"Cookies for Ala" or "How Many Cubic Centimeters to the Cup?" or "You Make Diet Coke Cake in Palestine?" or "Mesh Moushkile!"

This post brought to you by: all the relatives who own shares of the brand-spankin’ new camera I got for Christmas! Way to make it happen, team! Also, please be sure to check out my first three posts again; I have added pictures. The ones for "The Main Event" are works of art from the art exhibit I talk about!

One last thing before I get to it: if you’re feeling like you want to read a little more about the experiences of students on Earlham’s Jordan Program 2011, I recommend leilafeejordan.blogspot.com as well as awkwardinjordan.blogspot.com. Despite the fact that they are both blatant blog-address plagiarists, I love Leila and Bill anyway and suggest that you read what they have to say.

Last Friday morning, after a late and luxurious breakfast, I read in the family room while my host siblings and mother watched TV and visiting-family-member Magida dusted. Friday mornings here have a similar feel to Sunday mornings at home: people get up when they get up, eat, and then lounge around with coffee. Usually, this is a calm and relaxing chunk of family time.

But this Friday was a little different: we had an eight-year-old boy in the house. Magida’s son Ala was visiting too, and he not really feeling the chill Friday morning vibe. As usual, I was looking to capitalize and decided that it was time to kill two birds with one stone and finish a project I had started the previous week while giving Ala something to do to boot. The mission: chocolate-chip cookies. Ala was the perfect accomplice.

Like I said: these cookies had been in the works for a little while. A week, actually, because it the previous Friday, when, feeling a little antsy myself (not to mention a little homesick, and more than a little hungry) I decided to investigate what the baking situation was in my host family’s home. The good news: they had all the ingredients for chocolate-chip cookies on hand except chocolate chips, brown sugar, butter, and baking soda. The bad news: they hadn’t ever actually heard of brown sugar, butter, or baking soda.

This posed something of a problem. Brown sugar is easy enough to explain, but have you ever tried to describe butter?

But: no problem (or, as we would say in Arabic: "mesh moushkile")! I went to the corner store and bought their only box of brown sugar, which judging by the condition of the packaging, had probably been there since before the British granted Transjordan’s independence in, like 1946. Fine. I pushed on: I went to the Safeway next to my gym to buy the remaining ingredients. Butter and chocolate-chips proved easy enough, but I had no success with baking soda, which apparently just isn’t a thing in Jordan. Still I was not deterred: I am a child of the South:I can make chocolate-chip cookies without baking soda. I can make chocolate-chip cookies out of nothing. No baking soda? Mesh moushkile!

Anyway, Ala didn’t really understand the mission for which he found himself spontaneously recruited, but he liked that it involved cookies and he liked that it meant he and Ziad and I got to lock everybody else in the house out of the kitchen while we prepared a surprise. At first Ziad didn’t want Ala to help (he described why through a series of gestured that illustrated a general state of chaos) but once I explained that, actually, giving Ala something to do was the entire point, he came around.

Our first task was breaking the brown sugar. We did it eventually, but it took all three of us as well as a mortar and pestle and the Shuwikah’s granite countertop. (I’m sure Aziza, my host mother, was thrilled at the sounds coming from her kitchen.)

Ala creamed the butter and sugar.

The second task was measuring the flour.

I was prepared to eyeball it, having been prepared for the possibility of no measuring cups by my friend Arielle, who has done a little baking of her own already this semester. This wasn’t the problem at the Shuwikah’s; they certainly had measuring cups. Or, I should say, measuring liters for wet ingredients and measuring cubic centimeters for dry.

(When I have children, I am raising them on the metric system—no matter what country I live in. Also 24-hour time, and degrees Celsius, so that when they study in foreign countries they won’t be laughed at or go through the emotional roller-coaster of thinking they’ve run a seven-minute mile like a beast when really it’s only a seven-minute kilometer. Fahrenheit? Cups? Feet? Socially irresponsible, I say. Thanks a lot, Mom. That’s all.)

But we worked it out. How many cubic centimeters to a cup, you may ask? 236.4, or, in other words: eyeball it.

So that was fine. Eggs and vanilla went without issue, though Ziad is very fond of vanilla and was very upset when I wouldn’t let him add more than double the recommended amount. He was also out of the room when Ala and I added the baking powder that I was substituting for baking soda, and it was very hard to convince him that we hadn’t forgotten it. He also wanted to add oil to the batter (suspicious as he was of the butter) as well as—

“Pepsi?” I said. “You want to put Pepsi?”

“Yes!” Ziad said, emphatically. “We make this in Palestine, cake, with Pepsi!”

I looked at him with a face that I’m sure was less than culturally sensitive. Then I realized. “You make Diet Coke cake in Palestine?” I asked in awe.

“What?” he said.

Clarissa Jakstas is a big fan of Diet Coke cake, as it is a combination of her two favorite things in the entire world. It also boasts far fewer calories than regular cake—you make it by taking a chocolate cake mix and adding diet coke instead of the recommended ingredients. I’m also pretty sure that you cook it in the microwave. Clarissa is a big fan; me, not as much. Still, it was a surprise to me that what I thought was a purely desperate American college student phenomenon had made it to Palestine. The internet is a beautiful thing.

“Never mind,” I said to Ziad. “No Pepsi.”

Ala stirred in the chocolate chips, spilling about half the bag so that it mysteriously ended up in his mouth. Then, it was time to shape the cookies.

Here is where America’s philosophy of cooking differs from Jordan’s philosophy of cooking. When I cook Middle Eastern food with my family, there is a lot of careful chopping of parsley and tomatoes for tabouleh, lots of delicate rolling of grape leaves and filo dough. The name of the game is: precision. But I’ve seen Americans plunge chocolate bars into jars of peanut butter to make their own Reese’s Cups, and I've stuffed as much rice as I can into a burrito that then falls apart all over my shirt, and when it was time to make the cookies I stuck my hand into the bowl, grabbed a handful of the stuff and plopped it down. In this way, I put down seven cookies while Ziad laboured over turning his into a perfect cookie-shaped oval.

“You have to make them into balls,” I said, licking my fingers.

“This is a cookie,” he said, showing me his handwork.

“Nah,” I said, “they’ll spread out in the oven.”

“Shuu?” Ziad said.

“Mesh moushkile,” I said. “Haik.”

We put the cookies in the oven.

“They’re melting!” Ziad yelped a few minutes later.

“It’s fine,” I told him. “Don’t worry.”

He wanted to flip them, like pancakes.

“It’s fine,” I said. “Don’t worry, I’ve done this before.”

And it was fine. Even when one of the cookies broke coming off the pan. Ziad looked terrified but I said, "Oh no, it's broken, we have to eat it." and ate it.

"It has to cool!" Ziad wailed, having apparently lost all hope for me.

The cookies were delicious. The texture was a little off due to the lack of baking soda...but whatever. Mesh moushkile! They were still crumbly, golden and filled with gooey, melty chocolate. And there was a little bit of dough left over, so Ala got to take part in a truly American tradition.