Slime Soup

I spent the first six months of 1977 in Israel.  The first three weeks were on a kibbutz in Galilee, and the rest of the time was spent studying at Tel Aviv University (with lots of traveling about within the country).  At Tel Aviv University, I stayed in the student dormitories, where I had three other flatmates.  Each bedroom slept two people, and the two bedrooms shared a common room.

My roommate was an Israeli, but I did not get along with him particularly well.  The two guys in the other room were Israeli Palestinians, from the Nazareth area, and I got along with them much better.

Khaled and Afu would return home most weekends, and would come back to the university laden down with food that their mothers had prepared for them.  This food always included huge homemade pitas, each one about a foot in diameter, as well as lots of other dishes.  The food always looked very tasty.  Usually they ate by tearing off a piece of bread, and using that to pick up the other food and eat it.

One weekend, Khaled and Afu invited me to come to visit them in their homes.  First I went to Khaled's house.  He lived in a small village on the east side of Nazareth.  Khaled was the eldest of 13 children, and his mother seemed quite young. The Palestinians are very hospitable people, and so his mother served me a lot of food.  It was a little disconcerting to me that she would serve the men, and then leave, and she herself would only eat later, after the men had finished.  But this seemed to be the way they did things.  Most of the food was quite tasty, although a little different than what I was used to.  The Palestinians tend to use spices in their savory dishes that I normally see in sweet dishes, such as cinnamon and allspice.  To my taste buds, it made these dishes seem sweet to me, even though they weren't, really.  But it was all very nice, nonetheless, and I was grateful for their hospitality.

Khaled took me around his village to see various aunts and uncles.  They were all happy to receive this visitor from afar, and they all tried to give me more food, even though I had already eaten.  Clearly, food paid an important part in their communal life.

Now it was time to go visit Afu.  He lived closer to the center of town.  When I arrived at his house, I was introduced to his mother, as well as some of his brothers and cousins.  Now, Afu was the youngest of 11, so his mother was quite elderly.  Nonetheless, she had prepared a table filled with impressive amounts of a variety of different foods.  Again, she served the men, and left.

So we sat down to eat.  Although the table was loaded with many platters of food, we were each served an individual bowl of something that I did not recognize.  It looked like, and smelled like, some sort of green vegetable, like spinach, in a clear broth.  The others at the table were raving about this dish, and called it something that I had never heard of.  (Communication was not the easiest, because the only common language we spoke was Hebrew.)  At any rate, it seemed I was being served a Palestinian specialty.  And so I dipped in my spoon, and put it to my mouth.

As I lifted the spoon from the bowl, I noticed that the broth formed something of a string as I brought it to my mouth.  And then I put it in my mouth.  The flavor was not unpleasant; it did indeed have a taste akin to spinach.  But the broth was a mucilaginous lump of slime.  Imagine, if you will, a mouthful of raw egg white.  That's the consistency that this stuff had.

It was all I could do to swallow.  And I simply couldn't say, "No, thank you; I don't like it." because their feelings would have been hurt.  No, I had to force this stuff down.  And then I had to eat the rest of it.  On more than one occasion, I nearly gagged, but I determined that it was a case of mind over matter, and I soldiered on.  Eventually, I managed to down an entire bowl of this slime soup.

And then they offered me seconds.  Mercifully, the table was piled high with other things, so I was able to point to the rest of the food as tell them that, no thanks, I couldn't possibly, because there were so many other delicious things to try.

Many years later, a colleague of mine who is of Egyptian extraction was eating a rice dish in the cafeteria at lunchtime, and she offered me a taste, telling me it was an Egyptian specialty.  I tasted it, and instantly recognized the taste.  It was this same vegetable, cooked with rice.  This time, however, the rice had absorbed the sliminess in the cooking process, so the texture wasn't offensive.  It turns out that this vegetable is called  molokhia, and it creates a slimy broth when it is cooked, much as okra does.  It is a specialty of several countries in the Middle East, but it is one I can do without.

Don't worry; I'm not going to give you a recipe for molokhia.  Instead, I'm going to give you my recipe for homemade pita bread.  Pita is surprisingly easy to make, and the pocket is formed naturally.  Just be sure the oven is quite hot, and the bread dough is rolled out very thin.

Pita bread

1 cup water
2 cups all-purpose flour
1 cup whole wheat flour
1 1/2 tsp salt
2 Tbsp sugar
1 tsp (or one package) dry yeast

Mix and knead as you would any bread dough. I do mine in the bread machine, but if you have a stand mixer with a dough hook, that will work, too, or just do it by hand.

Let the dough rise for about an hour and a half until double in size, and punch it down.  Separate it into small balls (this recipe makes about 10 small pitas), cover them, and let them rest for 20 minutes.  Meanwhile, put pizza stones or cookie sheets in the oven and preheat it to 475°. 

After the dough balls have rested for 20 minutes, sprinkle a little flour on a board, and roll them out with a rolling pin until they are very thin.  Put them a few at a time (how many depends on the size of your oven) onto the pizza stone or cookie sheets, and bake for 3-4 minutes.  No need to turn them.  They will puff up like little pillows.  Take them out of the oven with tongs, and put them on a rack to cool.  Repeat until they are all baked.  After they have cooled, you will have to gently press the air out of them, and then you can store them in plastic bags.


It is fun to make pitas with children, because they like watching the bread dough puff up into miniature pillows.