Cooking to music

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Kano, author of "Syrian Foodie in London," a food blog you'll find listed at right, recommends an unusual site with Arabic music accompanying video recipes.

Here is the link to one recipe:  http://syrianfoodie.blogspot.com/2010/02/7aki7aki-cooking-videos.html

Here is the link to the cooking video site itself: 7aki7aki

OK. The site is in French and Arabic, neither of which I read, but I love it it because it reminds me of when Grace Sasson, my mother, used to play Arabic music in our Brooklyn home, where she would entertain guests, serving them Turkish coffee (photo) and her homemade pastries,  or prepare her Sephardic specialties for dinner.

Beans, beans and bread

Image by seier+seier+seier via Flickr

My passion for the spices and flavors of the Middle East only seem to increase as I get older. I have been trying more and more to experience again the wonderful meals I enjoyed for many years at my mother's table -- her Jewish specialties from Aleppo, Syria, where she was born.

Now, I visit Aleppo Restaurant and Middle Eastern bakeries and markets in Paterson to taste that wonderful food or gather the ingredients for home-cooked meals.

The other day, I found a large, 32-ounce can of fava beans from Lebanon in my cupboard and immediately thought salad. I drained most of the liquid and poured these humble beans into a bowl, adding chopped scallion and parsley, extra-virgin olive oil, juice from two small lemons, garlic powder, cumin, allspice, Aleppo red pepper and salt.

You can heat up the seasoned beans, smash some of them and serve them with a hard-boiled egg on top. Or you can spoon a good amount of beans on a plate, warm them in the microwave and top them with one or two sunny side up eggs, as I did for breakfast today. Then, I warmed up Syrian bread and scooped up egg, yolk and beans, or made small sandwiches with the pocket bread.

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Grace Sasson, my mother, used to make falafel with fresh fava beans, as the Egyptians do. Everyone else uses chickpeas. In her self-published cookbook, "Kosher Syrian Cooking," she has the falafel recipe and a second recipe where shelled fava beans are cooked in oil, water and allspice until they turn brown and served as a side dish.

I'll probably be making some hummus (pureed chickpeas) this week -- adding powdered garlic, lemon juice and olive oil to canned spread from Lebanon -- and I know I'll be snacking on pocket-bread sandwiches of fava beans and hummus. Basic, filling and delicious.

Delivering food the old-fashioned way

I shop for food in probably half a dozen stores, so you'd think I would be drawn to one of those supermarket delivery services. But some of the stores I patronize regularly (Costco, Trader Joe's, Fattal's Bakery) don't deliver and I haven't warmed up to the ones that do.

I do speak regularly to the home delivery staff at the ShopRite in Hackensack, because they know exactly where everything is and whether it's in stock, saving me valuable time.

Ah, if I had the delivery services that were available to my mother, Grace Sasson, in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s in Brooklyn, life would be sweet. My mother self-published a cookbook of Sephardic Jewish recipes and made a lot of the food we ate -- including string cheese and baklava, which she learned from my father, the son of a pastry maker in Syria. We kept kosher and rarely ate out.

We had one refrigerator and two big freezers stuffed with food. One of her big time-savers was preparing a dish such as stuffed grape leaves or black-eyed peas with tender beef, placing them in a pot and putting the pot in the freezer. She only had to pull out a pot and place it directly on the stove or into the oven.

Just about everything she bought was delivered -- produce, fish, meat and Syrian bread from individual stores on nearby Kings Highway or Avenue U, and groceries from the C-Town supermarket near McDonald Avenue. She could call or stop by the store and leave her order. There was even a live-poultry market only a couple of blocks away.

One time, my father saw the fruit guy kiss my mother on the cheek, and went ballistic.

We spent the summers in Bradley Beach, on the Jersey shore, and my father would commute by train to his dry-goods store on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. (As a kid, I'd place a coin on a track and retrieve it -- flattened -- after the steam locomotive had left. ) After we picked him up, we would drive across the tracks to the farmer's market and buy 50-pound bags of potatoes and other items.
 
Luckily, we didn't have to go without fresh Syrian bread. A man took the train down from the city most days and hawked the pocket bread from a baby carriage he pushed down the center of the street in the sleepy, sun-spalshed community.

Here is why Julia Child is irrelevant

A new movie partly inspired by her life is bringing renewed attention to Julia Child, the late and, to some, lamented French television chef and cookbook author. But to me and thousands of others who watch what they eat, her kitchen techniques and her recipes have long been passe.

I am sure there are many people who still eat this way: three courses of cholesterol-laden food, including gooey desserts, all made with large quantities of butter and heavy cream. I not only gave up cooking with butter or cream 15 to 20 years ago, but devote most of my time and energy to finding pure ingredients and then cooking them as quickly and simply as possible. How many people spend an hour or two preparing dinner? How many use recipes with a dozen or more steps and a list of ingredients as long as your arm?

Mine is the Mediterranean diet: heavy on fish, fruit, vegetables and olive oil. I drink a glass of wine with dinner two or three days a week. A salad and great bread must be part of my meal. My idea of dessert is low-fat organic yogurt with honey.

Who needs Julia Child?

I only have to look at my mother, who spent hours in the kitchen every day and put a great meal on the table every night, while withstanding my father's third-degree on the whereabouts of leftovers. A meatless meal and another of fish were weekly occurrences. She didn't mix meat and milk because we observed the kosher laws.

A plate of cut lettuce, cucumbers and celery was placed on the table every day or we had a big salad. She made her own string cheese and baklava. And starting in 1958, she self-published a cookbook of her Sephardic recipes, following up with two new editions. In short, I only have to look at the life of Grace Sasson if I need to be inspired about food.