I’m leaving everyone here to starve a meal early. For reals: they have no one to cook for them. They are going to starve.

On Monday, I cooked my last meal in Iraq. Chicken with dried fruit and couscous.

It became my last meal only a few hours earlier. It also went from being a meal for 10 people to one to 25 people close to the last minute, as one of the people here decided she was going to turn my dinner into a birthday party and invite relatives from in town. On top of that, she put the clamp down on everyone with the “we can’t eat until so and so shows up.” Considerate. So for the hour we spent having to wait, and the hour my food spent getting cold, a few of us got a good buzz on in the kitchen.

I spent my remaining time scrambling about packing and trying to acquire a few items: sweet Iraqi kicks, one of those head scarves (did you know it is actually a scarf and hat combination..?), a Desert Eagle .50, bronze trunk, and post cards. As Hil and I packed in a whirlwind our flight was thankfully pushed back a few hours, and then our baggage allowance was cut down to 50 kilos. 50 kilos, when I came here two months ago with 80 kilos. We’ll see what happens at the airport. Well shit, now we have 30 kilos. AirServ, you blow.

I got out of cooking yesterday because everyone remaining decided to throw a party for us and the others that are leaving this week. Food was procured from some local restaurant, it was piled up 90 minutes after it should have been, and then everyone went to town and stuffed their faces. Of course, it was followed by the weekly soccer game, which was a good one.

I was a little saddened that I didn’t get to cook last night. Despite the stress of it all, I’ve grown attached. I’d ideas on doing something simple, which the folks here have been looking forward to since I started: roasted chicken with two lemons, potatoes and green beans on the side. Easy and yummy, and a nice way to leave.

There’s plenty of talk from Amman though, that I may be pressured to be the lunchtime cook. The current ones aren’t too good. What I don’t get is why we can’t just go out to eat for lunch? That’s the way dinner is done, since Amman is a perfectly safe city (if you ignore the fact that the hotel we stay out was blown up about 8 months ago). We’ll see how the food procurement side of things is there. If I can get sliced bread, ham, and cream, I just might do it.

I leave for the airport in ten minutes, if we keep to schedule. Direct flight, which unfortunately means I won’t get to spiral into Baghdad. I’m leaving here, and am a little melancholy about it, as it turned into such a shorter stay than I’d expected. Oh well, maybe I’ll get a job in Samoa.

Pie.

I like pie.

I how I do like to eat pie.

Romans used to like their pie so much, they’d eat pie if there was a chicken leg sticking out of said pie. Just wrap their hand around that chicken leg and eat that pie.

I ain’t never ate no pie like that, but I would.

Therefore, yesterday I made and I ate pie.

It was alright. Lamb pie. Moroccan lamb pie. I’d make it again, but it wasn’t all that. At least not on a hot, typical day in Iraq. Maybe if it were cold out, and drizzling. Maybe if I was all homesick and in a fetal position. Then, I would eat up that pie and ask for more. But as were the conditions yesterday, it was just alright.

The crust was real good though, courtesy of Hilary and Crisco. Everyone else really liked it.

I’d write more about it, but I’m not feeling it.

My head is elsewhere anyways. Just got news that I’m headed to Amman, Jordan. 4am on Wednesday. 1 and a half days from now. The close down and file tracking has hit a few road bumps and the staff there are swamped. So off I go. Hil and I start packing tonight because we’re not coming back - no more Iraq. No more cooking.

Instead, I am going to go have someone buy some Scotch on my behalf. Glenfiddich 30 Year Reserve. US$150 a bottle. I might do myself up a whole case and never worry about buying Scotch again.

On almost every day of the week, I bone three chickens. Sometimes Hilary gets into boning the chickens as well, but I really like to bone them myself. There's just something that feels good about boning a chicken, getting your hands all over it and taking care of it piece by piece. I haven't boned very many other animals, especially not a raw boning. I guess I've only boned lambs, rabbits, and the like after they've been heated up. If you don't bone, cold animals, raw, you're missing out on a fabulous thing to do in the kitchen. I recommend that you go and bone a chicken tonight. You'll thank me for it. I do, however, hope you don't get some sort of itch from the chicken, as I've gotten.

Normally I’m not enthusiastic about red beans. I find them boring and lacking anything more than a taste of red beans. Despite that, I decided that I would make red beans and rice with fried chicken for the Haitian guy with whom I share my office and play soccer. Nice guy, sort of an aloof brainiac, but enjoyable. I don’t know if he likes red beans and rice, or fried chicken, but I thought that he should. Therefore, in his honor, I decided to make that meal.

Unfortunately for him, I decided that two weeks ago and finally got around to making it yesterday. Unfortunately for him, he was in DC on vacation.

I started as usual, chopping onions and garlic. This time, off the advice of Oscar, I opted to mince the hell out of the garlic. You know, just chop, chop, chop, and chop, until you can hardly distinguish the individual pieces of garlic. Two large onions and a whole head of garlic. A few tablespoons of olive oil, in went the onions, and when the time was right, in went the garlic. When everything was smelling good, six cups of hot water, ten Turkish bay leaves, two tablespoons of dried thyme, four teaspoons of dried oregano, about an inch of Tabasco (an inch out of one of those 6” tall bottles), one teaspoon of ground allspice, another of ground cloves, two teaspoons of finely ground black pepper, and four teaspoons of salt. Stirred it up, opened and drained eight 15 ounce cans of kidney beans, and tossed them into the pot. Brought it to a boil, lowered it to a gently boil, and let it hang out for a long time.

When the liquid was about 2/3’s evaporated, I added another six cups of hot water, with six tabs of instant halal chicken broth dissolved. Cooked it all down again, until about 60% of the liquid was evaporated.

Serve that with some rice and some flakey fried chicken with tons of garlic all done up in the marinade.

Now its beans and you got fried chicken in there. When you do something of that nature with Mexican food, you need a lot of Tequila to make it good with the ladies. But I’ll tell you straight up: cook those beans, serve it to your lady, and she will like you big time!

This I guarantee.

Let’s talk about pictures. I keep getting requests from people wanting to see more pictures. In fact, I’d say that’s what most of you are thinking.

Are you people nuts?! Why do you want me to die? The reason I’m writing a blog about cooking in a kitchen is that I can’t go outside! What? You want a blog about what I do in the bedroom? One of you, a Mr. Edward A. Horgan, already suggested that I write a blog about my bowel movements. I can do that one, and I can supply as many pictures as you want! And you might even think they’d be interesting, because my poo is different. I might get more people reading my blog then, maybe even establish a whole cult around my excremental godliness. But tomatoes? Come on people! If you want to know what cutting a tomato looks like go do it yourself! You’ll probably enjoy it much more than me! When I cut tomatoes, I’m in total fear of goring myself with a knife that has been sharpened on the street outside! Seriously! And you want me to hold a damn camera as I do it?? You’re crazy! No! You don’t get no fancy pictures of my pie crust, how I apply the salt, and my lentil sorting technique! You want more reasons? The lighting sucks! I might as well be cooking in a cardboard box! There is one crappy fluorescent light that works when the power is on. And it’s a good thing I’m cooking while its daylight outside, because that’s often the only way I can get light! I don’t have some fancy kitchen here like some guy with a show named “Wok & Roll”. I have a 6” ledge and a stinky trash can in the middle of the kitchen. My prep surface isn’t an island or some ergonomic whozawhatzy. Oh no, I cut my stuff on some flimsy plastic tables you might find on the roof of a frat house. My water sometimes comes out brown. The aircon (which, by the way, is much more fun to say than “AC”) turns off and on sporadically. I burn my fingers adjusting the stove burners. I have no hot pads. I light the oven using dirty paper towels. When I need to add water to a dish I have to go to the water cooler across the room and have it trickle out of the faucet. It is not pretty! It is not inspirational! You will not feel better about your life after seeing more pictures of my hands doing things in the kitchen!

Here is my day: I wake up in my bedroom. I go urinate in the WC (I think that stands for “water closet”). I then walk to the shower, where I shower. I walk to the sink where I shave or brush my teeth. I walk back to the bedroom and put clothes on. I walk downstairs, out the door, and 400 yards down the street to work. I enter the front door; I say my “good mornings” and wave then go up the stairs, into my office and sit down. At noon I walk downstairs, out the door, 300 yards down the street to the common house, into the kitchen, get some food, and then walk into the dining room. I eat, I get back up, and walk back to work. Sometime around 2:45 I walk downstairs to piss. I walk back upstairs to my desk, sit down, and work some more until around 3:15-4:15 and leave to go back to the common house and cook. I’m in the kitchen until around 8pm, and then I walk back to my house, sit down on the bed, and stay there until 11pm. I get up, go brush my teeth and the sink, and then pee again (in the WC, not the sink…usually). Then I walk back to the bedroom and go to sleep.

I do that everyday with no deviation (except for Fridays, and I spend most of that doing absolutely nothing). I am more regular than if I were on birth control.

The problem with all that is this: Iraq is not the same as France. I can’t take pictures of what is outside. If I did, there’s the likelihood of some “insurgent” seeing it, putting two and two together, and driving a nice big truck full of gasoline into the neighborhood and blowing my ass up! The picture of the albino kids? I should probably remove it. The only reason I put it up there was that the house they are on is being built, and today, one day later, it is nearly unrecognizable because more has been built already. It is still a security risk. You don’t get to see pictures of anything that would assist someone locating where we are. I’ve taken plenty of pictures, but you can’t see them until I leave here, and the operation is entirely closed down.

Not only can are my exterior pictures extremely limited, so are those that I take inside. We do a lot to pretend we are not here. We don’t know who works with us. We don’t meet them, they don’t meet us. Not only for our protection, but for theirs too. We’ve had contractors killed for their associations with us. We’ve had offices staked out by the people who lob mortars into markets. Our contractors already spend huge sums of money on increased security, and who hire big guys from South Africa who I’ve only seen twice with a large handgun. I see them much more regularly with at least three assault rifles (per person, plus extra ammo for each weapon). In our own office, we employ a fair number of local staff, wonderful people who live here. They live here with their families, and if the shit hits the fan, they don’t have the luxury the US Marines swooping out of the sky in gun ships and Blackhawk’s to evacuate them to safety. Our local staff and their families are as much targets, if not more than us foreigners. We have a few ex-pats in our office as well, Iraqi-Americans who grew up here. Their wives, sons, and daughters might be back in Reston or Chicago, but their parents, brothers, and nieces are still living here. They too are targets. Thus, they will not be in any pictures, even after we are all closed down and gone. It’s not like putting a picture up on Friendster or MySpace and worrying about someone calling them fat. It’s more like someone just getting shot at. Being shot at isn’t so funny.

On the lucky chance that I get to go outside and deviate from my normal schedule, it is in an armored SUV. The windows don’t roll down. They are thick and dirty. Even though it’s armored, we don’t want to attract attention or get shot at. Cameras attract attention, and here, it’s not like you’re a tourist who might get mugged: you’re a target for much worse. But hey, I haven’t had that pleasure in weeks. Three? Four? I don’t know, but I’ve lost count. Everyone here does.

I have taken pictures, those that don’t deal with cooking. Maybe they’ll appease you. It is not many. After all this, that’s when you can see some of those.

You may wonder if it’s blown out of proportion, this whole “got to be safe on the world wide web” thing. Proportions don’t exist here. Proportions don’t exist when you compare each rumble or bang or roar to the explosions and gunshots and artillery blasts you’ve heard on TV.

Besides, it takes a long ass time to upload them to this website.

Yeah, well anyways, there's now a link for photos back towards the top, on the right. Sandwiched between the sections for my profile and links. Or here ... photos.

I lied and spent a good chunk of the last two days in the kitchen. Thursday was Hil’s birthday and we were still in lockdown. I thought about taking her for a little picnic up in the hills, along a little creek, around sunset and having a fire. Maybe pulling out some fine, stinky cheese, a baguette and a bottle wine. But that wasn’t such a good idea, because we would have been shot.

I think that it is very common to have that desire of not getting shot on your birthday. I don’t know who you roll with, but even when my friends are down their luck and all that, they don’t want to get shot. I guess I don’t hang out with any goths, but I doubt they’d be into it. Something about it not being romantic enough. I think they’d rather get stabbed, no, sliced a few times while doing some sort of fetish thing with the apple from a roasted pig’s mouth. I’m glad Hilary isn’t a goth.

Did I ever mention that there are a bunch of albino kids in this part of the world? There are two running around outside right now, watering a house that is being built. I think there are about five in the neighborhood. Pakistan had a bunch too. Scrawny whitey, white kids going all around. One here, the little one, looks like he gets beat up a lot. The biggest one, he looks like, hmmm…weird, for one. I can’t quite place it. Maybe he looks like he is trying to be a forest ranger. Being in the desert doesn’t work with that. If they come back around the corner I’ll take a picture. I hope the flash doesn’t hurt their skin, but serious…what the hell are they thinking living in a desert?! A desert is no place with the melanoma-challenged albinos! They should be in caves five feet under the ground where it is safe! In eight years I bet they’ll end up being a walking scab of skin cancer! Perhaps their paleness somehow protects them from the sun’s dangerous rays? I ain’t ever seen an albino kid in a forest, or in Canada, not even in Germany where you’d think they’d be popular and get all the ladies. The only one I ever knew was some kid named Chris Waters or something in 6th grade, and I don’t think he was an albino even though I called him that. Someone else called me an albino in that class too, and all I could do was point to him and say he was whiter than I was and I was off the leash. It always feels so good to have someone around who is worse off than yourself.

Okay, bringing it back to Hil’s birthday, and eventually cooking, since I couldn’t do anything else I made her a cake. A small one, just for her (um, and I was hoping for half of it). Another woman here was making her a hefty amount of carrot cake, doing it up all proper at work. I, however, was going for the subtle approach, and didn’t want to have no sort of cake competition or nothing.

Chocolate cakes in Iraq are no easy task. For days I searched online for a recipe to base things off of, but by the time I got to the end of every recipe, I had no more than two of the ingredients: flour and sugar. I thought about toss those into a bowl and heating them up and stick a spoon in it, handing it to Hilary and saying “happy birthday” but I tried a little harder. Still being in lockdown did not make things any easier. No butter, no margarine, (weird, I just noticed that the albino kids all dress alike! Village of the Damned-Style!) no semi-sweet chocolate, no bittersweet chocolate, no baking chocolate, no almond extract, you name it, and I did not have it. Oscar advised chocolate milk and flour, which I nearly followed him up on before it donned on me that I can’t get chocolate milk here, and I can hardly get milk. Eventually, I came across a recipe for Rheine de Saba. Not only did it like I would have to use minimal substitutions, but it was what I was looking for: moist, dense, and chocolaty.

Thursday morning, I feigned sickness, and after Hilary left I went back to sleep for a little bit then headed to the kitchen. My goal of the day was that cake and bread dough. I got the cake all together, using mass amounts of Crisco, omitted the almond extract, and regrettably the pulverized almonds because someone ate or disappeared my two kilos worth. Everything flew together, and the only hurdle was getting the egg whites to peak. I had to beat that stuff like I was Bob Dole back in the day (pre blue pill). After a very long time, I just gave up and added it all together, baked it, pulled it out abut two minutes later than I should (I cooked the center), and set it aside to cool under an air conditioner as I got the icing together. I also realized that the lunch cook had knocked over my cup of frosting in the refrigerator, but I was in good spirits at that time and whipped another batch together. The payoff to another batch was that I had to pull out the bottle of rum, and it being 2:30pm by that time, well, I did have to indulge in a little bit of cane goodness.










Mixed in with getting the cake ready I was prepping my sourdough. At 10:30am I set three portions of starter to do their final refreshing before making dough. When the time was right (3pm I think) I added more flour and water to get the bulk fermentation going, and then went back to the cake. It had cooled enough to put it in the refrigerator to get nice a cold, so I could do a quality frosting/icing job. I sketched a few possibilities, then came up with the design I wanted to make on the cake. Simple, not elaborate, and achievable for my first time decorating a cake. Everything was turning out grand. All I needed was pastry bag to squeeze the icing out of, which of course I did not have. No bag like objects, anywhere. The only similar items were fat to precious to use (HA! Big albino kid just hosed little albino kid and now he looks like he’s pouting. Damn, those kids need hats, and capes. Capes might protect them from the UVs). Eventually, I settled on some plastic wrap which I could easily make into a bag.


The time eventually came when I was to knead the dough. I added salt to retard the fermentation and starting banging away on it, pulling it, jabbing it, and just beating the crap out of it. It was a lot of fun. Milkfat, the token gay guy here, was in the kitchen too making dinner, and I co-opted him into helping. I think he enjoyed it, but I think he might have some S&M fetishes he was interested in playing out. Regardless, I was happy to have his assistance. He could really bang that dough hard. The dough was kneaded; bannetons were built out of cardboard boxes, my sarong, and toothpicks. In went the dough.

I went back to the birthday cake – it was time to decorate. I slathered on some dark chocolate frosting, smoothed it out nicely, but the ambient temperature was already causing it to droop off the sides. Then came the fancy decorating: the text and the diagonal lines, using the icing from my plastic wrap pastry bags.

Plastic wrap does not make a good pastry bag. My first gentle squeeze caused the bag to rip wide open. The plastic wrap just wasn’t going to work. Not having anything better, I used the one plastic bag in the entire place, which was dirty and had been containing carrots. Knowing that people who pick produce also tend to crap in the fields (seriously, you would too), I turned the bag inside out so any dysentery tainted poop on the carrots would not get on my icing and make it ugly. Besides, plastic bags are used to keep the dirt that is on your produce form getting on other things, right? Therefore, the outside of the bag was the cleanest! In went the frosting, I twisted it shut, cut off a small corner, and gently squeezed again. And again it ripped, some, but a 1” wide channel was better than nothing. Any of the fancy work was out the window, so I did it up quick.

I was already a few minutes late to Milkfat’s going away dinner and party, so I got my cake and ran home (where I knew Hil was). Sliced up two pieces, took it up stairs, and gave her some cake. Ate some more after the party, and then some for breakfast too. It was really good, even if there were Crisco chunks in the frosting.

The next afternoon it was time to bake my bread. It hadn’t risen much the night before, and the outside had a sort of shell on it. I’d been reading about brick and masonry ovens recently, so I wanted to try to replicate the effects of it. A lot of folks online recommend using a pizza stone or some masonry tile in your oven to replicate the irradiating effects of a stone oven. The best I had were some cinder blocks outside. This was probably not my best solution to a minor issue. No, it was not. It was definitely not after I decided to add two very heavy cinder blocks to the bottom of the oven. If anyone tried to disprove me on this, I’m sorry, but you are an idiot.

After warming up the oven to the highest temperature possible (maybe 350?), I put my three pretty loaves of bread in. Oh, how excited I was at that point! They were in the oven for about 20 minutes. I was in the other room watching a terrible, terrible movie. Then there was a loud crash involving metal and a heavy thud. I just about ignored it, but Hil jumped up knowing better.

Yes, I dropped cinder blocks through the bottom of the oven. Two cinder blocks, and they were very heavy. In the fall, the burner became dislodged, and the flame went out. My bread was fine though, which I was happy to see. Using the two crappy hot pads in the kitchen, I carried the 45+ pound cinder blocks outside, in a running fashion because they were very hot, and threw them onto the grass. This was after it took 10 minutes to extract them from the very hot oven. I pulled out the bottom of the oven, which was now bent, and moved it aside, then knocked the burner around so it looked the way it should. I tested it, and it lit again. Thinking that was good enough, I man handled the oven bottom back into place and put the bread back in for another 20 minutes.

20 minutes turned into about an hour. When I finally pulled them out, they looked really weird. The crust was a grayish green. I figured it was from the flour I dusted the tops with, and that had just burnt. No big deal, I could wipe it off later. They hadn’t raised much, but everything seemed to be good.

Hilary then put some cookies in the oven. When those were done, she pulled them out and mentioned that something was wrong because her cookies were ugly. It looked like soot to me, from my burnt flour. We did some more thinking about it, some research on the internet, and then came to the conclusion that I had broken the oven. The oven flames were a nice yellow/orange, and tall. If your oven flames are this color, you will die from carbon monoxide poisoning.

Back into the stove I went, to try to tinker it back into working. Turns out that the whole thing was jury rigged together in the first place with a wood screw, and works about the same as a carb on one of those weed-smoking pipes. It is just a little harder to move around a burning piece of metal to establish the right color and height of the flames. After maybe an hour or so, I declared it fixed. I was also covered in black soot.

Don’t do something stupid and put cinder blocks in your oven. That is a stupid, stupid idea.

My bread however, looked like ugly bread. Using the bread knife, one of the best knives in the kitchen, it took about 45 seconds to cut through the crust. This was primarily the knife’s fault. The inside looked good, but my bread had not risen. I could still see the folds from the final shaping, and there weren’t any air spaces. It tasted like bread. It was also weighed about 6 pounds per loaf.

I took pictures of them, and then threw them away. I am not yet completely raw. But here's a picture of the albino kids. Enjoy it.

Kerosene is a good way to start a fire. We’ve got a big jerry can, about ten gallons worth, that sits five feet from the grill. There isn’t a pour spout, just a big, fat opening, maybe 2.5 inches, covered with a loose fitting cap. It’s some old, awfully yellowed plastic, with a lot of junk and gunk on the inside.

The grill usually sits right in front of our common house, where the kitchen is. There’s also the foosball table, pool table (crappiest one I’ve ever seen), poker room, dining room, TV room…that sort of crap. Once you walk off the street, and through the gate, right next to the guard shed and mumble something like “choni bashi” or “zor spaz”, you’ve got to dodge some t-wall (blast walls, big thick concrete things that look a bit like an inartistic segment of the Berlin Wall), and then you’re on the front patio. There isn’t a back patio, or back door even. There’s a patch of grass, a fine luxury here, which is occasionally used to barbecue on, a blue water hose that’s been left out, and a plastic bag of “crap bread”. That bag of bread is always there, but it’s always different. I know someone eats the stuff, but I’ve never seen the culprit – it’s always tied up, sitting there on one of the blast walls. Step on the house, cross the patio, and you’re at the front door, which is usually left open regardless of the 100 degree heat in the shade of the house. There’s screen door too, and I hope someone rips it off of it’s hinges. Like every hinged object here, it slams. I’m not talking about a bang sort of slam, but straight up Jimmy Supafly Snuka slammin’. Someone put a piece of foam on the door frame to quiet it down, except the idiot put it on with a thick piece of wire, bent into the shape of the door frame. The result? The door slams even louder as you walk into the kitchen. Back outside, about five feet to the right of the door, is the grill, standing pressed against the wall of the house, right in front of the window that looks into the kitchen. Crap grill. The fire tray is warped, and there is no grilling surface. What we have for a grilling surface are these flimsy metal trays, the like which you’d use to grill a fish over an open flame. They might work great on an open flame, but for the grill we have, you can only open the up and rest them on the top of the grill itself…giving you about 2” between the coals and the food you are trying not to burn.

That open distance of 2” from the coals is after you burn the heck out of the charcoal that sits in a woven plastic bag underneath the grill. You reach in, pull out a piece, and it gets suck on no less than three fibers from the bag so you have to shake it loose. Shaking it loose causes all sorts of charcoal dust and pieces to fall all over your feet. Once you get enough charcoal up on the fire tray, the coals peep up above the frame (where you’d like to put your food), but about 1.5”. That’s if you spread the charcoal out flat and don’t heap it up.

The great thing about kerosene is that you don’t have to heap up the charcoal. What you’ve got to do is grab the ash shovel from someplace in the yard (I imagine it was used earlier in the day to scoop up some cat shit and throw it over the wall, because it’s the perfect size for that sort of thing), and bring it over to the kerosene can. Take off the top, and pour as much as you can into the shovel. Put the lid back on the can (to be safe), and transfer the shovel of kerosene to the grill, pour over the charcoal, get another shovel load, pour it over, and then a light that puppy up. Once the black cloud blows past the wall and the guards start looking in to see what the hell is going on, you’ve got a good fire going. But sometimes that doesn’t work so smoothly, because you might have to use another shovel load of kerosene for good measure. And you might accidentally not pour all of the kerosene onto the charcoal that you want to burn. You might accidentally instead pour some down the side of the grill and all over the plastic bag which contains the charcoal you do not want to burn. This might happen because you poured kerosene from a shovel onto some burning coals and that burning stuff called fire began to burn the kerosene that was pouring from the shovel. Once it does that, you might accidentally let it burn the kerosene in the shovel as you sort of look at it going “aw crap, now what?” But then you might accidentally make the stupid decision of hastily pouring the burning kerosene in the wrong place. If you do that, make sure that any water hose you find on the patio that might assist you in putting out the flame that is burning stuff which you don’t want to burn, well…just make sure that hose has a source of water on one end or it won’t do you any good. You might have to depend on using a small cup from inside the house, taking multiple trips back and forth from the faucet which is on the other side of the kitchen, before you give up and decide to try to put out the accidental fire with your sandal clad foot.

At the end of all of that, you might result in a big heap of charcoal sitting under your grill, which you used to have some charcoal in a plastic bag that kept it from being a big mess. Oh well.

But what is the final result? Beef tenderloin, done up all nice and red on the inside, with some specks char on the outside. Still mighty tasty.

That was Monday.

Tuesday, I decided I like cooking eggs. I dig on poaching eggs for egg benedict. I enjoy knowing that a refrigerated egg can go into a small soup pot with a certain amount of water in it, to a perfectly done hard boiled egg, with no hint of green oxidization on the exterior of the yolk, in the hint of a boil and 13 minutes of a simmer. I also take pleasure in an omelet. Two eggs, a pinch of salt and another of pepper, a glug of water, and a few proper shakes of the pan. It’s easy, it’s simple, and it’s unmolested food. Don’t bring your “what, no milk?” complaints to this vato because I’ll spank you with a spatula like Dennis Rodman probably does to people in some imaginary kitchen where Dennis Rodman might cook.

That was Tuesday.

Today, the mighty Wednesday (equal to your Thursdays), was another chicken-fest. This time Hilary did up the chickens as she wishes for me not to get the itch I’ve been getting lately. Worked out nice. Onions and garlic up in the cavity, salt and pepper all over, with some potatoes and carrots strewn about to keep court with the meat. Baked some spiced apples alongside, and everyone liked it. I especially liked the apples, more so pre-baked, because after that they got sort of soupy. I think part of my appreciation of the pre-baked apples was that I can’t remember the last time I bad brown sugar, and I liked the taste of that stuff.

Tomorrow, I’m not cooking. The big gay guy we like to refer to as “Milk Fat” wants to do something with various species of birds. Fine by me, because I got Hilary’s birthday present to take care of and some bread baking to do. My sourdough starter is still looking good, and I’ve grown attached to the little baby I carry everywhere with me. Got to protect it from any air conditioners that might go out with the power. The good side about carrying around the starter and refreshing it for the past week is that I have a lot of it. I’m going to have bread coming out of my wazoo!

Going to give a loaf as a present tomorrow too. Not to Hilary, but we’re having a little party as some folks are leaving in a few days. Leaving for good. And we’ve been requested to bring a $10 item as a present. White elephant style I guess. Milk Fat did bill the thing as a “Gay Party.” I suggest to all of you that you be careful this holiday season. You know, if you don’t want to be into that sort of thing. No more complaining about getting that picture frame you really didn’t want, because there’s always that other gift you could get. What? You didn’t know white elephant parties were synonymous with gay orgies? You’re crazy!

And now, I leave you with some kitchen pictures from the last few days:











My beautiful sourdough starter..

















I asked for beef tenderloin, or what the locals call "beef rope" and I got some, and some other stuff..










And I made this with it. Lena, as mentioned in the menu, is a vegetarian. She really likes my chicken, and I believe has enjoyed my goat as well. They just crumble when I bring the meat. Vegan, vegetarian, it don't matter because they know what they really want to eat..










I decided to pull out the precious stash of frozen bacon, cut it by hand, and ate it. The local staff kept coming in asking what smelled so good all up and down the street. That was pig.










I ask for "Feta Cheese." We discuss the cheese being made from sheep or goat, looking rough, white, and having a stink. He calls it "farmers' cheese"...more commonly known as "Falcon"..











Eggs.

Yesterday was Hilary and I’s one year anniversary, which we spent on our roof enjoying a quiet dinner to ourselves. Quiet if you discount the clank and hum of the generators and howling cats, the occasional heavily armed South African sneaking a peak, or the beeping of the UPS’s as the power went out and back on and back out again.

It was a very nice surprise on her part. After cooking dinner (Penang curry with chicken and mixed vegetables with sides of Thai fried chicken and steam rice) she wrapped up two plates and told me to go put on something nice because we were going on a date. Um, dates aren’t usually given security clearance in Iraq, and there’s not really anywhere to go. But I played along, thinking that we’d just “go out” and watch a movie in our house. Heck, that was a good enough date a year ago (well, then we really did go to a movie theater).

Back in October the guys at VVAF suggested I take a suit with me to Pakistan in case I ended up going out to dinner with some big wig like a diplomat or David Bowie (one always needs to look good when David Bowie arrives). I brought my suit but haven’t had the occasion to wear it and was lately wishing I hadn’t brought it. To make a long story short, I dappered myself up with my suit, despite it still being a good 95 degrees outside, because we were going to go someplace with some fine ass food. Of course, it was my food, and luckily I didn’t have to tip anyone for the service of removing the plastic wrap.

Once dressed, I was surprised to be ushered up to the roof where Hil had set out a patio table and chairs, with a bed sheet as a table cloth. Two candles, an iPod with speakers, a bottle of wine (a gift from our housemate), our plates of food, and something wrapped up with a ribbon and bow. I made do with a place to put my suit jacket, and got down to the good evening. And a good evening it was, complete with brownies and milk for dessert.

Afterwards I was able to open the box. It was Hil’s engagement present to me: a fancy watch! It’s a badass watch, all elegant and with a laser beam feature hidden somewhere in it that I haven't found yet. It’s the kind of watch that a dude might get jacked for in the LBC, but right now, that won’t happen. Not because I’m not in the LBC, but because we have to find someplace to have a few links taken out. Therefore, It hangs down real low on my wrist (er, hand), in the style of a thug’s watch. A thug watch style is loose, just like that, because said watch has just been pilfered from a display case, no money down. Right now, my watch says “don’t step.” You don't mess with a dude with a thug watch, even if he is wearing sandles instead of Hi-Tecs or BKs.

I still haven’t given Hil her engagement present (that whole ring thing). I tried a twenty dollar bill the night I proposed and it didn’t work so well. It’s sort of difficult to try to get a ring to this part of the world. I don’t want to trust it to FedEx, and I think they have an anti-jewelry clause. The biggest problem is that since January I haven’t known where I’ll be in the next month because of silly contract stuff. Once all that seemed to have been sorted out and I was going to be in Iraq for a year, we got the surprise of that contract not going through. Unfortunately with it taking a minimum of a month for mail to get here from the US; it would have been cutting it close to have shipped a ring since we’re headed to Amman in less than a month. I guess Hil’s contented as long as I keep cooking and work out with her on occasion. Maybe she’ll get it if we go back to the states for a little while after this contract.

It was interesting sitting up there on the roof. Roofs are always refreshing despite their being over our heads all the time. You don’t really go anywhere to get to a roof, but when you’re there it always seems isolated from any other place in your life. Maybe the feeling comes from sneaking onto the roof when I was a kid, or maybe it’s the remnants of some sort of chimpanzee inclination to climb to the top of a tree and stick your rosebud butt out for the world to see. I don’t know, but I like roofs. No one else around, nothing overhead except for a few stars, and in the case of last night, someone out in the lights below was a car loaded with explosives.

That car thing has been interesting. For three days now we’ve been in lockdown. At first it was a car in Erbil, but the new reports are “a car in our neighborhood with explosives.” By “our neighborhood” I mean a fairly large part of town, I just can’t say what neighborhood because that might give it all away and my bootie might get singed and burnt. But the neighborhood we live and work in large, and has many, many more dense, high-profile, and high-value targets than us. While we’ve been given the impression that the threat isn’t substantiated, it is still a threat so we have to take precautions. I did fell strange walking down the street after work yesterday, going to the kitchen to cook, and wondering…”there’s a car in our neighborhood.” Well shit, there are a lot of cars in our neighborhood. I can see four right now. It’s not exactly a paranoid feeling, but more in a way of surreal. Maybe how some people in the suburbs of DC felt back in the sniper days of ’03, with all the white vans?

It would be pretty sweet to see a car tearing down the road and our 60 guards (with 40 guns) unlead their guardliness upon it: Pesh Merga style. Car getting punched with holes, hub caps flying off, window and watermelon like thing getting shattered. Car does a hard veer to the left, hits a wall then banks harder to the right, hits a pile of rubble and launches up 20 feet in the air, final hub cap flies off, bounces thrice on the asphalt below, and then the bullets tear into the gas tank, stream of petrol tailing behind the flying car, bullets bouncing everywhere, and then it speaks...WHAM! Car blows up, burning chassis lands on a trask heap and everyone starts dancing, pulling out beers, Van Halen music starts up in the background and bikini clad women start roasting marshmellows over the car as a single hand, hanging out what's left of the window, stops its convulsing and then falls off, severed to the dirt below.

That would be sweet.

Because of all this, I still can’t go shopping for kitchen supplies. Since I can’t go shopping, I can’t fulfill my plans for anniversary things, Hil’s birthday things (later this week), buy some knives that will cut, a blender, baking flour, or a whole host of things.

Instead, I just get to go about making my list and giving it to someone and wondering why I got certain things. Yesterday for example: two bottles of lemon juice. I thought about it for two hours, and then discovered that what I had asked for was “fish sauce.” Pretty close. It was a step below the canned pineapple, when I made a great point of requesting fresh pineapple. I even drew a sweet picture for the guy, and I know that pineapple is easy to get here. Oh well.

Update on the sourdough starter: the first 24 hours I had doubts because nothing seemed to be happening. But now, the bowl of fermentation that’s on my desk is making me cough! My sourdough is going to be straight bubonic! If I have enough flour, I’ll try my first loaf this afternoon. When I refreshed it this morning it had to skim all sorts of white goopy stuff off the top. It’s making me proud.

I’ll go make today’s list now.

Shopping didn’t quite work out today, might get to go tomorrow. Instead of whatever idea I had, something with chicken or beef tenderloin or an English pie, I made chili. I was able to send someone out for a few things, and the ingredients got back around 4:30pm. And oh boy, was I glad to see some unfrozen ground beef in a plastic bag as soon as I walked into the kitchen. That's it, front and center in the white, nice and room temparature.

The milk I requested was waiting for me in the coolness of the fridge.

In Iraq, there are two types of peppers. First, you have these jalapeño looking things. They are long, slender, and pale green, with a little bit of spice and the taste of a jalapeño. We call them “jalapeños.” Locals call these “hot peppers”. We also have miniature bell peppers, or “sweet peppers.” Oh, and we have ground black pepper. This is all, and therefore, chili is a challenge.

I started out by picking through and washing the tomatoes. Today was a bad worm day, and I had to toss three or four. In the past I usually just chopped my tomatoes, but today I wanted something different, something more playful in the mouth: I randomly cut. This method works really well with my dull, 82 degree beveled knives. If the knife can’t cut the skin, who cares! Just cut the next tomato, and if it cuts it in half, maybe it can cut it into quarters! After going through about 18 tomatoes, I followed up with 8 petite onions (I got about 10 kg of ridiculously small onions last week), chopped all nice and pretty. Diced some jalapeños, and then chopped some sweet peppers. Got my trusty skillet with one handle that wobbles like a coed who has been hitting the Southern Comfort, and another handle that is ready to break apart any day now. Added canola oil (I’ve tried to replenish the olive oil supply for two weeks now), lowest possible flame setting (medium-high), and went to town. First was the ground beef, 1.5 kg or so, cooked until a chunk or two turned brown. Set that aside, and kept the beef juice in the skillet, then came the onions, ground coriander, chicken stock, jalapeños, paprika, pressed garlic, dry oregano, cumin, chili powder, and some red stuff in a spice container. I can’t tell what it is, but I decided to put it in – it’s chili after all! Got everything looking nice and wet, transferred to a stock pot, added tomatoes and more of the herbs and spices. Cooked for a long while, covered.

In the meantime, I lubed up some whole jalapeños and sweet peppers with tasty canola, and tossed them in the oven to roast. Got the cutting board clean (we only have two very small ones) and started on the biscuits. I tried to make biscuits once before, and I spent too much time combining the butter and kneading. My previous biscuits were dense lumps of floury crap. Oh, how I longed to do better this time. Since I still had no margarine, despite asking for it daily for three weeks, I was forced to use the precious Butter-Flavored Crisco. This Crisco is indeed a special commodity here, and had to be shipped from Amman, Jordan.

Take a moment and let that sink in. This is where I cook, supposedly the hearth of our civilization. Life is so great here, that instead of butter, nay! Instead of margarine, NAY! Instead of lard, I have to stoop to Butter-Flavored Crisco AND it has to be tracked down in another country. I can’t even get the plain Crisco blue container. Iron Chef Hiroyuki Sakai…blow me.

Ahem. I was quite careful in adding the Butter-Flavored Crisco in tiny little amounts, cut it in so carefully with two knives, and then kneaded it as little as possible, only so that all the flour was picked up by the milk. Pat and spread it about ¾ of an inch thick, and punched circles out with a plastic cup. Oh, it was looking good and I was singing “Cuz now I got the world swinging from my nutz” in my head. It was perfect, had just the right amount of room on the baking sheet as I needed for biscuits too. Dabbed a little Butter-Flavored Criso up top of my boys to give them that tasty, shalac, and then they went to the oven. I’d removed the peppers some time before, so that the air could get itself ready for a baking fiesta.

Back to the stovetop with the chili. In went the ground beef, and three cans of kidney beans that had been simmering on the stove. I nearly killed myself trying to open those cans too. Next time I won’t even attempt the can opener, and will just get one of the broken cinder blocks from out in the street and smash the bastard open. I’ll sift out the pieces of rock, I don’t care. Hmmm, maybe one of the guards could shoot the cans open for me. I’ll try that one before the cinder block. Point blank would probably rip the whole thing apart and I’d loose my beans, but maybe a distance of 10 feet would do it up right? Anyone know what a cheap Iraqi knock-off of a Turkish knock-off of a Chinese knock-off of a Yugoslav knock-off of a Russian AV-47, shooting cheap bullets, will do to a typical tin can full of beans at a variety of distances? Maybe 0’, 10’, 20’, and 30’? 40’ might be a littler far since it is a residential neighborhood. Serious question. This ain’t America I’m cooking in – we can do this sort of thing.

I retouched the herbs and spices, and added a wee amount of cocoa, sugar, molasses, a bottle of green Tabasco, a bottle of red tobasco, the roasted peppers (Iraqi roasted peppers produce about 1/8 of a teaspoon of worthwhile pepper meat), and four more pressed cloves of garlic. Let it cooks a little longer. I was trying to simmer it, but all I could get was a rolling boil.

I extracted my biscuits from the oven, and the little bastards didn’t rise more than 1/8 of an inch! I don’t know what it was, if my baking powder was actually talcum powder, or I needed more flour. Whatever it was, I was sad. The little buggers still had a good taste, and were this imaginary sort of flaky, but maybe next time they’ll work out.

The chili was good. Next time I’ll add red wine to it. Or beer, or perhaps some Jack Daniels. That way, I’ll feel like a champ when I spoon my bowl of chili. What else am I supposed to do with what’s left in the bottle?

Oh, and maybe someone can suggest something for me. I've been cooking a lot of chicken these days, which I like, and so do other people. But as I'm prepping the chickens, and especially after fisting them to flavor the inside of the carcass, I develop a mean itch in my hands (or whatever I've touched the chicken with). And I mean a mean itch. I need some sort of cooking glove. Latex might work, but I'd be damned if I can find latex anything in this country. I am thinking about the future with this, and I'd like a solution I could use down the road if I can survive the itch here, and maybe pick up someplace else like Amman, Dubai or Mogadishu. Latex might work, but do you think that might leave a nasty latex taste on the meat? I know you know what I'm talking about, and no one wants that flavor on their chicken. But what about some other material? I know they have chain-link Michael Jackson gloves for butchers, and Spectra gloves for fisherman, but what about for us allergy prone chumps who don't want to look like child petters and who just want to make a chicken and not get itchy from it? Anyone have this problem??

Back in high school I never got to carry a sack of flour around and pretend it was my baby. No formal education on how to put on a diaper (all I got was a crash course by a 5 year old as another kid lay on the bathroom floor looking poopy). Thankfully, my new sourdough starter baby doesn’t have BM’s. It is supposed to get “black” and “scummy”, but that hasn’t happened yet. Last week I had a few failed attempts to make a starter. Either there was no cloth to cover the dish with, or the dish got thrown away. No more of that. I now have one of the few precious plastic bowls from the kitchen, with a nice smooth, 1:1 concoction of water and flour inside, covered with my sarong. Hygienic or not, I don’t care. I bought that sarong at the last Hog Farm Festival in Laytonville, CA. The sarong has been a lot of things and been a whole lot of places. At least I washed it sometime ago, because now I’m making bread with it. In two days, I’m hoping to have a nice starter, from which I’ll make my bread and let it sit in the sarong for a little while before baking.

I don’t have any fancy flour. I have no idea how strong the gluten will be, what the vitamin C content is, or any of that. It came out of some paper bag. Someone said it was flour and it looked like flour. It’s very possible that this bread thing won’t work, and we won’t be able to have French toast, some awesome sandwiches, or croutons. Or whatever else one can do with bread. I was reading someplace that you shouldn’t try making a bread that is different than what the local bread is. Local bread is that way because the flour and environment can only make that type of bread. To hell with that. The local bread is crap and I don’t want to make or eat crap bread.

On a side note…since working in Pakistan and Iraq, I’ve seen a lot of business cards and resumes with email addresses on it. I’ve been surprised at how many of those email addresses end in “69”. For example, “Iraqi_Champ_69”. Does the number have a different significance around here? It’s not like I see “SuperPakistani70” or “BigButmash68” on resumes. Seriously, I think when I get back to the states I am going to have a new email address for job hunting: “Phat69.” It’ll prove that I am a diverse individual. People will immediately recognize my solidarity with my Middle Eastern and South Asian brothers.

Crap. I still need to figure out what I’m cooking tonight.

Maybe some braised eggplant, pasta with a Bolognese sauce, and garlic bread. That’ll require shopping though, which might not be allowed. There was a security report of a car packed with explosives driving around Erbil yesterday. We were locked down because of it. But we’re more or less locked down everyday. Hopefully I can go shopping. I need flour, olive oil, canned oysters, and to get out.

I haven't cooked much this week. All I have to report is that my bowels are not doing well. No, not good at all. I might have jarassciatis or something.

Other things of minor note..

It seems that we've been banned from buying fresh chicken. Bird flu. Some butcher sells it on the black market sometimes, but we still can't buy that. The Kurdish Gov'ment has issued a decree banning sales. I don't get it. The morning cook gets fresh chicken, why can't I? Why must be given frozen chicken at 4:00pm? I want my chicken fresh damn it.

Kurds only eat tomato paste. No tomato sauce. No fire-roasted diced tomatoes in juice. Only paste.

Hil made fried rice.

Chief of Party made something on Sunday. Couscous.

Another guy is making masguff tonight. Masguff is fish. Cooked by the fire.

Oh the misery..

There were some other themes I thought of using:
Get Used To It
Tastes Real Good When Bought With an Unemployment Check

So yeah…grilled cheese sandwiches made with naan. I wasn’t trying for some ethnic fusion dish. I’d just asked for “sliced bread” and that’s what was there when I got to the kitchen. It worked though, but it sure wasn’t the buttery goodness I was expecting.

Might help next time if I had butter.

The tomato soup was tasty, even if the blender went dead a third of the way through the process. As I was blending up tomatoes, on the last batch the blender refused to start. Piece of crap just died on me. The motor spins, but the power isn’t transmitted past the differential, thus the blades just sit there and do nothing. Do blenders even have a differential? There was another blender I found in the cabinets, but that didn’t work either. I hoped that the simmering would mush stuff up enough that I wouldn’t need to blend the soup at the end (if I had a blender that worked). But no such luck: the onions held their own, and so did a fair amount of tomato meat. It still had a mighty fine taste though, with enough leftover for tomorrow if someone is so inclined to eat it.

Now, for those of you so inclined, look at that pot. One might think that this pot is “tough” but I’ll tell you something: it is not. It is just a crappy pot. One handle, chipped paint, some non-stick coating that probably never even worked and is now flaking off into my grub. What the picture doesn’t show you is that the remaining handle…grasping that is like a limp-wristed handshake. 14 pounds in a limp-wristed pot makes no ones day.

What has the day taught me? I need to learn how to make bread. Not only did the sliced bread vs. naan incident bring this to light, but so did my reading of yesterday's Achewood. "A dude who can walk into any kitchen in the world and make bread is COMPLETELY RAW."

Raw being an agreeable thing. Thus, I need to learn this thing called bread.