seasoning, her food is very much of-the-moment. 

Hope you enjoyed the meal, my mother teases us, because you'll never have this again. 

We whine.  Beg her to write it down.  But we know that it will never happen.  We might get another similar meal in the future, but never the same one twice.

This dish is in that vein, born from the same twin desires to stuff my house with the glories of early summer produce, but then to use it up and let none of it go to waste.  The difference is, I'm writing it down this time. 

Lacto-Fermented Hummus

Do you sometimes make a double (or triple!) batch of hummus and then find that it still sitting in your fridge a week later?

I do.  Maybe you don't, because everyone in your house attacks it immediately, which does often happen here.  But sometimes, we just can't eat it all quickly enough. 

And then I become sad.  Because who would want to throw away such beautifully smooth and delicious hummus?

 

You see, I really like making large batches of hummus.  The best hummus is made from hot, just-boiled chickpeas.  As I shared in my post on hummus (How to Make Really (Smooth) Authentic Hummus), if you want smooth hummus, you need to either peel the chickpeas or make your hummus with hot, freshly boiled chickpeas.  So after I have gone through the work to soak and boil my chickpeas, I try to make as much hummus as I think we can manage to eat before it goes bad.  Otherwise, I have to freeze the chickpeas and peel them the next time I want to make hummus (not fun).

But then we have to EAT all of that hummus.   And even though Palestinians often serve hummus breakfast, lunch and dinner, we don't.   But I do love having hummus on hand all of the time.  I think Americans must love that, too, because Costco sells massive boxes of single serving tubs of hummus and they sell like hot cakes.  Because of the preservatives, store-bought hummus will last a long time in the fridge, but fresh hummus will usually only last about a week.  

So, here is a very easy way to extend the life of your homemade hummus.  It takes no time, doesn't change the flavor, and is as easy as stirring.

Returning to the Old (Arab) Ways: Why I Ferment Food

I have been asked many questions recently about traditional foods, and particularly why I chose to follow so closely to the traditional food methods of preparations.  So, this is the first in a series of posts in which I will attempt to talk about a few topics related to traditional foods and health. 

 * * *

I grew up in a pretty dirty part of the world.  We lived in Cairo when I was in elementary school and as much as I loved it (and I was pretty passionate about defending its beauty), I have to say that it was dirty.

Did I say dirty?  I meant filthy. 

The air pollution was so bad that when my father had a physical exam after he returned to the States, the doctor said that his health was fine, but that he really needed to lay off of the cigarettes.  That's right.  My father isn't a smoker. 

It wasn't just that the air was dirty.  We had to be very careful about drinking water and food.  We had to worry about hepatitis, parasites, amoebic dysentery.  My mother was extremely diligent and went to great lengths to keep our water and food safe, and all without the help of little bottles of antibacterial soap or wipes.  Yet, we all stayed healthy (although others who traveled with us were not as fortunate), and when we moved away, we left in good health. 

Now, I wonder:  did my time in Egypt actually improve my health?  After all, when I travel abroad now, even though others are often stricken with various, ahem, gastro-intestinal issues from the food or the water, I am fine.  This makes me wonder what those years in Egypt did for me. 

Love from Palestine: Rhoda's Real-Food Care Package

 It's a bittersweet sort of day - a cool, rainy, gray Friday, when it should be a brilliant and run-and-jump-and-play time of year.  And, today, for the last time, we gathered up my daughter's preschool bag from the little hook with her name printed over it.  Good bye, good bye, friends, we said.  Good bye.   I lingered at the door, even while my daughter bounded through it.  Today, it doesn't quite feel like we are saying hello to summer.

But I said hello to the mail carrier who pounded urgently on my door this afternoon.  He had a surprise to deliver - a box postmarked from Jerusalem.  Imagine my delight when I opened up this: 

 

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?