An Observer’s Commentary on this Wednesday’s Bite
This is how it went:
Tuesday afternoon, I said to Mac, “Hey Mac, we’re hosting book club tomorrow, and I want to make something sweet and yummy for us to munch on. Any ideas?”
And he thought quietly for a minute, gazing up at the snowflakes hanging from the ceiling, and then said with decisiveness, “I’ll make baklava.” He nodded his own approval.
Baklava having been totally off my radar, I said, “well actually I was thinking something like cookies. Do you think I should do like peanut butter or like chocolate chip?”
And he, “We’ll have to pick up some phyllo dough, but that’s ok because we need to go to the store anyway… I think we have enough honey… I might go look at some recipes, it’s been a few years since I’ve made baklava…”
Fast forward a few hours, and we’re standing in the kitchen, Mac fastidiously wrinkling the thin, delicate phyllo sheets to the appropriate level of “wrinkled” and brushing them gently with butter while I, like, hold the pot. He has printed out the recipe that he’d written and hung it in the kitchen for our reference. I look at the crazy, labor-intensive mess of walnuts and phyllo dough and say, “How did the Greeks come up with this anyway?”
“Actually,” says Mac, “the Greeks didn’t come up with it at all. The very first instances of baklava come from China, of all places. Then it kind of disappears for a while, and re-emerges in Turkey a couple hundred years later.”
I stare at him. He keeps at his phyllo dough. ”I wikipedia’d it,” he says.
I thought perhaps this second perspective on how baklava came to be in our house this week might enhance your appreciation of the original “Bites” posting.
Post book club follow-up: baklava was a huge hit, not surprisingly. We do, however, have left overs… so if you’re in the neighborhood, give us a call…