I’m at home cooking and watching the news.  I’m dicing an onion and the tears are starting to sting my eyes.  The refugees are in Greece. Women children guards with machine guns, everyone looking disoriented, pleading.  They look like they’re running out of everything (food, water, goodwill, independence, family, home), they’re running for their lives.    I start to dice potatoes, courgettes and carrots and tomatoes a handful of parsley and kale into small pieces, and my mother’s voice starts to come into my head chiding me, you’re going too fast, don’t be stingy with your time, make the pieces as small as possible, it needs love.  The recipe hinges on each bite being comforting, easy, warm. It’s a soup.      

But at that time, what did I care what my mom had to say about the soup.  I was a teenager. I had bigger problems.  We’d just moved to LA from Lebanon, which had erupted into a lethal Civil War.  I had no friends, I didn’t speak English. I was trying to figure out if I could ever call this place home.  Or if I even wanted to. My first day of high school, there were pregnant girls, kids making out in the hallways tonguing each other, the bathrooms were full of marijuana smoke.  Where was I?

In Lebanon, we spent our summers in the mountains.  With creeks that had natural springs of ice-cold water; the pine trees all around, the mountains rising in the distance and the view of the beach from the balconies, the smells of mint, and people baking manaeesh* and bread.  We used to play cards with our cousins, and ride bikes.  I knew all the locals who’d stop me for a chat and to give me some candy.  Everyone knew who I was.  I was loved. I felt safe.

Cameljockey.  Now there’s a word.  I’d never seen a camel in my life.

Do you have oil in your backyard?  Ummm….no.

What State is Lebanon in? Well, it’s not in one of the 52 actually.  A state of war?

Are you from I-ran?  No.  But I did run.  I ran and ran.  

I’d never been on a plane before.  We flew out from Beirut Airport.  It was 5am, a dark eerie misty morning just before Christmas.  Today, actually.   We had to cross the City from the East to the West and there were snipers and checkpoints  everywhere.  We changed cars in each neighbourhood to make sure the person driving was from the ‘right’ religion when we were stopped at the checkpoints, our hearts pounding every time we were stopped.  We left with three suitcases between a family of six.  At that moment, that’s all that we amounted to.  

I get 1 knuckle of lamb off the bone out of the fridge.  I remove the fat and cut it into 1 inch squares.   On TV they’re talking about refugees and what to do with them.  And just who they will let in.  England will accept twenty thousand by 2020.   I imagine all of them in Lesbos in that purgatory, waiting for someone to give them charity to eat and drink, the charity to find a home.  I wonder if in Greece they have the word cameljockey.  

I take the lamb cubes and the bone and put them in a pressure cooker and cover with a litre and a half of water.  I bring to a boil on high heat and remove the scum as it appears.  After about 5 minutes I pour out the water, straining the meat which I put back in the pot with a fresh litre and a half of boiled water.  Next I add all the spices – bay leaves, cardamom, cinnamon stick, black peppercorn and salt – and bring to a boil, closing the pressure cooker, and cooking for 30 minutes.

I loved Beirut growing up.  If it wasn’t for the war, I would say my childhood was enchanted.  Truly blissful; full of family, laughter, carefree days and authentic and pure food.  We would look forward to the seasons, because every season brought something new.  In Fall my mother and aunts and neighbours would bring burlap sacks of raw olives and the kids would split them open with a hammer so that they could brine the olives and put them in jars to last the whole year.  Sometimes we’d make elaborate necklaces of the olive pips.  In Summer we’d pickle the grape leaves and cucumbers.  In the Spring was all fruit picking and preserving.  Apricot jam was my favourite on Arabic flatbread with butter.

It took many years, but in the end I did start to feel at home and at ease in LA.  I wasn’t so bewildered.   Being a refugee is disorienting.  Firstly, you look like one. They don’t get you. You don’t get them.  You don’t even know if someone says hello to you what it means; are they being friendly, are they being hostile, do they want something?  You can’t read people or situations. In those days, it felt like the walls and floors were shifting.  It was a nausea, a malady.  Frozen dinners, spaghettio, jack-in-box.   The worst part about it was that not even my mother and father, my figures of protection, could protect me. It felt like being an orphan, a four year old lost in a zoo, tears streaking my face.  Except in this case, so were my parents, lost at the zoo, and I hated to know them like that. Powerless. I hated to see us like that.

Shorbat Moozat was the dish my mother would make when things weren’t going well, either emotionally or healthwise.  It is something to make you feel cozy and looked after.  It took years but we all got the hang of LA.  We found our feet, and a new way to live.  We learned English, the weird became familiar; that is to say, I knew what was weird and what wasn’t.  We took a beating, and we came out differently.  Not what we were, and not what we were supposed to be – passports became technical.  

In the end, we were able to access two great places, the East and the West. It felt like after all of the struggle, we had a window into two cultures, and we became the bridge that connected them; that there is a way to combine the cultures, and make a beautiful thing.  A fusion. It’s not oil and water. It can work.  And it did.  I’m happy.  

But we were some of the lucky ones.

I pull out a quarter cup of black rice.  Black rice by the way was an LA revelation. I’d only ever known about white rice.  Black rice has a bigger bite, and if you boil it, it doesn’t disintegrate so it’s great for a soup.  There are all sorts of rice I would never have known about; black, red, brown, wild, risotto, paella.  And each variety can be used in my mother’s traditional dishes to make them more interesting, more healthy, and more contemporary.

I open the pressure cooker, add the black rice and simmer for 15 minutes.  Next, I add the kale (another LA export) and vegetables (except for the tomatoes) and simmer for another 10 minutes.  

The TV’s still going.  It doesn’t end.

I add the tomatoes, and the parsley, and the juice of half a lemon.  The smell takes me back to my mother’s kitchen.

Those refugees are still out there.  In Lesbos.  Or Calais.  Or Jordan. Or Lebanon. Or Turkey.

They’re everywhere and nowhere.  They are and they aren’t. They’re scared of life, they’re scared of death.

I pour the soup into a large bowl.  

I place the bowl in front of the TV.  Shorbet Moozat.

Tfadaloo.

*tfadaloo in Arabic means both ‘food is served’ and ‘welcome’