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!