This past weekend was our monthly Women's International Cooking Collective. Anita & Cara invited a refugee friend they met last summer (Leen) to serve as this month's guest chef. Anita actually met Leen & her family the very first day after they arrived in the U.S.-- straight in from Bahgdad. Leen's husband was a translator for the U.S. army and she said his job was very dangerous. So, when the army offered to relocate him & his family to the U.S. to better protect them from harm, they agreed. Leen has been in Austin for just over a year and her husband found a job again as a translator... this time for a refugee resettlement agency where he works with the Arabic speaking resettled refugees.
(below, Leen with Cara & Anita)
On the agenda for our cooking class was learning to make Iraqi food. Technically though, I think we just learned to make Arabic food--but I do think each dish likely had some local twists to it. For instance, we learned to make Tabbouleh, but in a way I'd never eaten before... the parsley was not finely diced, but more salad like, and we added olives. Plus Leen was aghast that we would eat it with pita... it was for eating with a spoon.
(below, tabbouleh salad)
We learned to make homemade hummus. Leen schooled us on why homemade hummus was so much yummier than store-bought... because usually store bought hummus doesn't include tahini in their recipe. Plus she taught us how to "plate" our hummus to have a great presentation, on top of tasting delish!
And finally, the big sha-bang was that we all learned to make dolmas! Dolmas are those stuffed grape leaves that you find in a lot of middle eastern restaurants. Usually stuffed with rice and spices, sometimes also with some ground beef in the mix too.
My history with dolmas was a love-hate relationship. I always hated them (even though I'd never tried them-- I was too scared), until I was in the home of Turkish Muslim mother in Izmir who had slaved all day making them for me and insisted I try them. I was backed into a corner. I had to oblige. My first nervous bite was a milestone. I fell in love with dolmas. Now, anytime I can get them I will.
(pictured left, Skipper taking her dolma rolling seriously, and me being an excited goof)As a group, we learned to make the stuffing for the dolmas, even hand mixing it-- literally with our hands! And then we prepared the vegetables to stuff. I learned that you can make dolmas out of most any vegetable-- because essentially it just means to stuff something. So we stuffed onions, we stuffed zucchini, we stuffed tomatoes, we stuffed bell peppers... and then, we started stuffing the grape leaves. It was so fun, all of us learned to lay our grape leaves just so on the counter, placing the stuffing just so on the open leaf, and then folding up the sides and rolling the leaf closed, like a burrito (because we're from Texas this was our natural go-to parallel when trying to help each other roll a dolma: "you know, roll it like you would a burrito").
(below, Nicole showing off our pot full of dolmas)
We finally rolled every last bit of our stuffing and piled all the dolmas into a giant pot to stew for an hour. It was a feast! After cooking the dolmas on the stove, we flipped the pot onto a giant platter and began to dig in. Girls who had never particularly cared for dolmas before were loving them. And all of us who tried the vegetable versions for the first time were in love.
We ate, and ate, and ate... and then each filled up giant ziploc baggies with leftovers to take home. Leen was such a great teacher and chef!
(pictured below, our platter of completed dolmas)Throughout our cooking time, we also learned a lot about her family, and Iraq. She misses her home country a lot. When we asked her what she missed most about home, she said "everything!" It was such a poignant reminder that refugees don't necessarily want to move to America. They love their homelands. They just don't feel safe there. So, to protect their kids, their wives, their families, the flee. But they love their land, their people... and they always hold out hope that things will get better, and one day they could return to what they know.
My friend Skipper and her husband are leading a trip to Egypt this November to work with Habitat for Humanity. The traveling group is all married couples, going to help improve some of the substandard housing in the Nile Valley region. Skipper and I went to work with Habitat in Egypt in 2009 and when she got home, her husband loved her stories so much he began to pray that they could go back one day together.
