This recipe is inspired by my grandmother. I’m sure a lot of people are inspired by their grandmother’s cooking but mine was a little different than what you’re probably picturing.
She was a really good cook, something I took for granted about all of the women in my family. She married my grandpa, whose parents were from Lebanon and so learned to cook all kinds of exotic (and incredibly delicious) Lebanese food.
One thing I spend far too much time thinking about is how to coax more vegetables into our/other people’s/people with temporarily strange palates lives. I could probably speak French and Italian by now if I were to have put in the same amount of time and effort. But who needs to be understood in the countries of love when you can….eat more veggies?
Anyway, this dip is my latest obsession. I am now in my last week (hopefully?) of pregnancy and have been making up for the all but complete lack of vegetables in the first half of my pregnancy. That stretch of time brought me a deeper understanding of my clients who were going through treatment who only wanted beige food, but it also meant this baby got a lot more beige food than I was happy with (thank goodness for smoothies).
I still don’t know how we got this lucky, but the first time I tried Massaman curry was in Thailand, on a beach, made especially for us by a Thai woman who was too modest to call herself a Chef but too passionate not to offer to cook for us once we started talking about food.
We had been frequenting her tiny bar that had only three tables setup on the beach, every night around sunset. Slowly we got to know her and her husband and learned that they had just given up their restaurant in another part of the country and were running this tiny bar until they could figure out where to open up a new one.
Not that I’m here to tell you to eat salad in January. I really do prefer to look back fondly on a (somewhat) debaucherous December. I feel like that is what it is there for, and that soul food, laughter, togetherness and festivities all have their place in the grand scheme of things and are as good for us as salad, just on a different, sometimes harder to reach, level.
But sometimes your body will tell you exactly what it wants, and who would deny themselves an actual salad craving? Especially if you happen to be 37 weeks pregnant and your baby has been way too into French fries thus far. I nearly skipped (carefully on our iceberg-covered sidewalks) to the store to buy some leafy greens.
