Easter Dinner: "Eat It Now" Lamb Shish Kabobs

As with all things in life, our Easter menu changed since last week. Instead of using the lentil soup recipe from The Language of  Baklava, we tried out a cream of asparagus soup recipe from Edible Ojai and Ventura County, since my mom doesn't like lentil soup. However, we went ahead with lamb shish kabobs, though I forgot to purchase the skewers, so we used a basket on the grill to cook the lamb.


Easter menu:

• Lamb chunks marinated in red wine, red vinegar, olive oil, fresh rosemary and oregano. 

• Cream of asparagus soup (recipe courtesy of the spring 2016 issue of edible Ojai and Ventura County)
• Freshly baked bread (pizza dough recipe doubled and allowed to rise over a full day)

 

• Dragon Fruit Sorbet for dessert (Brother Duncan's choice)

Wine from Brian's Cellar: 2005 Blair Fox Syrah; Paradise Road Vineyard Santa Barbara County

I had the pleasure of tasting at this vineyard three years ago, right around Christmas 2013 in the Los Olivos area.

Left to Right: Dad, me and sister Danica

 I had just come back from 4 months in the United Kingdom for a semester abroad, where they liked their cider, beer and ale more than wine. For our Christmas break Dad decided to take me, my sister and my Mom wine-tasting up in the Los Olivos area (yeah, where they filmed Sideways!).

"What a cool Dad!" Shannon, the tasting room attendant, said, upon hearing that my Dad was taking us on a wine-tasting tour.

Being the oenophile that he was, Dad always made sure that we knew about the wine we were tasting. And (to our dismay), he taught us how to spit out the wine so we could taste ALL the wine. We have several Blair Fox wines in Brian's Cellar, so we chose one for our Easter dinner. I'll talk about Dad's love of wine, and how he influenced my love of wine, in future blog posts.

Raising an Arab Father in America 

"Eat it Now" lamb shish kabobs refers to the first short story "Rising an Arab Father in America" in the memoir The Language of Baklava by Diana Abu-Jaber. In this story the author's father, a Jordanian who moved to the States and married an American, attempts to rediscover his roots by attempting to cook lamb shish kabobs from scratch. Having read this story some years ago at Westmont, I remember having learned from this story that the lamb must be calm before it is killed, or else the meat spoils. The father, Bud, and his brothers learned that after living for so many years in America they had forgotten how to properly kill a lamb, and spoil the meat for the shish kabobs in the process of killing a lamb that the children fawn over. 

Reading it four years later, I realize how Abu-Jaber's stories relate to me, though I am Filipino-American rather than Arab-American. I remember Dad forgetting how to kill a fish properly after so many years away from the cabin in Wyoming, or how the Philippines had changed after twenty-one years for Mom. Time changes everything, and though Abu-Jaber's story illustrates an extreme, it is amazing to look back upon one's life and realize how easily you can forget how to do something that defined your childhood.

Next week: "Nostalgic Chicken Livers" and "Bud's Special Rice for Special Company" in the short Story Hot Lunch.     

Breakfast Pizza!

We have this tradition in my family to cook a homemade pizza every Friday night--and it's a pretty awesome tradition, in my opinion. Dad spent years perfecting his crust, and now it is time to start perfecting mine.

Yesterday I attempted a new recipe that utilized different ingredients available from our garden: parsley and fresh chicken eggs. But eggs on pizza??!!

Our chickens Lumpia, Siopao and Adobo. 

Seemed like a crazy idea at the time. Eggs on pizza is a suggestion from Edible Ojai and Ventura County--a quarterly cooking and gardening that I had the pleasure of writing for a single issue. Eggs seemed too bizarre, but after some thinking I realized that we were cooking the same kind of pizza each week: meat-lover's supreme. Nothing wrong with wall-to-wall pepperoni, of course, but life's too short to have the same thing over and over again. So out to the chicken coop and vegetable beds I went!

Pizza crust ingredients:

• 2 1/2-3 cups of flour 
• 1 tablespoon of olive oil 
• 1 teaspoon sugar 
• 2 1/4 teaspoons of active yeast 

 Pizza toppings:

• Marinara sauce (growing San Marzano tomatoes for homemade sauce!) 
• Mozzarella (however much you want!) 
• Mushrooms 
• Onions 
• Bacon 
• Avocado (Fresh from Ojai orchards!) 
• Chopped parsley 
• 4 Ojai Day chicken eggs 

The most difficult part is cooking the eggs correctly without burning the pizza. Add the eggs after baking the pizza, keeping the oven warm to cook the eggs. The oven cooks the yolk evenly, so it's not runny inside. And voila! Only took a couple of hours!

 
With so many toppings this pizza ended up being very filling, yet so delicious. Next time I'll experiment with different kinds of soft cheeses for variety!

Wine-Stained Book: The Language of Baklava Challenge

I don't fancy myself a great cook. Sure, I'm a competent cook, but not a great cook.

It just so happened that my Dad was a great cook. One of his favorite past-times was watching cooking shows, movies about cooking, books about cooking, just about anything that had to do with food he loved to be a part of. He was all about the sizzling onions, watching the bread dough rise and experimenting with some darn recipe he found on the Internet. But who doesn't love good food?

My interests reside more in the literary realm, and it's harder for me to get as enthusiastic as cooking as he did. But there is something  to be said about how food described in a story breathes a higher level of  life into the author's world. Witches and wizards may cast imaginary spells, but butterbeer is something you can make and taste. The dystopian world of the Hunger Games seems too fantastic to be true, but the variety of District breads, laced with seaweed and dark ration grains, grounds the story to a reality the reader can easily access.

Though that's just fiction, such fiction grounded with such vivid sensory details is one of the keys to a great story. What better way to write with such vivid detail than to draw from your own life?

The Language of Baklava, a memoir by Diana Abu-Jaber, explores her childhood as an Arab-American through food. Each story contains one or two recipes, everything from shish kabob to baklava. After having read a few of her short stories, I mentioned the book to Dad as a way for me to read more fiction and have him cook the food. He loved the idea, but with a twist: he would read the book if I cooked the food. Well, I left him the book to think about the proposal. As per the family tradition, anything that we like likely has wine spilled on it, and lo and behold:

While he was reading it he ended up spilling wine on it. However, due to his passing in December, we never got to The Language of Baklava challenge.

So, I will attempt ("attempt" is the key word here) to cook one of the recipes associated with one short story a week. In the process I hope to learn a little more about cooking, and use it as an excuse to read through this book in its entirety.

First challenge (potential Easter meal?): Rising an Arab Father in America: "Eat it Now" Shish Kabob and peaceful vegetarian lentil soup.

The added challenged: pair the lamb shish kabobs with one of Dad's fancy wines from his infamous wine cellar for an Easter celebration.  

There's no guarantee that anything I cook will be amazing. After all, I'm only a competent cook. But let's see where this challenge will take us!