Dolma

If you have ever been to local home in Hawler or neighboring areas, you definately know what dolma is! Last weekend, due to a sudden recurrance of a particulary pernicious sort of chronic social disease in which I seem unable to come with any polite excuse whatsoever to defer, postpone or decline invitations, I ended up going out for meals 3 times last weekend. It all started with dinner on Thursday night at Haji M's house:
Above is Haji M inviting us (Dr. F, Dr. S and I) to put a little more biryani on our plates already heaped with dolma (see center plate). In South Kurdistan, dolma is made of any and all local vegetables available: tomatoes, potatoes, peppers, courgettes, aubergines, onions, etc. All are hollowed out and stuffed with rice cooked up with spices and meat. (Please note I received an essay last year where the main premise was that it was clearly evident that Kurdish culture was far more advanced that Turkish culture via the fact that Turks only stuff peppers for dolma, whereas Kurds use all vegetables. In fact, I like all the variations, and in Turkey I love some of the different ways of serving yaprak sarma (stuffed vine leaves): cold with yogurt, hot wish spicer accompaniments. In Kurdistan, the ones where the vegetable skins are rubbed with lemon before stuffing are good.
Anyway, enough about the dolma... the real reason I try to avoid invitations is not because I don't like dolma... which invariably shows up in quantities enough to serve an army, but because the hosts usually force feed the guests until they are unable to stand up and walk to the street afterwards. In our case, Haji M's wife (a lovely lovely lady) would hold kupa (little fried meat dumplings) in her fingers and look at you with a distressed look when you turned a 4th helping down, "But they are so good."

This second photo was taken on Firday, a week ago exactly. On Saturday late morning, I went to a 2nd home for lunch; however, shock of all shocks - there was NO DOLMA! And the food was not served on a plastic tablecloth on the floor (Which I am quite comfortable with being rather festive and picnic-like). Instead, everything was carried on the overly fancy silver serving trays (identical to the ones in our Naz CIty flats) and laid out on a table in the living room: a kind of meat biryani, apricot stew, fasulya, chicken... The food was plentiful, but not as heavy or overabundant as usual. Then I found out the family was not exactly local, but from Sulemaniya. Hmmm... very similar to what one might order at Abu Shahab restaurant (a local favorite), but less greasy. I actually left with enough energy to go shoppping at lenga market and for ice cream at "Me and You". This second picture is of Bilge and Dr. I enjoying Ice Cream. After Ice cream, we continued on to Izzy's house for coffee, food and drinks. I spend all of Saturday recovering. (More about Izzy to come soon).