- qabuli palow
basmati rice
chicken thighs
onion
tomatoes
carrots
raisins
cumin seeds
almonds, skinned and split
pistachio nuts
olive oil
salt
garlic
A few RPCVs Afghanistan from VT and MA brought their memories of home-cooked Afghan meals and the ingredients to January gathering, and the Afghan students their cooking skills. An evening with study and work set aside to share the simple tasks of dicing, sauteing, tasting and of all the talk, if not a recipe for peace, surely one step toward it.
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You can’t get much better food anywhere west of Kabul - it was the Afghan touch.
It is good to hear from you Once In Afghanistan folks about food.
What is your favorite book about Afghanistan?
We just finished reading One Day I Will Write About This Place by Binyavanga Wainaina about Kenya and Uganda where I was a Peace Corps Volunteer 196-69.
As you can imagine, we have our individual favorites. Among them are: Jason Elliot’s An Unexpected Light, Doris Lessing’s The Wind Blows Away our Words: A Firsthand Account of The Afghan Resistance, Ann Jones’ Kabul in Winter, Sarah Chayes, The Punishment of Virtue, Christina Lamb’s The Sewing Circles of Herat, Asne Seierstad’s The Bookseller of Kabul, and John Sumser’s A Land Without Time. This list is what comes to mind. It might be interesting to know what qualities put them on the list, but that is for another day.
My favorite foods in Afghanistan were nan, freshly baked in a cave-like oven with the bakers inside, and cucumbers which we were told was the safest way to get water while traveling through the country side. Come to think of it, the feshly baked nuts were good too.
Try as we do to replicate Afghan naan when we gather, it seems that without Afghan wheat and a wood-fired oven of clay it cannot be done.
I learned to like cucumbers the summer I spent in Jalalabad. They were a god-send with salt. The Afghan tip on how to open a cucumber involved slicing off each end and scrubbing that piece briskly across the open end. Purpose is to remove any bitterness.
An Afghan friend here recently showed me the next step: place the end with little stem in the very center of the forehead just above brow line. It will stick for as long as it takes to prepare the cucumber for eating and creates as cool and pleasant a sensation as the eating!