Kurdelicious

I am going to begin this post by noting that I am stuffed full of Kubbeh and Katachaweh and if you understand what I'm talking about, you can skip half of what I have to say.

Winter is Kurdish food season. Kurdish food comes in three forms:
1) Raw
2) Extremely well-cooked
3) Very extremely well-cooked

The raw aspect tends to focus on all kinds of good-smelling herbs, like fresh basil, bad-smelling herbs, like green onions, and root vegetables of a dubious nature. Also something that everybody agrees is called "taratiza", but nobody can translate into a language spoken by non-Persian Kurds.

And now to explain further. Kubbeh is to Kurdish cuisine as…gosh, I don't know, a nice hollandaise sauce is to WASP food. It is the pinnacle of Kurdish culinary skill. It can be fried or boiled in soup, and begins its life as a stuffed, round dumpling. The wrapper part is made of semolina (think Cream of Wheat, Americans), and the inside is ground meat, ground chicken, or some kind of vegetarian sludge. They can be the size of ping-pong balls and spherical, or can get as flat and big in diameter as a small plate. As far as I can tell, there are at least a dozen variants on the soup involved, ranging from beet broth (delish! I know – sounds terrible – cream of wheat stuffed with pulled beef in beet broth) to sour sorrel soup.

They are the joy of husband N's existence. As winter comes, he waxes nostalgic, and advocates at least once every ten days that we make the three-hour drive up to his parents in the hopes of having Kubbeh for Friday dinner.

Did I mention that it is the secret way to separate the Kurds from the rest of the world? That as a super-non-Kurd, my chances of ever getting the cream-of-wheat to form a glutinous ball that will support the filling are slightly worse than those of my winning the PowerBall lottery?

As if the nostalgia wasn't overwhelming enough, we unwittingly moved last year, right at the beginning of the Kubbeh season to one of the quiet Kubbeh capitals of Israel.

Our landlords live one floor above us. Mrs. Landlord, who could – and should – be the subject of a photo shoot by National Geographic on the Kurdish exile, makes everything they eat from scratch, from bread, to home-cured sunflower seeds, to Kubbeh. And oh, what kubbeh (we imagine) it is. As far as we can estimate, she's been in the kubbeh-rolling business since she was about ten. She seems to be, in a sort-of ageless way, pushing 80. She has some 11 children, all of whom have children (and one or two have grandchildren) and on Friday nights, they all come over and eat kubbeh.

N's mouth waters and his eyes grow as wide as the saucer-sized flat and yellow tumeric kubbeh when he smells them cooking. He chokes back his jealously as he hears the chairs scraping upstairs signaling the onset of the kubbeh meal, while he wends his way through another roast chicken dinner a la Ashkenazi-American Jewry. Mrs. Landlord, who is always happy to invite us in for a cup of tea and delicious home-made sweets, knows where her real assets lie, and will not give out her kubbeh for free. In fact, she assured my husband, she would be happy to sell us 50 frozen Kubbeh at the same budget rate that she offers to her offspring.

Where does Shorter N fit in to this? He's our leverage, of course.

Mr. and Mrs. Landlord think that Li'l N is a fabulous baby, meaning they talk to him in Kurdish baby-talk, and…like old people everywhere…wish to express their love by way of the palate. So while N and I can languish months with my roast-chicken-and-sweet-potato dinners, a visit with Shorter N to the Landlords can result in side benefits for Mom.

Last week, the Little Guy had a runny nose, and after a medical discussion in Kurdish, the Landlords prescribed a treatment of Shorbeh, a sort of rice-and-chicken stew. They poured Li'l N a bowl big enough to present a drowning risk, and grinned as he took a bite, grinned, and commercially announced a perfectly-scripted "mmmmmm". Guess who was given the honor of finishing the Shorbeh? Yup, me.

Big N had a sort of hang-dog tone, if a tone could be hang-dog, when I called him at work to report my success. "Did she give you Kubbeh, though?"

Here I had to admit defeat. "No. But the Shorbeh was gooooood. Much better than the can of tuna I planned on having for lunch."

But never you fear, faithful reader. Little N is growing and becoming cuter by the week. And after I strategically plant him in sort of a Tiny Tim way, plaintively staring at – or better yet, after I teach him to delicately announce in his little voice "kooo-beh, kooo-beh" – I'm reasonably certain that success can't be far off.