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Nothing is simple about milk: a Shavuot meditation

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The thing I liked most about working on a dairy farm was fresh milk every morning. The thing I liked the least was the sound of the male calves at night.

I was a city kid spending a summer of my junior year on a northern California farm, and it was hard to reconcile these opposites. At breakfast, I sat down to a pitcher of milk that tasted of the sweet fresh grasses carpeting the Marin hills and the sea mist off Tomales Bay. 

At night I went to sleep to the bellows of male calves taken from their mothers too early and locked in pens and fattened for slaughter as veal. The cries of the calves were answered by the pained lowings of their mothers, and the pleas echoed across the rolling hills and even drowned out the sound of the cars on Highway 1. 

The people who ran the dairy farm were progressive and wonderful—and Jewish!— and explained to me that there was no way a dairy farm can be financially viable without selling the male calves as meat. They understood the physical and psychological pain mother cow and child endured, and they did their best to mitigate it, but they weren’t in the business of raising pet cows. 

I never saw a glass of milk the same way since. On the one hand, no milk ever tasted as good as what I drank on the farm, not even close. But also I couldn’t un-see and un-hear the pain and cruelty that was now an indelible ingredient of every sip of milk and bite of cheese I enjoyed. It’s been many years since I slept in that farmhouse, and I still can’t separate my love of all things dairy from the cruelty that’s inherent in it.

Now comes Shavuot, the holiday we traditionally celebrate by eating dairy foods: cheesecake, blintzes, borekas, rice and cheese pies. There are two reasons commonly given for this tradition. One reason is that Shavuot falls in the seasonal cycle just as nature provides a surplus of milk and grain. Cows, goats and sheep have just given birth and the spring rains have brought forth carpets of grass. The rabbis long ago fashioned this natural cycle into a metaphorical second reason: Shavuot celebrates the giving of the Torah on Mount Sinai, and Torah, the rabbis say, is like mother’s milk to the Jews.

It’s all very sweet, except we know that the Torah, like dairy, has its malignancies as well. There are dark passages we can’t unread—genocide, stoning, incest, mass rape—and that’s just Genesis. Last March, a Utah father sued to have the Bible banned from the local school library for its violent and pornagraphic content. I oppose book banning, but the dad does get points for consistency.  

Then there’s the way people over the centuries have used the holy book’s words to justify all sorts of hate and atrocity. In America it’s the prooftext for the anti-gay movement. In Israel it’s the final authority on a land dispute over the West Bank which is slowly draining the country’s democracy away. No joy comes unalloyed. 

That, maybe, is a third reason that we eat dairy on Shavuot: to remind us that the world is complicated, that cruelty and sadness are mixed up with joy and pleasure. Our task, I guess, is to work to lessen the cruelty, as much as we can, from the systems and traditions we inherit. 

I don’t know of any commercial dairies that don’t sell calves for veal, but after decades of activism the industry adopted far more humane standards for their care. So I also still eat dairy, if not with a completely clean conscience, then at least with an informed one. 

 

Homemade labne cheese and za’atar

For this Shavuot, I decided to turn homemade yogurt into labne cheese, serving some rolled in zaatar, chili flakes or mint, and others baked inside sourdough pita dough, a kind of Levantine Hot Pocket. If you’ve never made your own cheese before, this Middle Eastern staple is a perfect gateway recipe. No special cultures or equipment are needed, not even a thermometer. Plan on a few minutes of work and a couple days of waiting, then you can store the cheese submerged in olive oil in a cool cupboard.

1 gallon whole milk

2 cups whole milk yogurt or labne

½ teaspoon salt

In a large pot, heat milk over medium heat until it begins to simmer. Let cool until you can insert your very clean finger into the milk and hold it there for several seconds without any pain. In a small bowl, combine a cup of the warm milk and the yogurt, stir well, then add to pot and stir to combine. Cover with a towel and set in a warm place overnight. The yogurt will set up and be relatively firm.

Place a large colander into a large bowl. Line the colander with cheesecloth and dump in the yogurt. Cover the top with more cheesecloth and allow to drain overnight. You’ll have to periodically spill out or use the whey that accumulates. You can also place a plate or heavy flat object on the yogurt to press out more liquid.

When the cheese is firm it will holds together easily when you squeeze some in your hand.  Sprinkle on about ½ teaspoon of salt and mix in well. 

To make the balls, line a baking sheet with parchment. Roll two tablespoons of cheese into a ball and place on the sheet. When finished, cover loosely with parchment and refrigerate several hours or overnight.

Prepare three small dishes with zaatar, dried mint and Aleppo or Korean red chile flakes. Roll each ball in one of these.

Add the balls to a very clean jar. Cover with six cups olive oil. You can refrigerate or leave at room temperature for several weeks. Serve balls as appetizers, stuffed in pita, with warm vegetables or as a filling for the pockets below.

‘Hot Pockets’ with labne and zaatar

1 recipe pita or pizza dough, or premade dough

10 labneh balls rolled in za’atar

Sumac or za’atar

Salt

Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Divide dough into pieces just larger than a golf ball. Roll into balls, then flatten each ball with your hands. Use a rolling pin to roll out a six inch circle.

Put 2 labneh balls in the center of the circle. Fold over to make a half-moon shape and press edges to seal. Brush with olive oil and sprinkle top with salt and sumac or za’atar.

Bake until golden, about 10 minutes.

 

Sourdough Chard and Feta Hand Pies

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A chard and feta hand pie made from sourdough starter.

If you ever come across a recipe that instructs you to feed your sourdough starter by first discarding a portion of it, throw out the recipe. How wasteful is it to toss off perfectly good flour, especially the fancy organic Central Milling stuff I buy from Kings Roost? Instead, I make a quick pita-like dough from it, which I keep around either in the refrigerator or freezer to make pizza, pita or, in this case, hand pies.

I haven’t measured out the precise amount of flour I need for turning starter into pita dough; I go by feel, and you can too. You’ll know it’s right when the dough starts to come together in your hands, and after a few good kneads you have a soft, smooth mass. It’s a good feeling. Try it once:

Start by taking 200 grams of sourdough starter and plopping it in a medium mixing bowl. Loosen with 100 grams of filtered water. Add a teaspoon of salt and a tablespoon of good olive oil, and stir well. Now add flour, mixing until everything comes together in a nice but somewhat shaggy ball.  Scrape it all out onto a floured surface and knead, adding more flour to create a cohesive but soft dough. Clean your bowl, smear it with olive oil, and plop the dough back in it. Cover and let rise until double. If your starter is active, this should take an hour or so in a warm place, since this dough is mostly starter.

Preheat the oven to 500 degrees and place a cast iron pan, baking stone or griddle inside. Take about a pound of chopped chard and 1/2 cup finely diced onion. Saute the onion in a little olive oil until translucent, add the chard and saute until it is cooked down but still bright green. Stir in 3/4 cup of crumbled feta and some fresh ground pepper. Let cool.

Turn out your dough onto a floured work surface and separate into pieces the size of a small fist. Roll out each piece using flour as needed, until you have a circle about 1/8 – 1/4 inch thick.  Plop your filling down the center, fold over, crimp, brush with olive oil and dust with sumac or zaatar. Bake on the hot sheet or pan  for about 10 minutes, until golden.

Torta di Santiago

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This is the traditional dessert of pilgrims on the road to Santiago de Campostela in Spain. It is suspiciously similar to cakes Jews make during Passover, as it uses no flour and no dairy. It also uses almonds and citrus, two ingredients the Arabs brought to Spain. My hunch is the Catholic Spaniards adapted it from their Jewish and Muslim neighbors, before forcing them out (or killing them) in 1492.

On Passover, I baked it in a nifty hamsa mold to celebrate its Jewish and Arab roots.

The history may be fraught, but the dessert is delicious and easy to make. The traditional cakes have St. James’ cross stenciled on as decoration. I’ve stenciled on a Jewish star, Naomi’s initials (for her birthday) and a goat (for mine).

My birthday torta di Santiago.

INGREDIENTS

  • 1/2 pound (1 3/4 cups) blanched whole almonds or almond flour
  • 6 large eggs, separated
  • 1 1/4 cups sugar
  • Grated zest of 1 orange
  • Grated zest of 1 lemon
  • 4 drops almond extract (optional)
  • Confectioners’ sugar for dusting

PREPARATION

  • Preheat your oven to 350 degrees. Grease a 9-inch springform pan or a hamsa mold. If using a cake pan it helps to line with parchment.
  • Pulverize the almonds in a food processor if you don’t use almond flour.
  • To make this cake more easily, I start by beating the whites. Separate the whites directly into the bowl of your mixer with a whisk attachment. Put the yolks in a small bowl. Beat the egg whites until stiff peaks form. Transfer them to a large bowl.
  • In the mixer, beat the egg yolks with the sugar until the mixture looks pale and creamy. Beat in the orange and lemon zest and the almond extract. Add the ground almonds and mix very well.
  • Add about 1/2 the whites to the egg yolk mixture and stir well to lighten everything up. Then fold in the rest of the whites with a spatula.
  • Pour the batter into the prepared pan and bake for 40 minutes. It should feel firm to the touch. A toothpick inserted into the center will come out pretty clean. Let cool, then unmold.
  • Make a stencil. Use a cross if that’s your thing, a Jewish star, a crescent, a birthday boy or girl’s initials — a cookie cutter of a goat, whatever. When cool, dust the top of the cake with confectioners’ sugar over the stencil.

My Response to the LA Times

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Wow. Slagged off by the very editorial page that featured me. I guess that’s why they call it an “op-ed.” Today the editorial writers of the Los Angeles Times weighed in on LA’s homeless problem. They described how it’s really bad and getting worse. Then, when it came time for their solutions, they called for…more toilets and trash cans near homeless encampments. They also called for…”more progress.” But as for actual solutions, they dismissed the one I suggested two weeks ago in a column in the Sunday Times.

“Busing people to the Antelope Valley or erecting a mythical tent city near LAX won’t do it,” they wrote.

The latter was a reference to my suggestion, a pretty disparaging one. On Nov. 10 in the LA Times Sunday Op-Ed page, I wrote that LA owns some 300 acres of vacant land north of LAX, at least 100 of which could be used immediately to erect temporary emergency homeless housing and services. The idea could shelter thousands of homeless at once. Is it mythical? Well, tent shelters are being used in San Diego, Hawaii and elsewhere to house hundreds of homeless. In Washington, Oregon, Texas, and around the world, officials have already created non-mythical homeless cities (more like villages) that house hundreds of people, quickly. Some use the kinds of structural white tents I referred to (Google “Sprung Tent“) and some use even more innovative tiny houses, that can be built by volunteers for between $2400-$7000 each (Google “palletshelter“). Many newspapers have written about these villages. The Sacramento Bee just reported on Renewal Village, a 700-person homeless village of tiny homes, RVs and tents being planned on the site of an old elementary school. Is it mythical to suggest that LA City and County, two far larger entities, could create 10 or more Renewal Villages this year? If we want it, we can do it.

Maybe by “mythical” the Times editorial writers meant that such a village could never happen near LAX. I know this was the response many readers received from City Councilman Mike Bonin​, who also kindly reached out to me. The official city line is that the FAA rules under which LA acquired the land prohibit its residential use. If the city used it for residential development, it would have to pay fair market value for the acreage. I knew this from conducting background interviews for the column with city and county experts, which is why I wrote a Federal waiver would be necessary. A couple points to elaborate:

One, considering this is an emergency beyond the scope of current solutions, the city should press the FAA to *temporarily* waive that restriction for three-five years until the homeless can be transitioned to more permanent housing. President Trump has said he is eager to step in and help solve a problem our own officials have not been able to– getting the FAA to waive that rule would be a huge start. Seattle and Portland rewrote their zoning laws to allow for homeless villages. In a crisis, rules can be waived and laws rewritten.

Two– so don’t use LAX. In the column I made it clear there were other options as well. The city, county and public agencies own huge swaths of land around the region. Use multiple locations. There are large parts of Griffith Park unused by the public. There are areas downtown. City Controller Ron Galperin​ has the list. We are living in an upside down world where a safe, large-scale homeless village with all the necessary services is “mythical,” but homeless people strewn along our sidewalks is realistic. (By the way, The Guardian newspaper conducted a study of these homeless villages in the Pacific Northwest and found they did not lead to an increase in crime in the village or in surrounding neighborhoods).

Now, a sidebar. I appreciate and love working with the LA Times folks. The pieces I’ve written for them since leaving the Jewish Journal have received a wide readership and far-reaching responses. Very few columns I’ve written had the kind of reaction this last one did. That wouldn’t have happened if editor Sue Horton​ wasn’t willing to accept an admittedly new and controversial idea. And as for research, I relied heavily not just on interviews, but on the Times own reporting, including Steve Lopez’s numerous heavily-reported columns on homelessness.

So all that just made it more surprising that the editorial so blithely dismissed my call for a bold, big, scaled-up homeless solution. At a time when we all realize the current approach is broken, every thoughtful idea needs to be considered and critiqued, not mocked. The only thing mythical is the idea that we can fix homelessness with more trashcans, toilets or old ideas.

LATIMES.COM
Editorial: Of course homeless encampments don’t make great neighbors. So let’s get people housed
Living near homeless encampments can feel like a nightmare. So let’s get people housed faster.

What If We Solved Homelessness, Now?

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The early reviews are in on my op-ed in today’s Sunday Los Angeles Times Opinion Section!  Naive!  Impossible!  Never Gonna Happen!

The op-ed presented Jim Murez’s idea for housing thousands of homeless qucikly in temporary shelters on vacant land near LAX.  I wondered  why, if we will be able to house hundreds of thousands of Olympic athletes (and their horses!), support staff and visitors overnight in the summer of 2028, we can’t muster the same sense of urgency for the men, women and children currently sleeping on our streets.

So here’s an idea: What if we treated homeless Angelenos with the same urgency and humanity that we will treat the visiting rowers and gymnasts? What if we eradicated homelessness not in eight years, or three years, but in a matter of months?

The plan is to use pop-up tent shelters that many other cities (including Santa Monica) use to house hundreds of homeless quickly.

The actual shelters would consist of reinforced tent structures of the kind cities use when, say, Olympic athletes come to town. They are quick to set up and take down, highly configurable, and — surprise — already in use as emergency homeless housing in many places.

The Samoshel shelter on just off the 10 Freeway at Lincoln Boulevard in Santa Monica, for example, provides 70 homeless men and women with separate living quarters and a broad range of health services. The Leeward Coast Homeless Shelter, a tent shelter opened in 2007 in Waianae, Hawaii, was built in five months. Tent structures in San Diego went up in a matter of weeks, taking 700 souls off the sidewalks.

Murez envisions an array of such shelters on the land near LAX, laid out in a thoughtful, environmentally sound way. Families would be in one area, those needing addiction or mental health services in another. Garden areas for food production could serve both health and therapeutic needs. Some tents would serve as social service centers, security stations, dining and hygiene areas. LAX and the Inglewood stadium complex, two of the largest employers of entry-level labor in the region, would be minutes away.

The first comment I got was my idea would create, “a refugee camp near the airport.”

Okay, here’s the thing that made me realize.  We no longer have a homeless problem, we have a refugee problem.

These people we call homeless are really refugees. They are refugees from an economy that has waged war on the poor and lower middle class. They are refugees from a health care system that has, in many cases, forced them to choose between recovery and poverty, between an ugly death and an impoverished life. They are refugees from a legal system that criminalizes addiction. They are refugees from a mental health system that is underfunded and overwhelmed.

Mostly, they are refugees from a society that refuses to treat their suffering as an emergency. The average international refugee has been homeless for five years. The average person on our streets is pushing two years, on and off.

So, yes, a refugee problem needs a refugee solution.  Mass shelter, laid out in a smart, safe way, surrounded by support services.  So far, no one has come up with a better idea.  Because right now, we have tent encampments all over the sidewalks, parks, alleys and beaches, and they are not going away for years. Years.  We already have a refugee problem, we just diffuse it, ignore it, or continually plan ways to gradually nip at it.  And none of that is working.

I’d be very interested in your thoughts and feedback below.

The link to my piece is here.

 

Yom Kippur Break Fast: Harissa for 300

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Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish year, takes place this year from the evening of October 8 to the evening of October 9. Yom Kippur is the Day of Atonement, a holiday set aside for prayer and introspection. The laws governing the holiday require Jews to refrain from any kind of work and to afflict their bodies by abstaining from food, water, bathing and sex. The idea is one common to all religions: that by suppressing our physical needs, we will refocus on our spirit.

 

The giant harira pot on the Nashuva break fast buffet.

 

Two thousand years ago they called it fasting. Now it’s called cleansing. But the amazing thing is this: it works. By the time the holiday ends, as all Jewish holidays do, at sundown, I feel that something inside me has shifted. Hunger, when it’s a choice, can be empowering, reminding us that we are not captive to any need, impulse or thought.

A day and an hour without food—plus prayers, plus my wife’s sermons— is a way to remind me, as the French philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin said, “We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.”

But, then comes the break fast. This is the festive meal that marks the end of the holiday, and in the Ashkenazi Jewish tradition, it can be punitive. The light, healthy being inside you suddenly confronts a groaning board of salty lox, gummed-up cream cheese, oily whitefish, the egg- and sugar-packed baked noodle pudding called kugel, and of course bagels, piles and piles of bagels. Bagels stacked up like barbell weights, bagels that will set anchor in your stomach until the next High Holy Day.

Ashkenazi Jews settled in Central Eastern Europe around the end of the first millennium. Their foods are the foods of their neighbors: bagels, lox, cream cheese, noodle pudding, or kugel, pastrami, corned beef, borscht. When you think deli, think Ashkenazi.

Sephardic Jews took a different route, settling in Spain—the Hebrew word is Sepharad—then fanning out to Portugal, North Africa and the Levant. The foods they adopted or adapted include hummus, couscous, harissa and tagines.

Sephardic cuisine reflects the Mediterranean diet. Meanwhile, no one has written The Ashkenazi Diet. I suppose it’s possible to slim down on nothing but gefilte fish and cheese blintzes, you’d just have to schedule in four hours of Pilates, twice each day.

My people are Ashkenazim, Jews of Eastern European origin. At the turn of the century, my great-grandfather Aaron Eshman went into business with his father-in-law, Louis Peshkin. Eshman and Peshkin opened a kosher restaurant in Chicago, New York Deli, which brought Ashkenazi food to Clark Street. It was called Eshman and Peshkin. It failed.

But I grew up eating on holidays what their menu offered: chicken soup and matzo balls, brisket, kishke and rugalach my maternal grandmother Bertha, and my mother Sari, cooked. It was delicious, and I loved it. But then, in the early 1980’s, I first visited Israel, and discovered the other Jews.

And I liked their food better.

At the end of one Yom Kippur, I was invited to the home of a Moroccan family in Musrara, a neighborhood on the seam between Arab East and Jewish West Jerusalem. The father greeted me at the door with a double kiss, then handed me a shot glass of clear liquid. He motioned for me to toss it down my throat. It was boukha, an eau-de-vie made from figs, and it burned out whatever detritus of the past year was left in my intestinal tract.

Then came harira. This is the traditional dish Sephardic Jews, especially those from North Africa, eat at the end of the fast. It is stew-like, with onions, tomato, rice, lentils, cumin and chile, then finished with lemon juice, parsley and dill.   The toasted spices and herbs worked like smelling salts, brought me back to the material world. The lentils quickly filled me up without weighing me down. The touch of hot chile pepper rekindled my appetite. Kugel was dead to me.

Years later, I found the recipe. Meme Suissa, the mother of my then-colleague David Suissa, learned to make harira from her grandmother and mother in Casablanca. I spent a day at David’s house while Meme walked me through the steps. The recipe came with reminiscences about how the soup was something the Jews and Muslims shared—the Muslims made it for Ramadan, the Jews for Yom Kippur, and they would often trade recipes and tastes.  The idea that a soup could be the bridge between Jews, Muslims and their most sacred holiday makes it tat much more special.

Last year, I decided to make it for my community. My wife, Rabbi Naomi Levy, leads High Holiday services for the congregation she founded, Nashuva. I suggested instead of offering the standard Ashkenazi fare, we go Sephardic.

“Let’s do a break fast,” I told her. “I’ll make harira.”

Naomi announced it to her congregation of 1200 souls. I was on.

I combined Meme’s recipe with inspirations from other cooks, including David Tanis’s recipe and another from TasteofMaroc.com. To cook for a village, it takes a village.

I bought a 15-gallon soup pot from Smart and Final, two feet tall by 1 1/2 feet in diameter. Our friend Julie came over, along with my mother, and we chopped and sautéed 30 onions, added 120 cups of diced tomato, 30 cinnamon sticks, 20 cups of lentils, 120 garlic cloves—you get the idea. I figured just 300 people would stay for the break fast, but that was 300 people who hadn’t eaten in 25 hours.

Julie Drucker and me in the harira kitchen

The holiday ends with the blast of the shofar, the ram’s horn. For me that was a sign: put out the soup. With a small army of volunteers, we stationed the enormous pot alongside bowls of garnishes: lemon wedges, extra virgin olive oil, and fresh chopped parsley. On the other tables, we laid out the cream cheese, white fish and bagels. Because you can only mess with tradition so much.

The congregation spilled into the social hall and in a blink, the food was gone. We received hundreds of compliments on the soup. It was delicious. Also, people were really hungry.

In the midst of the feeding frenzy, an older woman came up to me and said the soup reminded her of celebrating the holiday in her Moroccan grandmother’s home in Paris. There were tears in her eyes.

That, for me, was a spiritual high.

The Nashuva congregation at break fast.

Harira for a Crowd

This recipe serves 20. It can easily be divided or multiplied. (For Nashuva, I multiplied it times fifteen). This version is vegan, though you could replace the water with chicken stock, or even add shreds of cooked chicken, as Meme Suissa does.

  • 2 large onions, finely diced, about 4 cups
  • 2 cups diced celery and celery leaves
  • ½ cup olive oil plus more for garnish
  • 8 garlic cloves, minced
  • 2 tablespoon dried ginger
  • 3 teaspoons black pepper
  • 4 teaspoons turmeric
  • 2 teaspoon toasted and ground cumin
  • 1-2 teaspoons dried red chile flakes
  • 2 (3-inch) piece cinnamon stick, ground, or 1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon
  • 8 cups diced ripe tomato, fresh or canned
  • 2 T. tomato paste
  • Salt
  • 4 cup red lentils, rinsed
  • 2 cup dried chickpeas, soaked overnight
  • Either 1/2 pound angel hair pasta or vermicelli, broken into 1-inch pieces or 6 T. uncooked white rice

Serving Garnishes:

  • Lemon wedges, EVOO olive oil, chopped parsley, chopped cilantro, chopped fresh dill, harissa
    • 


PREPARATION

  1. Heat olive oil in a large heavy-bottomed soup pot. Saute onion and celery until softened, about 20 minutes. Add garlic, ginger, pepper, turmeric, cumin, red pepper flakes and cinnamon. Cook until the spices smell fragrant, about 3 minutes.
  2. Add tomato and tomato paste and bring the mixture to a simmer. Cook, stirring until mixture thickens somewhat, then add 2 1/2 teaspoons salt, lentils and garbanzos. Add 16 cups of water. Bring to a boil, then partially cover and lower to a simmer.
  3. After one hour, taste for salt, pepper and other spices. Add rice. Cook for another hour, adding more water to keep the consistency like cream. The beans should be very soft.
  4. Serve, and encourage your guests to garnish the soup with lemon, herbs, harissa and olive oil.

A Jew Cooks Palestinian: Palestinian Chinese Purim Cookies

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Palestinian Chinese Purim Maamoul

Ma’amoul are semolina butter cookies stuffed with dates and pressed into a decorative round mold. I’ve eaten them at Moroccan Shabbat tables, Palestinian weddings, Lebanese and Turkish restaurants. They are a Mideast staple during the Muslim Eid holiday and Easter, and the Jews of Egypt bake maamoul during Purim.

For my version, I started with a recipe from the beautiful new Palestinian cookbook, Zaitoun, by Yasmin Khan. Both the dough and the filling use rose water, which I don’t much like. So in the dough I substituted grated Meyer lemon peel—a tree grows outside my kitchen– and in the filling I used local brandy. The brandy balances the sweetness of the dates, and anyway, on Purim, you’re supposed to drink.

Ma’amoul are round. To transform them into hamentaschen-like triangles, I used a Chinese mooncake mold (available on Amazon). The filling hides inside—so appropriate for a holiday whose central story revolves around hidden layers of multiple identities.

So, let’s review: this is a Middle Eastern/North African cookie from a Palestinian cookbook written by a Persian-Pakistani author and adapted by an American Jew, substituting some local Southern California ingredients and formed in traditional Chinese molds. If that doesn’t scream, “Happy Purim!” what does?

 

Purim Ma’amoul

Adapted from Zaitoun by Yasmin Khan

For the dough

 3 cups/500 gr. semolina

1/3 c/75 g. all purpose flour

2 sticks/250 gr. unsalted butter, melted and cooled

½ c./85 gr. superfine sugar

¼ t. sea salt

4 T. milk

2 T. water

½ t. grated Meyer lemon zest

 For the filling

 9 oz/300 gr. Medjool dates, pitted

½ tsp. ground cinnamon

¼ tsp. nutmeg

¼ tsp. allspice

seeds of 4 cardomon pods, crushed

1 T. brandy or eau de vie

¼ t. sea salt

Confectioner’s sugar

Instructions

Make the dough. Mix the semolina, flour, salt, lemon peel and butter in a food processor or by hand until crumbly. Add milk and water and pulse or stir until a dough forms. Gather, cover and refrigerate one hour.

Make the filling. Pulse or finely chop and stir all ingredients together into a rough paste. Refrigerate 30 minutes.

Divide dough into 24 pieces. Roll each piece into a ball, then make a small indentation with your finger, and stuff in some filling (about ½ -1 tsp.) and cover and reform into ball. Place ball inside triangular mooncake mold, press, and release.

Bake at 400 degrees for 20 minutes or until golden Cool and dust with confectioner’s sugar.

 

 

First, Khinkali House Soup Dumplings

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We were seeing The Cripple of Inishmaan at the Antaeus Theatre in Glendale, and if an Irish play isn’t a good excuse to try a Georgian restaurant in an Armenian neihborhood, what is?

Khinkali House is tucked into the back of a large mall complex just off the corner of Broadway and Artsakh Blvd., where the smell of Armenian kebab mingles with the scent of King Taco and Korean BBQ.  I had a feeling we were in the right place when I pulled into a parking space next to an SUV whose license plate read, “TBILISI.”

Khachapuri at Khinkali House

I’ve never been to the capital of Georgia, but I imagine Khinkali House is decorated  to look like the best four-star hotel dining room in mid-1990’s Tbilisi.  There are dozens of chandeliers, a shiny mirrored bar and a lone violinist whose repertoire leans to the mournful (dumplings and the theme from Schindler’s List,  anyone?).  The host allowed us to pick a table, so we settled in to a large round one in the back.  The server explained the menu and encouraged us to try her favorites. We were not in their restaurant, we were in their country, and we felt very, very welcome.

The woman at the next table must have overheard our struggles pronouncing the names of dishes.  She asked us if we’d ever eaten Georgian food before.  I had, one dish: In my mid- twenties I developed a fascination with the national Georgian dish, khachapuri, after coming across a recipe in Bernard Clayton’s The Complete Book of Bread. To this day I don’t understand why a cheese-stuffed flatbread topped with an egg has never become America’s next big brunch thing.  The rest of Georgian food was a mystery to me, I told her, except I had once read that Georgia produced some of the world’s oldest wines, maybe the world’s first wines.

The woman nodded.

“You have to try Kindzmarauli,” she said.

The server, a young woman from Russia, agreed.  “I’ll bring you a sample,” she said.

We toasted with it. Wow. Kindzmarauli is a semi-sweet red wine with a deep plum jam flavor. I table-Googled and discovered it was Josef Stalin’s favorite wine.  Bad man, good taste.

The woman, Mariana, was visiting with her two daughters from Las Vegas, where she has lived for years.  But originally she’s from Georgia.

“Even my car has the license plate, ‘Tblisi,’” she said.

I told her not only were we seated beside each other, we parked beside each other too.  In LA, that’s practically a relationship.

I trusted Mariana.  She not only knew her country’s food, but I could tell she knew how to make it.  She had to: Khinkali House was the best Georgian restaurant around, she said, and it was five hours from her home.

The food at Khinkali House reflects the clientele: Armenian, Georgian and Russian.  For appetizers we ordered ish, an Armenian bulgar and tomato paste salad,  along with some stuffed grape leaves, and the khachapuri. Their version arrives on a skewer.  It’s a cylinder of crisp pastry that surrounds a slightly tart, melted white cheese. It’s  like a cheesy egg roll, not at all the traditional shape for what is usually a flatbread. Mariana did not approve— but I would have ordered and eaten more.

There are many types of grilled skewered meats at Khinkali, including chicken heart and sturgeon, as well as classic Georgian dishes like chicken in a yogurt-walnut sauce.  But we had saved our room for the khinkali.

Khinkali at Khinkali House

Khinkali are Georgian soup dumplings.  They are usually stuffed with beef or cheese, though at Khinkali House there’s a very good, vegan mushroom version. The standard order at Khinkali House seems to be a dozen of these dumplings, set atop a metal platter on a high stand, and shared among the table. Mariana suggested we order the beef dumplings boiled, as is traditional, and the cheese or mushroom dumplings however we wanted, either fried or boiled.

They arrived, and I turned to Mariana for instructions.  She told me to pick it up by the bunched-up  knot of dough, what Georgians call the tail.  Then as per Mariana, I pierced the hanging sack with my teeth, and let the juices and filling run into my mouth.

No utensils are involved, and I learned very quickly that it helps to let the hot dumplings cool a bit.  The flavor of the broth, whether meat or mushroom, is oniony and fragrant with thyme.  The dough is light but substantial —  my grandmother’s kreplach. Mariana told me not to eat the tails.  “Too much dough,” she said. “They’ll fill you up.”

Outside Khinkali House, it was cold, and the ground was puddled with rain.  Inside, we were sharing some wine and conversation with Mariana and sucking down warm soup dumplings.  In a few minutes, we’d be in a darkened theatre, visiting the Aran Isles in 1930’s Ireland.

I’d happily return to either.

A Jew Cooks Palestinian: Sage Tea

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I first learned to make sage tea from a Jew who called himself Palestinian.

Mr. Yadeni was born in pre-state Palestine in the early 1900s. By the time I met him, he was old. He had made some money creating Israel’s first lock company in 1947, the still-going Yardeni Locks, and he lived on plot of land in Ein Kerem, in the hills of Jerusalem. He was in love with the land. As a boy he had hiked every inch of it, and in his retirement he spent hours tending to his garden and foraging. I think for him the land came before politics. It was there before the first Arab or Jew ever set foot on it, or bled on to it, and it will, God willing, be there long after we are all long gone. Yardeni showed me how to make wine from the pomegranates, zaatar spice from the wild oregano, and tea from the mint and sage.  Mint, he explained, was for summer and spring, sage for fall and winter. To this day, in LA, that’s what I do.

Not surprisingly, as I started cooking fro Palestinian cookbooks, I came across sage tea.  A recipe for int tea appears in Joudie Kalla’s Palestine on a Plate, and in The Palestinian Table, Reem Kassis features a recipe for sage tea . The key to making it is to use black tea (caffeinated or decaf) and plenty of sugar. You steep it all together a few minutes, and enjoy. Yardeni used wild sage that he picked himself. I use the stuff from my garden or, you know, the supermarket.

Even the supermarket stuff evokes for me the flavor of the Jerusalem or Galilee hills. I can’t pour myself a cup without thinking of Yardeni, sipping from his glass between puffs of his pipe (he smoked an old Shalom briar, another pre-state product). I had many glasses of sage tea with Yardeni, and even more when I’d sit the cafes of East Jerusalem in winter. On the street leading into the Old City from Damascus Gate, Palestinian women in heavy embroidered black dresses still sit beside piles of sage, selling it for just that purpose.

The Israelis and Palestinians I love most are like Yardeni,  the ones who love and appreciate the land they live on. The more distance I get from covering the day to day craziness of Israeli politics and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the more I focus just on the land and the foods, the simpler the solution seems to me: Just share it.

Its easy to get caught up in the weeds of the conflict. Try focusing on the herbs.

See my video on Instagram @foodaism.

A Jew Cooks Palestinian, Potato Edition

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For dinner last Sabbath, I cooked mostly Palestinian.

I made potatoes roasted with lemon, dill and scallions, green beans stewed with olive oil, tomato and onions, and meatballs in a tamarind tomato sauce, all from cookbooks by Joudie Kalla.   (I also served a smoke-roasted chicken with lemon, fresh bay leaves and garlic, arugula salad, and store-bought babka, because babka goes with everything.)

Potatoes with Lemon, Scallion and Dill

The potato dish is from Baladi, Kalla’s second cookbook.   I used large yellow potatoes without peeling them. The genius of the recipe is that you roast the potatoes with half the herbs, lemon juice and a little flour until they are shiny and crisp. Then, just before serving, you toss them with the other half of the herbs. The flavors of the cooked and raw herbs hit you in alternating bites. There’s a lot going on in this dish, for potatoes.

The green beans, from Kalla’s first cookbook, Palestine on a Plate, are cooked until tender, then added to a mixture of tomato, garlic, chili and onions, which are sautéed in many glugs of olive oil. The recipe calls for two heads of garlic, chopped. I checked and rechecked to make sure Kalla didn’t mean two cloves. She didn’t. The acid in the tomato sauce stops the beans from overcooking, and all that oil, garlic, stewed onions and chili gives them a meaty depth and richness. It’s pure vegan porn.

Green Beans with Olive Oil, Tomato and Onion

For the meatballs, from the Baladi cookbook, I substituted ground turkey and beef for lamb. (As a recovering goat owner, I still get queasy eating their close cousins. That of course is a big problem when you’re cooking your way through a Palestinian cookbook. So sue me.) The real flavor here comes from the six caramelized onions and the tamarind-tomato sauce, which after a short simmer completely suffuses the meat and turns the whole dish into something rich and exotic. Never mind lamb: you could make this with eggplant and it would still be thrilling.

Meatballs with Tamarind-Tomato Sauce

I’ve been trying to describe to friends the power of these cookbooks. Then, this past weekend, I came across this quote from Edward Said, which accompanied an exhibit on refugees by the Chinese dissident artist Ai Wei Wei.

“The pathos of exile is the loss of contact with the solidity and satisfaction of earth,” Said wrote.

Immediately I thought of Baladi. Recipe after recipe connects me with the “solidity and satisfaction” of the land. From the unholy mess of politics and violence in Israel and Palestine, Kalla zeros in on what is pure, beloved and enduringly beautiful to most of the people who live there, as well as to those who have left.

Wouldn’t it be nice if one day the Jews and Arabs fighting over that bit of earth figure out a way to share its many satisfactions? Here’s the truth, and it’s a truth beyond words, beyond history, beyond argument: If they all really wanted to find a way to share, they could.