Growing up in the small town of Monaca, about 30 miles Northwest of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, my grandparents, aunts, and uncles played a significant role in my childhood. My father's mother Sito, Arabic for grandmother, lived next door and many of my notable memories of food came from her. Her parents brought many traditional Lebanese recipes with them when they arrived in America in 1925, and she continues to cook these for her family.
One of our favorite dishes is Sito's stuffed grape leaves. The Lebanese version is somewhat similar to the better-known Greek version: the leaves from grape vines are wrapped around a mixture of ground beef and rice and boiled in water with olive oil and garlic. They take about 20 minutes to cook and make a perfect after-school snack or side dish. But because the grape leaves are only in season for three to four weeks in June, picking and stuffing them is a huge operation. The process takes two days.
The first day Sito picks and washes the leaves. There were once grape vines in the sparsely wooded field next to her house (up until my father built a house over them), but she now goes to several other locations in our town. She quickly scans the vine, cutting off the leaves that pass her inspection - too green and it will be too tough, not green enough and it will fall apart. The difficulty is finding people who are willing to give up the leaves. She aims to pick two hundred. The leaves on a grape vine protect the grapes from the sun, otherwise the grapes dry out, rendering them unusable for wine.
The second day she wraps. Usually someone will accompany her when picking, but no one else is allowed to wrap, no one else is good enough. She mixes the ground beef, rice, spices, and pine nuts in a large bowl, puts a small ball in the middle of a leaf, and wraps it tight. She places the stuff grape leaf in a freeze-friendly aluminum pan, and repeats for five thousand leaves.
I prefer to eat my grape leaves with Sito's home made khoubiz, pita bread. Baked in her basement oven in batches of 12 to 15 dozen loaves, my entire family looks forward to "bread days." I step off the bus after school, open my front door, and see the hastily scribbled phrase "Sito Made Bread" in my father's handwriting on a Post-It note on the table. I drop my bookbag and and sprint to her house. I open the door to her basement and the glorious smell of fresh baked bread hits me. I step into her back room to find Sito and my father sitting at the table, surrounded by stacks of bread still warm from the oven, enjoying a loaf of fresh bread with peanut butter and Sito's homemade blackberry jam. I tear off a third of a loaf, make myself a sandwich as fast as I can, and join them. The bread that survives this feeding will be frozen and we will eat it over the next few months, but nothing comes close to fresh, home made khoubiz.
One of Sito's more exotic foods is kibbi: raw ground beef mixed with spices and wheat, topped with olive oil and mild or hot peppers, and served with khoubiz. This Sunday treat is the center of my earliest childhood memories involving food, and I can remember the first time I tried it. My mother, who is Italian and German, was always afraid of us contracting E. coli or some other deadly disease and never let my brother and I eat it. But that Sunday afternoon, my mother gave in and I have been addicted since.
Kibbi topped with olive oil and peppers served with khoubiz.
Lahem mishwi, lamb kebabs, is another of my favorite dishes. Sito buys a leg of lamb from a local butcher that who raises the lambs himself. She cuts the leg into pieces about the size of a golf balls, and puts them on skewers. Grilling them is my usually contribution to the meal, which is about the extent of my cooking abilities. Just before the lahem mishwi is done, she will bring out some warm bread and I will wrap it around the skewers to soak up the the juice. This is the best, if not the healthiest, part of lahem mishwi.
A hundred yards behind my house, just before a patch of woods, lies an acre of weeds and small trees, including thousands of blackberry bushes. Years ago, Gido, my grandfather, cleared paths about every ten feet into the thicket. In the cool July mornings, when my parents were at work, Sito would take my brother and I (and my sister, when she was old enough) into the field with a plastic cup to pick the berries that were ripe. She would watch as my brother and I raced to fill up our cup first. We took the blackberries back to her kitchen and stood behind her impatiently as she washed them. When they were done we blended them with vanilla ice cream to make milkshakes. The leftovers were frozen and once we collected six cups, Sito me a blackberry pie with her homemade crust and Bruster's chocolate ice cream on the side.
My Uncle Paul, who lives in Tennessee, comes home every July, and he, my father, and now my brother and I, will pick gallons of blackberries for Sito to turn into homemade blackberry jam. My parents claim not to have purchased a jar of jam since they married 21 years ago, and Sito's is all I've ever known. I put her jam on the pancakes my mother makes on Sunday mornings before church and on the peanut butter and jelly sandwiches I took to school every day until eighth grade.
Though most of these memories are from years ago, I still enjoy Sito's food today just as much as I did then. I can't wait for Thanksgiving, when I will be enjoying Sito's kibbi, khoubiz, stuffed grape leaves, and lahem mishwi, surrounded by my family once again.
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