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Yousuf demonstrates how to properly core a squash (koosa) in preparation for stuffing and cooking mahshi koosa (stuffed squash). The key is not to pierce the squash with the corer (my mother was hovering the background ready to wring our necks if we did perchance make this critical error!). In the background one can hear Noor furiously scribbling with crayons on her table-eep.
Ok so I’m gloating-but how many 5 year olds do YOU know that can core koosa 
As many of you know, I am a foodie of sorts-some (*ahem* Yassine) would call me a slow-food activist. I am particularly interested in the connections between food, culture, and politics and have written a lot about the foods of Gaza in specific and Palestine in general. Here is a short video I made using my flip of my mom (who is still visiting us in the US) demonstrating how to cook Rummaniya, an unusual Gazan vegetarian dish made from the unlikely combination of sour pomegranates, eggplants and lentils. In the process, she gets a little homesick and emotional. FYI: the poem she recites in the end is attributed to a Imam Shafi’i, a Muslim jurist whose teaching eventually led to the Shafi’i school of fiqh named after him. It is said he was born and raised in Gaza and missed it so much after leaving that he wrote this poem.
Rummaniya is a seasonal dish, made just before pomegranates are fully ripe in the fall. It is traditionally considered a “poor man’s food” because it is meatless and consists of cheap legumes and vegetables. You would be hard-pressed to find it in any restaurant (but hey-maybe one day at cafe Laila’s! 
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The finished product
Here is the recipe for those interested:
Rummaniya
1 cup brown lentils
3 small eggplants (if they are big, one really big one, or two medium ones, or 1/2 kg)
3 sour pomegranates if you really can’t find them anywhere, you can use a few Tablespoons of pomegranate molasses, found at most Middle Eastern grocers.
1/2 cup flour
1 small onion, diced
2 T. Tahini
3 cloves garlic
2 whole dried red chili (or dried chili flakes)
1 teaspoon caraway seed
¼ tsp ground cumin
1 T. dried dill seed
1-2 tsps salt
1. Boil lentils in water until cooked.
2. Remove pomegranate seeds, put them in a blender; puree and strain, reserving juice. Set aside.
3. Cut unpeeled eggplant into cubes.
4. In a mortar and pestle (we call them zibdiya in Gaza, basically an unglazed clay/earthen bowl; if you can’t find them, use a mini-food processor), crush salt, dill seed, garlic, and chili. Set aside.
5. Saute chopped onion in some olive oil until golden brown; add eggplant until wilted and soft; add lentils; boil for a few minutes until well-mixed.
6. Mix pomegranate juice (or pomegranate molasses diluted in a few T. water) with flour until well-mixed, then slowly add to stew on stove-top while mixing.
7. Add crushed spices to stew and mix well until thickened.
8. When thickened, add Tahini, mix through for 5 minutes, and turn off heat. Pour into bowls and allow to cool before putting in fridge.
Top with extra-virgin olive oil, and garnish with pomegranate seeds if available. Serve with Kmaj/Arabic bread.
A while ago, I blogged about a meta-tourism project created by my friend, media artist Mushon Zer Aviv, called You Are Not Here (YANH), a play on the directional “You are HERE” found on maps everywhere.
YANH is an urban tourism mash-up. It takes place in the streets of one city and invites participants to become meta-tourists of another city. The way it works is : You download a map, take your phone with you and go tour Gaza through the streets of Tel Aviv or Baghdad through the streets of New York. It started as a tour of Baghdad through the streets of NY, a project dreamed up by Mushon and some of his colleagues while a graduate student at NYU’s ITP program.
I collaborated with Mushon on the Gaza iteration of the project, writing and recording the locations in Gaza City. The project was presented in many an exhibit, including Rotterdam’s Digital Electronic Art Festival and Istanbul’s Akbank Gallery. During the past few months, we updated the sites and recordings to reflect the current reality, and re-launched the tour for a theater exhibition at the (first) ArtTLV biennial in Tel Aviv.
Reuters, Haaretz, and the Abu Dhabi National and the Dutch NOSJOURNAAL (use google translate for this piece) among others covered the re-launch (links below).
Re-recording the locations was a very strange, very emotional experience, something that is mirrored in the tour itself. Its been a while since I’ve been able to return to Gaza, and so much has changed that I feel like a stranger-one that is nevertheless intimately familiar-with this city, this place I call home. So relying on my own personal knowledge and experience, and filling in the details with the help of my parents, Wikimapia, and some research of our own, we pieced together the most accurate descriptions we could. I tried to make the recordings as intimate and as colorful as possible-I really wanted to disorient the listener/walker, challenge their commonly held perceptions and their relationship to Gaza, all while reflecting the current reality.
As we made clear to all media outlets we spoke with: this is NOT a normalization initiative (if you didn’t catch it, notice the deliberately broken beach umbrella in the project’s logo above, created by our colleague Dan Phiffer). As one of the journalists covering the project put it, the tour serves to “create an association in the mind of the listener-to momentarily disorient the tourist and then reorient them with a new perspective—one that includes Gaza as part of their consciousness.”
You can read more about our thoughts in the articles above. I’ve also provided a sample recordings below. If they are not working, you can also access that at the YANH website itself. Enjoy!
We have just learned that Tunnel Trade, the film I co-directed with my friend and colleague Saeed Farouky of Tourist with a Typewriter Ltd, in 2007, has won a Noor Award for Outstanding Short Documentary at the Arab Film Festival in San Francisco.
Our trophy, send to the Tourist team in London via Fedex
Michel Shehadeh, executive director of of the AFF, says of the Festival: “Each year [it] offers inspiring stories and images through films that illuminate Arab lives and present authentic narratives as well as provide insights into the beauty, talent and diversity of Arab culture. The Noor Awards shine a special light on filmmakers from the Arab world and from the Arab diaspora who break new artistic and cultural grounds. This award recognizes their artistic excellence and their work at building cultural, artistic and human bridges. These are filmmakers who receive little visibility in the United States.”
We finished shooting the film in early June, amidst heavy Palestinian infighting that paralyzed Gaza City for days at a time, only a few short days before the Hamas-Fateh riff came to its ugly conclusion; as Saeed and I like to point out, we filmed the tunnels at a time when filming tunnels was “real”-when even talking about the tunnels was still a very dangerous business. In fact, we had our tapes and gear confiscated on two separate occasions, and Saeed got a gun to his head once (had it not been for the quick thinking, adept skills of our driver & occasional security adviser Maher, and our dear Friend and consultant on the film Fida, one of us surely would have been at least injured, and the film non-existent) all while I was pregnant with Noor (I guess that makes the award all the more appropriate!). People trusted no one in tunnel territory-not their neighbors, not the tunnel diggers, not the Israelis, not the Palestinian security, and certainly not two random Palestinian filmmakers from abroad.
Nowadays, filming tunnels (or facilitating the filming of tunnels) is as profitable a business as digging them; hand any Ahmed a few greenbacks and your good to go (of course the higher up the ranks in the system, the more they ask especially if you are CNN or BBC, as we kept getting asked). The tunnels themselves have since also become a necessary trade route what with the ongoing siege, transporting everything from sheep to deconstructed cars and even plastic chairs (before, the two most profitable and transported items were cigarettes and spark plugs, with processed cheeses a distant third).
Other winners included:
Eye of the Sun (full length fiction, Egypt 2008) by Ibrahim El Batout was selected as the Noor Award winner for outstanding fiction feature.
CasaNegra (Morocco, 2008) by Nour-Eddine Lakhmari received an honorable mention for fiction feature.
In the best short fiction category Fatenah (Palestine, 2009) directed by Ahmad Habash was selected.
The honorable mention was presented to This Palestinian Life (Palestine, 2008) directed by my friend Philip Rizk.
Tea on the Axis of Evil (Syria, 2009) by Jean Marie Offenbacher, was selected as the Noor Award winner for outstanding documentary.