Andorra redux

Because we couldn’t eat real Andorran food prepared by real Andorrans we went to Mercat in Manhattan to try Catalan food made by people who had once visited Catalonia. The room was tastefully lit and we sat at a heavy wooden table in the back of the restaurant. There were two shallow baskets containing plum tomatoes and green chilies on the counter in front of the open kitchen. A walk-in wine cellar, a large shelf, was built in to the wall above our heads.

On the very back wall of Mercat was painted a mural that looked like a drawing. In it, what I took to be a Spanish family sat around a long table. The women wore handkerchiefs on their heads and the man wore the clothes of a laborer. On the table were dishes and one steaming pot.  Maybe they were waiting for a more substantial repast, maybe someone outside the scene was preparing pots filled with rabbit stew and bringing in the wineskin from where it had been hung the previous night, but their eyes revealed their world to us. The artist included simple, single short lines, parallel to each other above and below the simple black dot eyeballs of each of her subjects denoting worry. These people were tired, and the lines in their faces betrayed their weariness and their fear that they would have to scrape by for another few days. They were tired and had little to share with us. They may have resented our intrusion into their lives.

In light of our recent forays into the outer boroughs and our research into our next country, Angola, we had started to expect welcomes into worlds that weren’t our own, but this trip served as a reminder that a lot of what people seem to be whispering and writing about Manhattan may regrettably be true. As we studied our surroundings, I couldn’t help but think that the worn down cobblestones running just outside had witnessed so much more than the conversations and goings-on of the well to do residents that lived at the architectural monstrosity across the street at 40 Bond.

40 Bond St, NYC. Photo by Phillip Ritz

We had some interesting things. Grilled chilis, some spicy potatoes, a pasta with shrimp and black squid ink sauce. We had a decent bottle of wine and some cheese.  Everything was pretty good, but a tad expensive.  Maybe we’re the peasants, striving for something we think might sometime be attainable.  Peasants are supposed to be marginalized, some things are meant for people that can truly enjoy and understand them.  I felt that the simple, comfortable food here was somehow meant to be way beyond us.  We finished our bottle of wine and went to Red Mango.

Andorra: Part One

We’ve hit our first big challenge.  Andorra is a tiny, landlocked principality nestled in the Pyrenees mountains on the border between France and Spain.  Of its 72,000 residents, at least 67% of those are from elsewhere in Europe, mainly neighboring France and Spain, as well as Italy, Britain, and Portugal.  The national language is Catalan, which is also spoken in certain regions of Spain (including Catalonia, where you would find Barcelona), the Italian island of Sardinia, and the Roussillon region of Southern France.  Andorra’s main industry is tourism (i.e. skiing) and it’s tax haven status also attracts some wealthy types.

We started out by crawling the Internet in search of any mention of “andorra” and “New York.”  Nothing turned up except a few mentions of the UN Mission to Andorra.  So a friend of the Nomad actually rang them up for us (thanks again!) and they told her that in fact there are no Andorran restaurants in New York City.  Hardly surprising considering that there are only 28,000 or so Andorrans in the world.  The person at the UN Mission recommended that we go to Le Bernadin, as chef Eric Ripert used to live in Andorra (this is corroborated by his biography on the restaurant’s website).  Anyone who lives in NYC or has watched Top Chef probably knows of this restaurant and its famous chef.  And anyone who has been there can tell you it’s a seafood restaurant (not the type of cuisine I would associate with a landlocked, mountainous country), and it’s also one of the city’s more expensive. I hear it’s fantastic though.

We decided not to go that route.  It would be hard to justify a very pricey meal that wouldn’t even quite fit our mission.  But we still had to give Andorra its due diligence.  We came up with a two part plan:

1. Make Andorran food at home
2. Go to a Catalonian restaurant

This is the story of part one.

I started out by cruising the web for Andorran recipes.  There were very few in English, but of those that I did come across, one dish was mentioned on nearly every site: Trinxat.   It’s a potato and cabbage pancake with smoky bacon, described by europeancuisines.com as, “probably one of the best-known dishes of Andorra.” And the recipe looked pretty easy.  I figured this had to be the thing to try.  Apparently it looks like this:

My methodology involved combining a few recipes I found for this dish, and boiling them down to the common elements.  It seemed simple enough.  Here’s is what I came up with:

4 large russet potatoes, peeled

1 head green cabbage

1 package bacon (12 strips)

3 tbs olive oil

2 cloves garlic, peeled

salt and pepper

(you are also supposed to use fatback, but since I couldn’t find any, I left it out.  Probably a critical missed step.)

1.  Discard the outer layers of the cabbage.  Cut the cabbage into fourths.  Bring a large pot of water to a boil, and boil cabbage for about 45 minutes.  Once that is going bring another large pot to boil, and boil the potatoes for about 25 minutes.  Allow both to cool.

2.  Discard the core of the cabbage, and press cabbage to release water.  Put cabbage and potatoes in a large bowl and mash together.  Salt to taste.

3.  Start cooking the bacon in batches.  Set on a plate covered with a paper towel to absorb grease.

4.  Drain off some of the grease from the pan, and then add garlic.  Cook for about 2 minutes until its about to burn, and then mix it in with the potato/cabbage mixture.

5.  (Here is the part where you are supposed to add the fatback to the pan, and cook it for a few minutes, but since I didn’t have any, I left that part out.  Did leave some extra bacon grease in there though.).  Add about half of the potato mixture to the same pan, and spread it around until it’s in the shape of about a 1/2″ think pancake.  Cook over medium high heat for about 10 minutes.

6.  Here is the hard part:  put a plate over the skillet and the flip it over, so the pancake is browned side up on the plate.  Slide it back in to the skillet and cook for 10 more minutes until it’s finished. Crumble the bacon, add it to the top of the pancake, and serve.

Easy, right?  Wrong!  I attempted this flipping of the pancake twice, and met with disaster each time.  The first time, I was using a very slick, brand new, deep Calphalon skillet.  As soon as I went to flip it, the food just slipped right out and landed in a pile on my stove.  I figured it had to be the skillet.  Way too slippery!

So I went for a cast iron the second time around.  It wouldn’t brown.  I waited and waited and finally got too hungry to wait any more.  This time when I went to flip it, I found it the skillet was too heavy to hold with one hand, and hold a plate with the other.  So I got some help.  But the pancake was stuck.  And once again I ended up with a pile, luckily this time I managed to get it on plates, and throw some bacon on top.  Below you have the result.  Not as pretty as the picture above.  But I imagine the taste was somewhat similar…maybe.  Kind of an Irish-ish dish to my taste, but good nonetheless.

And there you have it.  If anyone else decides to try this, I recommend including the step that involves the fatback, and using a light weight, shallow skillet.  Let me know if you are successful, and send in some pictures.

Part two coming soon…

A few more yummy things from Oz

The Three Sisters, Blue Mountains, NSW, Australia

I ate kangaroo while I was in Australia. Twice!  And it was delicious!  Actually, when I wrote the earlier post on my Aussie culinary adventure, I had already had it once, and completely forgot to mention it (I was totally jet lagged and still savoring the flavors of huge nice bowl of pho at the time, so I do hope you’ll forgive me for this extra bonus post).

The first time it was in the form of a nicely grilled, tender steak, over a bed of grilled vegetables, on top of mashed potatoes.  Washed down with a local Savignon Blanc.  Eaten on a old, docked ferry-turned-restaurant on Darling Harbor, which rocked for a few minutes whenever anyone came aboard.  When we sat down to dinner, my dining companions (who grew up in Sydney a few decades back) told me stories about taking that very same ferry to the famous Manly beach area, on the far north side of Sydney Harbor.  They also told me about the kangaroos they often see outside their house in Canberra.  Then they encouraged me to try the kangaroo.  Fantastic!

Later I came across the ‘roo again on a menu at a little cafe in a town called Katoomba.  This is in the famous Blue Mountains World Heritage area, where my colleague and I had spent a very full day hiking through the hills.   How could I resist kangaroo burger and chips after a long day of bushwalking?  Though not as tender and juicy as my first experience, the kangaroo burger hit the spot.

Did I actually see any living kangaroos during my trip, you ask?  In fact I did.  On the way back from a tour to Canberra, I spotted a number of ‘roo families grazing on the grass in the late afternoon sun.  Unfortunately, I didn’t see a close up.  Nor did I see a koala.  I did, however, see an echidna while in the Blue Mountains.  This little creature is both a marsupial and an egg layer, one of only two in the world!  Apparently, I am very lucky to have sighted it, as they are shy creatures.

Think we’ll find kangaroo on the menu when we eat Aussie in NYC?

Special Report: Live from Oz

So you decided we are a bunch of slackers because we haven’t written in a while?  Well, fear not fellow travelers, for we have not abandoned our mission (we’ve even done part one of Andorra, to be posted soon), but have merely been taking a break while I am in Australia.  I have been here now for a week, and have a week more to go.  The trip is work related (conference), but I’m finding time to get in some great sightseeing, and eat lots of different and yummy things.  I figured since Australia is an “A” country (on our list), and we’ll have to be eating some of their cuisine in New York in a few weeks, it would be worth a preview since I have a first hand look right now.

I should clarify that I am in Sydney, and have not been outside the city as of yet.  But there are plenty of culinary adventures to be found here.  What is Australian food like, you ask?  Well, there is a lot of this:

But there are also loads of other things.

Particularly notable is the delicious Asian food.  It’s also convenient that my hotel is a couple blocks from Chinatown, so I’ve been sampling some of the excellent Chinese, Thai, and Vietnamese around.  Chinatown here is different from the Chinatowns of New York.  It is much less residential, and much more touristic than the Chinatowns of our fair city.  There are a lot of young Asians running around in packs, and fewer hunched over old ladies.  There are restaurants a plenty, but few vegetable shops (and no vege stands.  In fact, I have not seen any street food in Sydney at all, which is a little disappointing).  That said, I think the food might surpass that found in NYC.  The Thai food is far more dynamic, with more flavor and dimension that what one finds in a typical Thai joint in the Big Apple.  And the Chinese is also outstanding.  The other day, whilist walking home from a long day at the conference, the wind suddenly carried a distinctive smell my way.  It was familiar, but from a long time ago.  It took me a minute to place it, then it hit me: China.  It smelled like China.  Not in a stinky fish head way like you get in Manhattan C-town, but in a delicious, street food in Xi’an kind of way.  I haven’t smelled that since I was in China in late 2003.  So immediately I wandered into the first Sichuan restuarant that i found, and enjoyed the heck out of a scallion pancake and some Kung Pao chicken.

Cafe life in Bronte Beach

I’ve also had some cheap and excellent sushi (surprisingly cheap, considering food is generally rather expenive here), Italian and Spanish, as well as grilled fish, octopus, prawns, and scallops (more local fare).  They certainly do seafood right.  Sydney has a fantastic cafe culture; sandwich shops and pubs typically have tables spilling good vibes and eats onto the street.  And they have killer coffee.  Now, I am not a coffee drinker at home (maybe one cup every two years), but immediately upon arrival here (at 7:30am after a 23 hour journey) I grabbed a cup, and I’ve been hooked ever since.  The name of my new found love is the “flat white.”  This is a shot of espresso with milk.  I also add a little sugar.  And being the talented baristas they are, the Aussies make it look beautiful too.  You can also get a flat black, a long black, and the familiar latte.  Yum.

So we’ll soon be eating Australian in New York, and will have good basis for comparison.  I’m assuming it will be lots of grilled and fried seafood, to ensure the experience is typically Aussie.  I hope its as good as the food here.

Ramadan, Algeria Style

Mediterranean Coffee Shop & Grill

25-75 Steinway St., Astoria, Queens, NY

It turns out New York is short on Algerians, which on consideration makes perfect sense.  Algerians are far more likely to immigrate to Paris or Marseille, where there are already large, deeply rooted North African communities.  Still, after some digging on a few online community boards, we discovered that the small Algerian community that does exist here has found a home among the hookah bars and North African groceries of Steinway St. in Astoria, Queens.

The neighborhood is primarily Egyptian, but we found a nice and well patronized Algerian spot there.  The dining room had a buoyant, communal feel with large long tables, and it was packed when we arrived (though it had completely cleared out by the time we left at around 9:30).  We were led through the restaurant and outdoors to a concrete slab graced with a few tables and folding chairs. If you were so inclined, it wouldn’t be too hard to imagine yourself in a small courtyard somewhere in the casbah of Algiers.

It hadn’t crossed our minds that Ramadan had started.  Everyone had come in after sunset to break his or her fast for the day.  Apparently, the restaurant discards its usual menu during the holy month, so everyone who comes in after sundown gets the same traditional post-fast feast, which suited us perfectly and added to the perceived authenticity of the experience.  Our waitress (who also turned out to be the chef) was warm and worked hard to make us feel welcome. Although she seemed to have an excellent command of English, her food vocabulary was strangely limited.  So our efforts to find out exactly what we were eating came to very little.  I’ll do my best do describe anyway.

We were started out with some orange juice obviously meant to get our glucose levels back up after a day without food.  This was quickly followed by a tomato-based soup  packed with vegetables, chickpeas, rice, and chunks of meat that we had a hard time identifying (after further research it turned out to be lamb, and the soup is called harira).  The soup was accompanied by a plate piled with a ratatouille-like dish mostly comprised of tomato and green peppers, two burek, which are crisp, almost egg-roll-style pastries filled with seasoned beef, and an Algerian version of the Indian confection, jalebi.  By the way, for those of you who have been paying attention, we also encountered burek in the last entry.  Algerian burek is much different from Albanian burek, however.  It’s more of a roll than a pie. Next came chopped liver in a punchy tomato-based sauce that I associate with a lot of North African food I’ve had, along with plates of prunes and raisins cooked in a sweet and tart syrup. The bread that accompanied everything was similar to Turkish bread and was perfect for soaking up the soup and liver sauce. Finally, for dessert, we got some healthy-sized chunks of fresh watermelon. We topped everything off with some incredibly strong coffee with milk and tea steeped with fresh mint leaves and lemon.  Our waitress then brought us some more jalebi and some delicious sticky sesame biscuits.

The entire meal seemed designed to provide as many essential nutrients as possible for a fasting body.  Even Noquar, who had been struggling mightily for most of the day after his exploits the previous evening, seemed to brighten as we worked our way through all the food.  From the vegetables in the soup, to the iron and protein in the liver, to the fiber and natural sugars in the dried fruits, we went home feeling very well nourished… perhaps even too well nourished by the time all that fiber had worked its way through our systems.

Robert Sietsema, you are my hero

Robert Sietsema, our ethnic food guide

I feel like I’ve found the Holy Grail. I even wondered at first why I’m even going to bother continuing to attempt to eat food from every nation on earth in New York City. It seems that it’s been done, and well documented. But then I took a closer look and thought, not quite. There is no entry for Algeria in Robert Sietsema’s The Food Lover’s Guide to the Best Ethnic Eating in New York City. Whew! I now have reason to keep going.

Robert Sietsema is longtime Village Voice food critic, and author of now-on-hiatus foodzine Down the Hatch. His book is a mandatory resource for anyone who is interested in multi-national eats in our fair city. First published in 1994 with the title Good & Cheap Ethnic Eats Under $10, the latest revision came out in 2004, and includes entries for what appears at first to be every cuisine under the sun. The guidebook, slim and rectangular, in a shape and size not unlike the Zagat guides, is organized by region/country/cuisine, more or less in alphabetical order. Each entry is limited to one paragraph, and includes a rating of one (good) to three (amazing) stars, a $ if the meal is more than $20/person, and other symbols if spicy food is available, the fish is particularly good, and/or if the establishment is vege friendly. A helpful little box of common food items to look is placed at the beginning of each section. All five boroughs and New Jersey are well covered, and a neighborhood index makes browsing your local hood easy.

This book is going to be a huge help when we get to places like Azerbaijan and Guyana, and for figuring out which restaurants in Flushing have Sichuan food and which represent Beijing. But with 100 cultural and national groupings represented, it is definitely not exhaustive of the entire UN.

We can already pride ourselves on having identified, located, and devoured Algerian cuisine in Astoria, Queens. Supereg will be filling you in on the details of that adventure very soon. In the meantime, I’m going back on the hunt for Andorran food (also not represented in the Sietsema book), which is proving to be our first real challenge.

Albania on Arthur Ave

Continuing down the UN’s list of nations, we learned that Albania comes after Afghanistan.  A lot of Albanians apparently live in the Bronx so we took the 5 train to the Pelham Parkway stop, an hour from downtown Brooklyn.

We went two places.

First up was Dukagjini Burktore, a small storefront with 4 tables on Lydig Avenue.  The menu was even smaller, complete with six items:  meat burek, spinach burek, cheese burek, yogurt, espresso and cappuccino.  This was enough.   Burek is fantastic, essentially a phyllo pie with filling.  At $3.50 per slice, we had four.  The yogurt was unflavored, thin but not watery, cold and satisfying.  Operated by the same family for 14 years, worth the train ride.

After dodging rush hour traffic on our walk across Bronx Park, we finally found our way to Arthur Avenue, the Bronx’s famed Little Italy.  I had never been before, but of course had heard from everyone about the Italian joints in the neighborhood, sausages hanging in windows and outdoor pastry shops, and gelato and hand-rolled cigars.  The street was quiet as apparently a number of restaurants close for extended August vacations.  Albania, separated from the heel of Italy by 74 kilometers of Adriatic Sea, was represented by one spot on the strip dominated by its larger, more celebrated neighbor.

We thought the Gurra Café, 2325 Arthur Avenue, was some sort of Balkan Social Club when we stumbled upon it.  We recognized the Albanian flag outside, and spotted tough looking, square jawed middle-aged dudes with closely cropped hair sitting at the table outside, talking quietly.  We went in anyways, taking our seats in the corner under the TV broadcasting poorly dubbed music videos from somewhere in eastern Europe, the women broadcasted undulating their hips ever so slightly and the men looking confused but happy to be there, singing pop songs in a language I didn’t understand.  The restaurant itself was very nice, dark woods and green paint, ceiling beams meeting in the middle of the room to form an inverted V.

Our waiter was friendly and helpful.  When we first walked in he smiled and asked, “Do you know that this is Albanian food?” Clearly a lot of people stumble in thinking the food here is Italian. We said yes, that’s what we were here for.  He suggested the combo meal so that we could have a sampler, and promptly brought us two much needed beers.  We watched the bad Balkan pop videos on the screen above us, and happily sipped while waiting for our food.

The food was decent, typical of what I think we’re going to find as we visit other spots from the region.  We split up a combo meal and got salad with chunks of a mild type of feta-like cheese and a variety of smoked meats, including Qebapa (Kosova style sausage), Suxhuk (Albanian sausage), Pleskavice (flat Albanian meatball), and veal.  A basket of fluffy, round, almost Turkish-style bread accompanied the meal.  Stuffed as we were from all the burek just an hour earlier, we managed to put down about 2/3 of this feast, and took the rest home to enjoy the next morning for breakfast (which we did, with fried eggs).

When we finished, we told our waiter about what we were doing, trying to find food from every country in NYC, blah, blah, and he said we could get most of it right in that neighborhood.  Looking at the citi-data for the area, it certainly does seem that there is quite an ethnic mix.  On the list of first ancestries reported, the vast majority claim Italian ancestry (3239 residents), and a good number hail from Albania (1313 residents), with many other ancestries (from Sub-Saharan African to Hungarian) included on the list.  But when we told our waiter we had come here looking for Albanian food, he said, actually, this restaurant’s proprietors were from Kosovo.  Then he laughed and said that because the two countries had been one until recently, it’s all the same thing really.  We agreed, finished our beers, hopped on the D train, and were home within an hour.

A is for Afghanistan

Ariana Afghan Kebab Restaurant

787 Ninth Ave (Between 52nd and 53rd St), New York, NY

www.ariananyc.com

Migozarad!
(It will pass)

Graffiti on the walls of a Kabul teahouse

- from The Bookseller of Kabul by Åsne Seierstad

Recently, we embarked on our first leg of a 192+ country culinary journey through New York City.  First up on the list: Afghanistan.  We will have to profess our ignorance up front for this one: we know nothing about Afghan (Afghani?  Afghanistani? We’ve seen all three.) cuisine.  We are fairly adventurous eaters (as we hope you will come to know), though this type of food none of us had tried before.  But hey, that’s why we’re doing this, right?  So where does one start to learn about a cuisine about which one knows nothing?  In this day and age, of course, Wikipedia is one important go to information resource (though we have a few more up our sleeves).  Through the Cuisine of Afghanistan entry, we learned a few things about the type of dishes to expect.  Rice is king in Afghanistan, breads and other grains are also staples.  For rice dishes, it’s Palow, with meat and spices blended in with the rice before it is baked, and Chalow, another basmati dish, which is baked simply with oil, butter, and salt, and then served with a Qorma (stew or casserole).

We had seen an Afghan kebab house out in Jackson Heights a few times, and thought about trying that one, but as we were in mid-town until fairly late that night, heading out to Queens didn’t seem like a wise option, especially to our grumbling bellies.  So we opted to check out two westside Manhattan Afghan favorites: Ariana and the Afghan Kebab House across the street.  After a peek through the window at the décor and clientele and a quick glimpse at each menu, we decided to go with the former.  Ariana has a pleasant and low-key vibe, with just a few tables, and a reasonably priced menu.  Rugs and pictures of landmarks and landscapes in Afghanistan adorn the walls, including some notable images, such as the National Geographic Afghan Girl photograph, and one of the 1500+ year-old Buddha’s of Bamyan, which were destroyed by the Taliban in 2001, just 6 months before the regime fell.

We walked in and were greeting by a smiling and enthusiastic waiter. The items listed on the menu were as we expected: many variations of kebabs, Palow, Chalow.  We decide that we need to try as much of the menu as possible between the three of us.  So we opt for the Combo Appetizer as a starter, which we are told will be a “surprise.”  It turns out to be two types of fried turnovers, or Bolanee.  One was filled with mashed potatoes and the other with pumpkin, both with lots of herbs and spices, and served with a yogurt dressing.  Also on the combo plate was some well-seasoned “fried” eggplant, which was more like an eggplant stew, served with pieces of flat, square bread.  The bread was dense, but fluffy in the middle.  Almost like a doughier panini.  All were delicious, although the pumpkin turnovers definitely stood out.

For the main course we each ended up ordering lamb dishes, but no matter.  The meat was seasoned quite different for each.  Here’s a quick breakdown of what we ate:

• Kabuli Palow: This dish consisted of salad and rice with shredded carrots, raisins, and almonds.  The rice was topped with grilled lamb, tender and well seasoned.

• Kabuli Palow with Lamb Tikka Kebab:  Similar to the above, though the meat was seasoned and cooked quite differently.  This dish also came with a side of potato, covered with a red sauce of indistinguishable, but tasty, makeup.

• Bandenjen Chalow: Again with salad and rice, though this time the rice it was plain, with no raisins or carrots or anything.  One the side was a stew of eggplant and tender lamb cooked with onions, bell peppers and tomatoes.

The waiter suggested we put some of the spicy sauces sitting on the table onto the dishes.  One red, one green sauce, both blends of hot peppers, added a nice flavorful spice to the dish.  They also brought out a little bonus yogurt sauce, which gave the meal another nice dimension.

We finished off the meal by splitting the two desserts offered.  The Firnee came in a little pudding glass, was a firm but smooth, nutty pudding with pistachios and slivered almonds mixed in.  Beghalawa is essentially the same baklava that you’ve had before at Turkish restaurants or your local falafel joint, but served piping hot (fascinating that baklava can be found, with little variation, from the Mediterranean to Central Asia).  We ordered tea and Afghan coffee, both of which were spiced with cardamom and maybe a little clove.

The meal was good and the flavors well balanced, but this was certainly a New York City version of Afghan dining.  The fact that we each had a bottle of beer with our meals is probably atypical for Afghan dining.  Tea would likely be more of a staple. A colleague of mine, who recently spent six weeks working in Afghanistan with their National Archives, training staff to digitize rare manuscripts in an effort to preserve what little of their cultural heritage remains, noted that no situation was ever complete without tea.  Work couldn’t be started with out everyone first having a few glasses; meetings would not commence until everyone had a glass in hand.  Meals would certainly be served with tea.  I wondered, is tea in Afghanistan served like it is in India, with milk, sugar, and spices boiled together?  A little internet research reveals that Afghans prefer to drink green tea, made by boiling tea leaves and served without sugar or milk, so that it is quite bitter.  Our tea didn’t have sugar, but also wasn’t bitter and had some spices blended in.  Still we enjoyed our spiced tea and coffee: Noquar has since been inspired to add some chai masala to his morning coffee.

So we enjoyed ourselves, for sure.  But we can’t say that it was all that much better than the food that one might get from a good halal cart.  And we’re sure that the array of dishes and flavors one would experience in Afghanistan would be quite surpass what we had at Ariana. Looking at the pictures on the walls during dinner, I got to thinking about what it would be like to one day eat in Afghanistan, enjoying a table spread on the floor of someone’s house.  Apparently, dinner is a big family affair, and guests are treated like royalty.  The author Åsne Seierstad wrote about first meeting the main character of her book, The Bookseller of Kabul, “One day he invited me home for an evening meal.  His family – one of his wives, his sons, sisters, brother, mother, a few cousins – was seated on the floor around a sumptuous feast.” She eventually spent 6 months living with that family and shared many more such meals with them.  We can only hope that one day very soon, the possibility of actually visiting Afghanistan will be a reality for many more than just journalists, soldiers and politicians.

One of the goals of this adventure is to learn more about the cuisine of each nation (or region where the owners are from), and talk to the servers or owners about their homeland, living in New York, and how, if at all, this city has influenced their dishes.  We certainly failed to do that this time.  The restaurant was busy (it was a Friday night at 9pm in Manhattan), and we were engaged in a heated political discussion (the usual “will Obama win?” debate that makes our meals stressful these days) during most of the dinner.  So we dropped the ball on that front.  But we vow to dig up a litter more dirt next week, when we visit Albania.  Until then…