In My Grandmother's Kitchen--Smoky Eggplant Salad, Beets, Kibbeh

We spent a good part of yesterday preparing food with my grandmother. This made me happy, because Friday (and often part of Thursday) was traditionally "war on the kitchen" in preparation for Shabbat, when no cooking can happen and when hordes of family would always descend to devour my grandmother's famously fabulous cooking. My grandmother would work up a storm in this tiny, sparsely equipped kitchen.

It's fascinating to notice all the things this kitchen lacks. Measuring cups, or any kind of measuring utensils, for prime example (I think she has an old scale stashed away somewhere for the rare cake-baking occasions). There's only one decent knife. Only one cutting board, about my age. Few work surfaces and very little pantry space. The latter is probably because it's a hot country, food spoils or gets worm-riddled quickly, and the stores are always well-stocked and just a short walk away. (In my next post, I'll share some pictures of town and some typical stores).

Our miniature "war on the kitchen" made me happy also, because my grandmother has experienced such an erosion of her abilities and loss of independence, and you don't need to be able to stand up to be able to cook wonderful food.

So here she is, just outside the kitchen, fully participating and very much in charge. She's preparing kibbeh, which I spell that way because that's how it's always spelled in English, but really the vowels are both wrong, and the right vowels don't exist in English... (I never normally put anything meat-based on this blog, but getting my grandmother to join in on making food was a big deal.) Just in case it wasn't clear, of course I didn't eat the kibbeh myself, never have in my life. It's meat and it's gluten--no go twice over. I handle meat and gluten on a daily basis back home preparing food for other people (I wear a dust mask when I'm handling gluten) but I simply choose not to mention it here. I made an exception for my grandmother's creation.

The kibbeh were steamed in a bed of shredded, seasoned beets, and we saved out a bunch of the beets before adding the meat, for a delicious vegetarian side-dish.

The beets were boiled whole until cooked but still firm. Then I slipped off the skins and grated them.
I saute'ed an onion with turmeric, black pepper a little oil, then added the beets. Let them cook for a while and added the juice of half a lemon and a little salt. It's interesting to me that my grandmother doesn't use a lot of salt--I don't have much of a taste for salt either, and in the US, many people I know add tons of salt. Genetic, or cultural, my feeling that a little salt goes a long way?

 This is the batter/outside part of the kibbeh.

It's semolina flour, oil and a little water. No measuring--my grandmother sat there and put it together, adding water by eye and by feel. Wetter than I would have guessed it needed to be.

Here she is combining the meat part with the batter part. That is quite a trick and I wish I'd watched her more closely. However, of course I was busy making something else at the time.

I was making what we call (approximately translated) "eggplant salad," which is really pretty much baba ghanoush. I thought this eggplant on the stove looked so funny!

It was a monster eggplant, and took quite a lot of my attention. I only burned myself once.

Did I mention that there's no food processor or anything like it in my grandmother's kitchen? There's a pretty good pestle and mortar, but not big enough for pulping the eggplant. Once I'd picked all the burnt skin off, I mashed it with a fork and then grated it.

I was going to add a couple cloves of garlic to the smoky eggplant, and look what my mom found!

I would never have guessed that worms could live in garlic--I thought garlic was antihelminthic...This worm was lively and happy, and probably had a great immune system.

Well, luckily we had plenty of garlic, really good garlic, too. The other important ingredient was tahini, and I ended up running out to the store to get some more, because the tahini that's already here was likely full of breadcrumbs from people's knives and I wanted to be able to eat the eggplant dish without getting sick! One interesting feature of Israeli supermarkets is that they have three big shelves of different kinds of tahini. So, mashed up smoky eggplant, two cloves garlic, a little salt, juice from one and a half lemons (added incrementally to taste) and a good pour of tahini. We wanted to add some cayenne pepper or curry powder but didn't have any (and hadn't realized that before my store-run), so we used black pepper, a pinch of cloves and some cinnamon. My mom was surprised by that choice of spices, but it really worked well.

I cut up carrots, cucumber and fennel to dip.

Right when we sat down to lunch, two of my uncles, one of my aunts and one of my cousins all showed up one after the other! They all claimed to have had lunch already, but they all enjoyed the eggplant dish, the beets and the kibbeh.