I am a citizen of this planet, who believes there is a purpose and mission to our existence. I pursue that mission and try to enjoy every lesson, every day, and every last drop of the pain and joy we drink when we live. I live a mostly regret-free life, with each failure quickly becoming a valuable experience and something to laugh about, and every success something about which to be thankful and celebrative. I do all of this in and around my beloved Berkeley, California.
3 comments:
Wow!
I love it! Nooshe Jan,
This is a comment my friend Fariba tried to post here but couldn't. I post it for her:
Nazi Joonam
For the third time I tried to add a comment to the posts in your weblog and failed. Maybe the traffic to the server is too high to let me through. Every time I try, I get “this page cannot be displayed” message.
Any way, cheese, bread, herbs(especially basil), walnuts, and sometimes tomatoes are my favorite dinner too. Especially when my younger sister sends me bread from out home town, Rafsanjan.
While my mother was alive she used to have Rafsanjani bread baked for me in her home and then sent them over by mail, or brought them with her when she came to visit. Rafsanjani bread smells so nice, and reminds me of my childhood.
When I was a little girl, twice a week the woman baker would come to our house. She would spread her special cloth on the ground in the kitchen, dissolve a piece of dried sour dough left from the previous baking in salted water, add the flour, mix it, cover the dough with the heavy cloth to keep it warm, wait for a few hours, then start baking the bread. Before putting the dough in the furnace, she would mix the dough for quite a couple of minutes with her powerful hands. Then, she would take small hand fools of dough, spread them on a round cushion, sprinkle some dried herbs on them, cover her hand with a thick sleeve, and stamp the dough to the walls of the hot furnace. To please us children, she used to make us small breads. Though made of the same dough, we always thought the small breads were more delicious. On those days, some 35 or so years ago, living in a small town like Rafsanjan, those small breads tasted like the best of cookies.
My mom has been gone for almost 8 years now. No body bakes bread at their homes anymore, but the bread my sister brings me from our home town, though made by machinery and not as good as home made bread, still has something of my youth in it.
Served with white feta cheese, basil, walnut and tomato, it makes a queenly dinner!
Love, Fariba
Fariba Jan:
First I must say that all the words that did not accompany my humble photo post, were in your lovely message! You should really write for others to see, too! I have seen the bread baking ritual in Iranian cities and villages, and you are right, something about it was so memorable and important to our childhood. The lady I saw make them in Kelardasht a long time before Kelardasht became a tourist spot (in 1969/1970), made special "Koloocheh" on the same bread day, too, and THAT was our treat--the sweetness with the fistfull of sesame seeds she would throw on top! Fariba, I really miss you today. I wished we could sit and talk and shoot the breeze, like we used to in Tehran. Be good my friend. Keep on writing.
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