Winter Rice Soup (Gêrmiya Şîr)

As everyone has noticed, winter is here early this year. For those of you who, after dragging yourselves home from a tiring days work, would like to be greeted with the aroma of a warm, homemade soup, I submit this recipe. 

Ingredients

•  2 cups milk (400 ml)
• 1/2 cup white rice (100g)
• 5 cups water (1litre)
• 1 level tsp salt

Preparation:

1. Wash and drain the rice.
2. Place the water in a deep pot, add the salt and rice, and cook on a high flame for 25 minutes. To prevent the pot from overflowing, leave the lid off or slightly ajar.
3. When the rice is cooked, add the milk and simmer another 10 minutes over a medium heat.
Bon Appetit! Noşi Can Be!

What's Cooking in Kurdish Cuisine?

Dear Readers,

Before I started sticking up recipes, I decided to go out into the street and see if people knew anything about Kurdish cuisine. I had quite an interesting experience. For example, a good number of people mentioned kebab, which is funny, because usually when Turkish people are explaining their own cuisine to foreigners, the first thing they say is kebab. Now here they were telling me kebabs were Kurdish. A lot of people answered ‘Beans and rice.’ These people, even though I asked in a very loud voice, always thought I said ‘Turkish food’. Basically, their brains were closed to the very idea of a ‘Kurdish’ food. The only people who could list any of the true Kurdish dishes (like meftune, keledosh, avsir, or braised lamb) were Kurds themselves. 

Let me emphasize, except for one man who said ‘The Kurds have their own food? Please!’ (and you can probably guess who this is in the video), I did not have any negative reactions to my question.  Quite the reverse, from the moment they heard my question, they started to ponder hard over a question that they probably had never thought about before.

The thing that impressed me most was the answer of the young man who appears at the very end and the very beginning of the video: ‘If we just talk, just like this, everything would be wonderful.’

Hello

         About ten thousand years ago, a people worn out from hunting and gathering settled down in Mesopatomia on the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. My people. They tamed animals, they plowed fields, they invented tools and passed into a sedentary life. Today, you find the ruins of their first attempts at civilization in Göbeklitepe in Urfa,  and Çayönü in Diyarbakır. Those people are the ancestors of the

Kurds who now so desperately try to affirm their existence on this same land. Of course, they possess a cuisine that cannot be disentangled from these millienia of historical development.

          There is so little information out there about what is cooking in those kitchens and just where that delicious-smelling smoke is coming from pouring out of the chimneys.

        I am creating this blog so I can share everything I am discovering about our cuisine. I want to open the way for the new generation to learn these dishes, and by cooking, bring this culture to life and introduce it to the world. To that end, I am writing this blog in English, Kurdish, and Turkish. I hope to add other languages in the future, and eagerly await your comments, opinions, and recipes.

         Bon Appetit!