Persian Salad and Tea in Monterey (California) - Part 1 - by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Persian Salad and Tea in Monterey (California) by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

In search of a 60-cent package of round pita bread, I used about a dollar’s worth of gas driving from Seaside (California) to the International Market in Monterey across town, which was the only place that sold pita bread in the early 2000s in Monterey County California.

The International Market sells an array of ethnic foods from the Middle East, India, Brazil, and other countries.

When we arrived, I looked at pita bread and long, thin sheets of lavash bread, yogurt drinks (laban), and trays of figs.  Florence sniffed boxes of tea from places like England, Morocco, and Persia (Iran).

“This tea smells the best,” Florence said holding a reddish brown, half-pound box of Persian tea with wavy Arabic letters decorating the package.

The ingredients list said the tea was made with black Darjeeling and Earl Gray teas.  Earl Gary contains Bergamot orange-flavored leaves. 

According to Margaret Shaida’s cookbook The Legendary Cuisine of Persia, this combination approximates the flavor of Iranian tea grown by the Caspian Sea that Iranians enjoy so much that none is available for export.

“If we buy this tea, we will have to buy a flowery carpet and brass samovar to go with it,” I teased my daughter Florence as I looked at the $8 price tag.  So, I was going to spend $8.60 instead of 60 cents – parenting is like that I have discovered.

“What’s a samovar?” Florence asked.

“Iranians and Russians both use them, but they look different,” I said as I began to explain.

“For tea made with a samovar, you put a bit of the strong tea in a cup and add water to it from a pot of really strong tea that sits above hot water,” I answered.  (I own a Turkish samovar now, which I use when it is not displayed as anthropological artwork.)

Florence kept smelling the box of highly perfumed loose tea and said, “This smells divine” as we looked at cans of hard-to-find items like fava beans, packages of vermicelli pasta, and unknown items in brightly colored cans with lettering I failed to place. 

Were the alphabets Thai? Hindu? Burmese?

End of Part 1

To be continued 

By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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Eating Lebanese and Syrian Lunches in Detroit, Michigan by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Eating Lebanese and Syrian Lunches in Detroit, Michigan by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

The following food memoir appeared in my “Side Dish” column in The Monterey County Weekly (Circulation: 200,000) about eating in Detroit’s (Michigan) Levantine Restaurants during frigid winters.

Cold Comfort

When I was a child growing up in Detroit, my mother’s favorite thing to make for lunch or dinner was reservations.

This meant that at least once a month, we would eat at an Arab restaurant catering to Detroit’s Arab population of 350,000.  The Lebanese, Syrians, and Iraqis in this population had ancestors who had come to work in the auto factories in Detroit.

I liked the lamb and chicken shish kebabs that retained the tangy lemon and garlic flavor of their marinade as well as the shwarma (a sort of Levantine gyro), but I preferred to order an “ethnic” appetizer plate.

When the appetizer plate arrived, I would load up the pita pocket bread with the roasted eggplant purée called baba ghanouj.  The baba ghanouj was seasoned with pantry items we did not have at home like tahini (sesame seed paste), garlic, and lemon.

I liked the garnishes on this dish, too – salty, black olives, tomato slices, and chopped parsley.  Next, I would heap on some yellow chickpea purée, hummus, flavored with the same things as the baba ghanouj.

I would alternate between bites of the deep-fried falafel patties made with ground chickpeas, garlic, onions, and cumin with the best thing on the appetizer plate – tabbouleh.

Lebanese and Syrian tabbouleh features loads of chopped parsley, mint, tomatoes, and cucumbers with grains of burghal wheat that have soaked up lemony dressing.  You are supposed to eat falafel with a tahini dressing, but I think it tastes better with tabbouleh.

As my lunch entrée, I would order a bowl of shorbat ads soup made with puréed cannellini beans, chicken stock, garlic, and lemon juice.  The soup is presented to you with a swirl of extra virgin olive oil on top and paprika.

With this meal, I would drink lemonade flavored with orange blossom water.

For dessert, I would further demonstrate my youthful connoisseurship of “Levantine” food and skip the baklava to order a “bird’s nest” – a phyllo pastry with edges turned up to hold pistachio nuts.

Waiters would bring my mother her coffee brewed Levantine-style with cardamom pods in a pot on a brass tray suspended from three chains.

After a meal like this, you could almost feel the Mediterranean sun on your face in the subzero temperatures of a Michigan winter.

By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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Making Moroccan Couscous by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Making Moroccan Couscous by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

My usual dining fare when I lived in Paris (France) for seven years was French food.  My no-surprises dinner routine came to a halt when one of my childhood friends gave me a cookbook called Mediterranean Food by Claudia Roden, which was a tie-in book for a BBC series the author hosted on the same topic.

I perused the pages of Mediterranean Cookery and discovered the subtly spiced cuisine and culture of the North African country of Morocco.  I loved Roden’s section on traditional cooking utensils and finally discovered that the clay pot with a triangular lid I had seen in markets was called a tagine.

The stew made in a tagine was also called a tagine I learned from Roden.  I thought one word for two different things made language learning easy. 

I read through the recipes and made preserved lemons with and salt and used them to flavor a fish and tomato tagine. 

My husband Laurent wanted a savory tagine, so I next tried a tagine chicken stew flavored with cinnamon, ginger, and saffron served over the tiny pasta called couscous.  He thought that was divine.  It certainly smells good when you lift the tagine cover.

When we came back to the US, a bookseller recommended Paula Wolfert’s cookbook Couscous and Other Good Foods from Morocco to me to practice my Moroccan cooking skills in Madison, Wisconsin.  I could buy the ingredients in a university town with no problem in the 1990s.

I used Wolfert’s cookbook to make a Moroccan-inspired salad of torn iceberg lettuce leaves with cashews strewn on top of them and tangerine sections surrounding the salad.  I use orange-blossom water to make a dressing for this salad that makes Wisconsin winters feel warm.

The cashews and tangerine sections seem to be a nut and seed protein combination.  The tangerine flesh surrounds seeds, so I thought I had made a sweet tasting sirloin steak.  (I need Purdue University’s chemical engineers to weight in on that judgment, but the salad tastes good in any case.)

I still love cookbooks that list pantry items, provide photos of ingredients used in the recipes, and provide drawings of traditional cooking items used in other cultures.  I feel I can stay at home yet travel with cookbooks like these.

The following cookbooks about Morocco might encourage you to try some of the dishes from this country:

Mediterranean Cookery by Claudia Roden

The Food of Morocco by Paula Wolfert

Couscous and Other Good Food from Morocco by Paula Wolfert

By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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Turkish Festival 101 - Part 2 - By Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Turkish Festival 101 – Part 2 – By Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

The traditional ending to a proper Turkish meal is a strong cup of coffee.  When you have drained the last drip from your cup, turn the cup over and let one of the Turkish Festival volunteers read your fortune in the grounds remaining in the cup.

Do not miss your chance to view the Turkish art on display, which includes:

-Arabic calligraphy – beautiful lettering enhanced a word’s meaning.  Calligraphy was used to decorate religious manuscripts such as the Koran and Hadith, collected sayings of Mohammed

-tapestries – decorations include figures such as sultans, mosque motifs, and flowers

-ebru – stationery and paper marbling.  The process for doing this will be on display at the Turkish Festival.

-carpets

Women weavers have anonymously made dominantly orange-red Turkish carpets since time immemorial.   One-of-a-kind carpets carry tribal symbols, the guls, which vary in the same way that Scottish tartans do.

The weavers vary tone and minute details to create movement among the repeating shapes.

With artwork like this on the floors, the Turks naturally remove their shoes before entering a home.

Flowery “Garden of Paradise” carpets can make a desert lush and illustrate a weaver’s skill in coaxing circular shapes out of an angular medium.

Festival attendees can also view silk prayer carpets decorated with a mihrab, the Mosque niche that points in the direction of Mecca with a lamp that represents Mohammed.

A trip to the Turkish Festival would be incomplete without knowing about Turkey’s wise fool country priest, Nasreddin Hoca.

In one story, the Hoca was discussing the completeness of creation with a friend during a walk.

Hoca said, “I think horses would have been much more useful to mankind, if they had wings.”

Just then, some pigeon droppings fell on Hoca’s turban,

“Allah knows best,” he said.

End of Article

If you are interested in cooking Turkish food, these recipe books and others might be of interest for possible purchase:

Classical Turkish Cooking:  Traditional Turkish Food for the American Kitchen by Ayla Algar

The Sultan’s Kitchen:  A Turkish Kitchen (Over 150 recipes) by Ozcan Ozan

Turkish Delights by John Gregory-Smith (100 recipes)

By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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