"Can you cook Persian food?” a friend asked me not so long ago. “A little bit,” I answered. “Can you cook Ghormeh sabzi?” she continued “Not really, I’ve never tried”. “Can you try? I’d like to surprise my husband, this is his favorite dish ever, and me, I can't cook it for my life”
I love pastries! Savory, sweet, spicy...doesn’t really matter, as long as they’re fresh and hot. When my son was a baby, I used to take him in his stroller for a walk in our neighborhood. We always had our must stop spots.
"Why don’t you make mafrum?” asked my better half with this voice that she keeps for the things she really, really wants. “Mafrum? Now? In the middle of the summer?” I tried to evade her question. “First of all, you promised a long time ago that you’ll make it for me, and never did".
"What are you going to make?” asked my better half when I was wondering what to bring to an afternoon gathering with friends. “I don’t really know” I answered. When I run out of ideas what to cook, I go shopping.
"We are going to visit grandma,” said dad. We were thrilled, my brother and I loved these visits. Grandma lived on the other side of town. Back then, it took a ride on two different buses and quite a long walk to get there.
"So you really know how to cook?” asked Jezebel (an invented name) when we sat in the early hours of the morning in a small restaurant in Paris after a long, alcohol-filled night. I vaguely remembered that we spoke about food and cooking in the evening. I guess the alcohol in my blood made me feel at least like Gordon Ramsay because I answered “yes, I’m a great cook” trying to impress Jezebel.
One of my most vivid memory from my childhood kitchen is the huge number of pots and pans cooking simultaneously on the stove. In a kitchen of nearly 80 square feet, that also had a dining table, in any given moment there were at least 3-4 dishes cooking, and usually one or two were baked in the oven.