beets can be tasty after all

If you are like me, and pretty much everyone else in my family, you are not really a beet person.

The secrets of beets, however, are two, and I learned them both in Morocco: first is its incredible color. Its juice is more raspberry than raspberries. It’s stunning.

The second is that you can puree beets with a little sugar and orange juice and produce a beautiful tasty nutritious smoothie drink in the middle of winter, when there are no strawberries to be found…

see how pretty? i mean it practically radiates beauty.

around the muslim world, 3rd ed.

A few links of interest:

1. An Egyptian praising Israel’s Mossad (their intelligence agency)? Yep, it happened, and it’s of no little significance that it was over Iran. It’s easy to lump all Muslim anti-Israel sentiments into the same category, but that’s not exactly the case. It’s true that Iran is linked to mostly-Arab groups like Hamas and Hizbollah, but a great many Arab governments (both secular ones like Egypt and Iraq and religious ones like Saudi Arabia) are as worried as Israel is about the prospect of a nuclear Iran. Read about it here.

2. What constitutes discrimination? According to one French mayor, a restaurant chain selling only halal meat (that is, meat slaughtered in accordance with Islamic dietary laws – the Muslim version of kosher) fits the bill. It seems to me more like a matter of market forces at work but watch this report and decide for yourself.

3. What is halal anyway? Technically it means “lawful” or permitted (the opposite of “haram,” or “forbidden.”), so it applies to actions and behaviors, not just food. In terms of meat, though, it means, among other things, no pork and no carrion and no blood. Halal meat should be slaughtered by a Muslim (though some Muslims accept meat slaughtered by Christians or Jews, like kosher meat) by cutting the animal’s throat swiftly while keeping the spinal cord intact. This ensures as much blood as possible exit the body before death.

There have been debates over whether this is a more humane way to kill animals, as Muslims have long claimed, which brings me to this study, conducted when the German government was trying to establish standards for animal slaughter. It compares brain activity in sheep and calves during halal-style, ritual slaughter and the more common “captive bolt stunning,” a common practice in today’s industrial style meat production.

bizarre, comic, and devastating: a list of american quirks

One of the delights of readjusting to American culture is being reminded of those things that could only happen in the United States. Someone wise once said that tragedy plus time equals comedy, and I think the same must be true when it comes to physical and cultural (not just temporal) distance.

Many of the American quirks below are, in a way, profoundly disturbing. But speaking as an American returning from abroad to splash-land in the middle of them, I think they’re also kind of hysterical. A list of my favorite rediscovered cultural anomalies:

1. The Filibuster. Can we start with how the name means “pirate”? This is a procedural element of our highest body of lawmakers, a body named after an ancient Roman institution boasting the most august and noble statesmen in Western history. Of course our version would have pirates.

2. What Not To Wear. What I find remarkable is not that such a show exists, but that it exists on The Learning Channel. Question: What is more American than the transformational makeover? Answer: the transformational makeover within the context of the most liberally defined and market-driven conceptualization of “learning” ever conceived by man.

3. The Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways. The sensational name alone should be enough to convince you that this is the greatest system in the world, and my love for it is dimmed only by the notion that the iron grip it holds on our hearts, minds, and logistics will probably render our rail system inferior to pretty much all of the other countries forever.

4. The Westminster Dog Show. Well, really, just dog shows in general. The Times had a recent article about the lengths dog owners go to to help their purebred dogs bring home the blue ribbon. What gets me is not that there are folks in this country that have an extra million dollars to throw hither or yon, it’s that they’d prefer to spend it on a dog than, say, a modest yacht.

5. Cable News. The fact that I’d consider watching The Daily Show for news and Fox News or CNN for entertainment (granted, it’s a particularly masochistic, self-destructive type of entertainment…but you have to admit it’s a bit like a terrible spectacle you can’t tear your eyes away from) has an element of tragicomic, epic irony to it. It’s as if the whole country has twisted itself into some kind of cosmic Opposite Day.

[Remember Opposite Day?]

i take you an orange

i take you an orange

This photo reminded me of a beautiful poem by Syrian poet Huda Naamani. Here it is, as translated from the Arabic by the poet and Miriam Cooke:

I take you an orange and I squeeze you holding you to my face
Spring you blossom in my eyes
A peacock’s tail you gaze at me in the dark
I wear you gipsy garb I fold you a nomad’s cloak
A flute grass and warmth of sheep flow with you
In the arms of mountains you paint the wreaths of heaven
And the pains of a goddess

A frame for me I carve you I gild you and
I fill you with roses
A fish I slaughter you, or a sun
I bake you
A star
Lightning flashes from your ring
Your eyes hang on my face coffee grounds honeycombs
Nigerian songs brush my neck, flocks of geese
Your word is suspended on the back of a door a duck’s nose

[From Opening the Gates: A Century of Arab Feminist Writing. Edited by Margot Badran and Miriam Cooke, Indiana University Press. ]

I particularly love the line “A peacock’s tail you gaze at me in the dark,” which, in a reversal from the poem’s first few images, makes the speaker of the poem into an object even as she is describing – in a way, objectifying – the addressee. Anyone who’s witnessed a peacock try to get the attention of a bunch of nonplussed peahens (hilarious) can appreciate how the poet, an Arab woman, is playing on courtship rituals and gender dynamics…one wonders if the (literal/figurative) eyes in the tail of a peacock aren’t always a bit “in the dark.”

The manipulations of agency are intriguing, but most of all it’s the images that I find stunning as I read and reread this particular poem. I love especially arms of mountains, honeycombs, a duck’s nose…

photo essay from baltimore

mountains in the streets!

over a snowy stile and stepping at strange angles, we walked

round a corner; left at a lamppost another world awaits.

bathing itself in winter light, snow draws the glance across

as much as into it, leading feet to wade through winter white, immediate and wet,

and trudge back through icy canyons stacked astride the walk

cook a chicken, read the times

Here are some directions for how to cook a whole chicken, Moroccan style. Believe it or not, it will take a lot of time but it also won’t keep you busy. And in the end your house will smell divine and the chicken will simply melt in your mouth. It takes a long time to cook from start to finish, but leaves you healthy spans of time in between adjustments to browse the paper, prepare another dish, make a phone call, or simply stand there wafting the heavenly smell of the thing towards your nose. Like living and cooking in Morocco in general, this method has a kind of even-tempered and measured deliberateness to it that I love.

I made this recipe a few days ago, and by the time I’d gotten out my camera, we’d sort of gone to town on the chicken itself, so the photo below is actually the aftermath of the chicken rather than what it’ll look like when you finish cooking it…but hopefully it gives you an idea. There’s really nothing like the look of a whole chicken just sitting there with its legs and wings and everything.

simmered in a tagine: how chicken should be cooked, company enjoyed, life lived, etc.

around the muslim world…2nd ed.

A few links of interest…

1. In honor of New York’s Fashion Week, a very different fashion show: what Muslim designers showed in Malaysia last fall.

2. “Where do architectural wonders, coat hanger abortions, virtual slave labor, and a modern underground railroad meet?”

- or, there’s more to Dubai than meets the eye. Dubai has been hailed for economic growth, the newest wonders of the world, and even environmental innovation, but at what social cost? Austin Considine writes in Guernica about the often-hidden world of cheap labor that makes it all possible…in two parts, here and here.

3. More oil = less freedom…or does it? New research suggests that the “oil curse” commonly associated with petrol-rich, authoritarian nations (many of them Arab) might belong more in the category of convenient myth than actual fact.

See also: the 1st edition of this post

stormy weather

a reminder that sometimes the sun doesn't come out until the last possible moment...and that in the end, sometimes it's better that way

maroc-caponata

(this just in from the bad puns department)

So I was contemplating this bit of eggplant in our freezer, leftover from some dish I can’t even remember, and I had a hankering for this amazing eggplant dish I ate once in Morocco. Not having a recipe I cast around a few cookbooks and came up with the concoction below. It’s not quite a salad, and not quite the dish I was aiming for, but it’s still perfect for an appetizer or side dish. My mom likened it to a caponata.

hence the pun

what you should know about the muslim world, 1st ed.

For those of you who don’t know (and for most of you, well, why would you), Peace Corps has three goals: the first has to do with providing technical assistance to countries that request it. The second and third goals are more cross-cultural: helping people in other countries understand American culture, and helping Americans better understand the people and culture of other countries. The idea is that service extends far beyond my village; even after my 27 months abroad, I can continue sharing what I’ve learned. I’m always looking for new ways to fulfill that goal (including, of course, this blog).

One thought, for now at least, is to highlight interesting, clearly written articles, podcasts or essays about the Islamic world for the average American nonspecialist reader – and publish a list once a week or so. So much of the information out there about Islam and the Middle East is one-sided or full of jargon or overly complicated, and while I am definitely not capable of explaining it all or even understanding the subtleties of every bias, we have to start somewhere.

The point is for this to be interesting, informative, short, varied. If there is something you want to know more about, tell me and I’ll do my best to hunt it down! And please, if I post something that has a backstory or bias that I don’t know about, let me know so I can either provide better context or present an opposing view alongside it for balance.

add this to your file of little-known facts: behold the University of Al-Karaouine, the oldest university in the world, founded by a woman, located in the Arab city of Fes

The first three links, after the jump…