When the Rain Falls, and a Recipe for Sugared Spelt Cut-Out Cookies

I sent my baby to kindergarten today. 

We woke up to rain falling, softly.  A dark, grey morning, the sun seemed unwilling to get up.  But we all brushed, dressed, pulled on new socks, shoes. 

We kissed.  We said the important things, the I-love-yous, and God-loves-you and always-remember-that.  And then I watched her proudly lead the line of kindergartners upstairs, her backpack slung high.  She was ready to go.

And still, the rain fell, softly, down my cheeks.

There are moments in life where deep joy and deep grief are twisted together, forming a braid that is as strong as it is beautiful.  Allowing both to pierce your hearts is what keeps your heart soft enough to open, soft enough to love, soft enough to break.

I know this because I know a little something about saying goodbye.  I have said goodbye enough times, to enough people, to enough worlds, to know.  I know that life is full of these moments, when a door shuts, when an airplane takes off, when a mother kisses you goodbye. 

Just as Good as Hummus: Palestinian Smokey Eggplant Dip

 

Now if you love hummus, (and I know that a lot of you just can't get enough hummus), you have got to try its smokey cousin:  eggplant dip.   It's a hearty dip made from the same ingredients as hummus except with eggplant instead of chickpeas.  This dip has it all going on: creamy, smokey, garlicky, a little nuttiness from the tahini, and texture from mashed soft eggplant.  Mmm, mmm, mmm. 

For many years, my (American) father preferred hummus over imtabbal.  It wasn't until my Uncle Yousef came to visit us in Jerusalem after years of living in Texas, and made this dish for our family one afternoon, that my father fell in love with it.  What did my uncle do differently?  Nothing really.  He just added a handful or two of garlic.  A handful or two.  We couldn't stop eating it and we've been eating it ever since.  My mother goes easy on the garlic, but I still like it extra garlicky. 

Let me give you five reasons to try eggplant dip instead of hummus:

1.  No food processor needed.  Just mash with a fork or a masher.  Easy peasey. 

2.  You don't have to soak or cook anything.  Throw your eggplant on the grill, stir up the tahini and lemon juice, and you'll be done in no time. 

3.  This is dip is mostly vegetable.  Besides soft, warm Arabic bread, I also love to dip red peppers into this dip, or even a sweet carrot stick.  Vegetables dipped in vegetables? Maybe not strictly tradition, but definitely healthful and delicious.

4.  Your tahini jar is getting a little bored.  I am not a one-trick-pony, she says.

5.  This dip will wake up a party, picnic or barbeque.  Everyone seems to bring hummus to a potluck but who bring eggplant dip?  You do, that's who!

Cousa Mahshi, or Stuffed Baby Summer Squash

 

 

Cooking is a communal activity in traditional Palestinian culture, and when you read this recipe, you will see why.  Whenever families gather together to share a meal, you will find aunties and tetas (grandmothers) gathered around the kitchen table, rolling these delicate grape leaves and scooping out the soft flesh of the cousa.  Time flies quickly when many are gathered to do the work, while sharing jokes and family gossip, and passing cups of hot mint tea. Aunties teach their nieces how to roll the grape leaves hayk, like this, nice and tight, so that they don't unravel in the hot pot.  Grandmothers cluck their tongues and roll, and re-roll the grape leaves until every one is just right, and then pop them all into the pot.  Rolling grape leaves and stuffing cousa is an art form, one that can be learned in an hour, but mastered over years.

How to Make Palestinian Rolled Grape Leaves, or Waraqa Dawali

We are back from a nice long visit with my family in Michigan.  The trip was glorious, full of excellent food, and plenty of sun and lake adventure.  My mother, the most talented Rhoda, bossed me around in the kitchen, taught me a great deal, actually measured her ingredients, and waited patiently for me to photograph food.  She was such a trooper.  The first dish that I asked her to teach me how to make was this dish, rolled grape leaves.  I have helped her make it several other times before, but this time I took notes.  

Stuffed grape leaves are something to get excited about.  The lemony flavor of  Palestinian grape leaves, cooked until tender and stuffed with a spiced rice and meat mixture, served with a squeeze of lemon juice and a bowl of yogurt - who can resists them?  Most Americans are probably familiar with the Greek version of this dish, dolma, which are also delicious but flavored differently.  Waraqa dawali, which means "rolled leaves" is usually prepared with another dish, stuffed squash, or cousa mahshi. 

Stuffed Sweet Peppers and Tomatoes: An Easy Introduction to the Arab Art of Stuffing Vegetables

I adore peppers.  My love affair started when I was old enough to sit in the front of a shopping cart.  My mother tells me that my favorite treat from the market was a green pepper, which I would clutch in my arms until we got home.  She would put me in my high chair while putting away the groceries, and then slice it up for me and give me a little homemade vinaigrette to dip it in.  This was such a favorite snack that my mother claims that she used slices of green pepper to reward my potty training efforts.

(In case you're wondering, this hasn't worked on my children.)

A Love Affair with Stuffed Vegetables

Now Palestinians love to stuff vegetables.  They love to stuff zucchini, eggplant, cabbage . . . any vegetable that can be turned into a conduit for a rice and meat stuffing has indeed been stuffed by an Arab woman.  Menu-planning, if you are Palestinian, is pretty simple:  keep a supply of meat and rice on hand, and then go to the vegetable market and bring home several boxes of seasonal vegetables.  Stuff the vegetables with rice and meat, cook it in one big pot, and dinner is done.  One day it is stuffed cabbage, another day it is green beans and meat over rice, another day it is stuffed squash, and then the last day might be a stuffed chicken.  Serve all of this with yogurt, a fresh salad, a little bread, and dinner is done. 

Cooking lessons are given from mother to daughter, so no one follows recipes.  They simply mix up the rice filling, scaling quantities up or down depending on the number of mouths to feed, and then start stuffing vegetables.  If they have leftover filling after making their main dish (usually stuffed cabbage rolls or stuffed cousa, a summer squash), then they use up the leftover filling by stuffing a few tomatoes or peppers, which they always have on hand.  So stuffed peppers and tomatoes are a convenient use-up, not the star of the table.

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.