by James Kanady
Pissed Again
I always cooked for my wife, Julie. When she was killed in a car crash six years ago, all grand cooking stopped. What I ate—when I ate—consisted of cereal, canned soup and tuna, bananas and protein shakes. Grief did a number on my stomach: heartburn, acid reflux, bloating, and occasional bouts of diarrhea on top of headaches, insomnia and ennui.
In my second year of sorrow, I slowly began cooking again, Julie’s void hovering in the kitchen like an apparition. I cooked big meals, providing leftovers that I’d put in containers and deliver to people I knew like some culinary Johnny Appleseed. She was with me while cooking, and when I dropped off meals, it felt as if we were dropping off meals—forever linked.
A source of inspiration came from a segment on the “CBS Saturday Morning” program called “The Dish,” where they’d feature chefs and restaurants from all over the globe. But one segment changed my life. A London chef who grew up in Palestine, Sami Tamimi, showed recipe after recipe of amazing food I’d never heard of, along with stories of growing up in his homeland.
I was transfixed. Sami’s father, Hassan, would make him a breakfast of easy eggs with za’atar and lemon, hummus with seasoned meatballs (or eggplant) and a few others. Sami also spoke about the people he grew up with, their pain in the midst of so much violence.
I immediately got online and ordered the cookbook, titled “Falastin,” the Arabic word for Palestine. When it arrived, I immediately made a list of ingredients—za’atar, sumac, tahini, molokhieh—and started cooking. It was a revelation to my Great Plains-trained palate. Sami’s use of cinnamon, lemon and lemon zest is masterful. My zester wasn’t up to the job; it took me way too long to zest, and it drove me crazy. (Fortunately, a friend of mine, Jan, after hearing me complain, bequeathed me her own king of zesters: long, wide and sharp as hell.) Another constant of Sami’s: generous amounts of black pepper!
While learning and cooking, I read the wonderful profiles of the people of Palestine. The food and the people are inseparable: A group of yogurt-making ladies in Bethlehem; Battir, a little farming village in the west bank; Nablus, a key trading center with a plethora of delights; the Palestinian Seed Library started by an amazing woman named Vivien Sansour; The Tent of Nations farm southwest of Bethlehem that’s run by Daoud and Amal Nassar (her father bought the land in 1916). Despite years of oppression, they still believe in active hope and peaceful resistance. Stories of restaurant owners, fisherman, a female cook in a refugee camp, and so many other good people.
I carried their stories in my heart while prepping and cooking. By eating their food, I was ingesting their culture. When my friend Mac came for a visit from Colorado, I cooked a pulled lamb shawarma sandwich with spicy roasted new potatoes with lemon and herbs. I had Mac spread Sumac yogurt on warm pita bread with cherry tomatoes, red onion, parsley leaves, mint and Shatta (a wonderful hot sauce). Mac ate silently until: “Do you know how much you could charge for this meal in Vail?
I kept cooking, experimenting and introducing others to this amazing food. My daughter loved lemon chicken with za’atar, and everyone loved chicken meatballs with molokhieh, garlic and cilantro.
Then, on Oct. 7, 2023, Palestinian militants—especially Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, launched a brutal attack, killing 1,200 and taking 240 as hostages.
The Israelis’ response was massive. In just three weeks, 1.4 million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip were displaced and thousands killed. By January 2024, 23,000 were killed, and the devastation from the bombing was nightmarish.
The apex of madness was on April 1, when seven of Jose Andres’ aid workers for his World Central Kitchen were killed in an Israeli drone strike. Those people were there to help.
To help.
“This doesn’t seem a war against terror,” Andres said. “This doesn’t seem anymore a war about defending Israel. This really, at this point, seems it’s a war against humanity itself.”
My dad, Virgil, fought the Nazis in WWII and was present at the Gardelegen Massacre in 1945, where 1,016 prisoners of the Germans were forced into a barn and the gasoline-soaked straw lit with a match. He saw with his own eyes the Holocaust and understood why the people hungered for their own state, but he disagreed with the Zionists’ violent invasion and 700,000 Palestinians displaced.
When I learned about this in school, I asked him more questions.
“They should’ve given them West Texas; the land looks the same, and they wouldn’t had to fight anybody for it,” he said.
He’d shake his head when another Arab/Israeli conflict would be featured on Walter Cronkite.
“Jimmy, they gonna fight each other until the end of time,” he said.
Around 2004 I heard an interview with Israeli writer Amos Oz on NPR and was captivated. I immediately ordered his memoir, “A Tale of Love and Darkness,” devoured it, and heartily recommended it to any and all.
Oz started the Peace Now movement to champion the cause of a two-state solution. Some called him a traitor (which he considered a badge of honor). In 2018, after Oz’s death, Jonathan Freedland did a great essay about him in The Guardian:
“His great gift was to express complex moral ideas through compelling metaphor, even in his second language of English. He would argue that, after the Holocaust, the Jews were a drowning man: they therefore had the right to grab hold of a piece of driftwood, even if it meant forcing another man, the Palestinians, to share it. What they did not have was the right to grab the entire piece of wood and force the other man into the sea—which is what Israel had done in 1967. He would say that Jews and Palestinians both understood that a two-state solution was necessary, the problem lay with their leaders: ‘The patient is ready for the operation,’ he wrote. ‘But the surgeons are cowards.’”
For now, I’ll keep cooking these amazing Palestinian meals: spiced chicken arayes; baked kofta with eggplant and tomato; oxtail stew with chard, sumac and tahini; eggplant, chickpea and tomato bake; spicy roasted new potatoes with lemon and herbs; and so many more. While cooking, I feel a kinship with the men, women and children who are true victims of this tragedy. I pray for all of them.
I don’t know what else I can do.