The last time I went to a restaurant in Baghdad was more than two years ago. I didn’t know then, of course, that it would be the last time. I don’t remember what we ate, but I do remember my Iraqi hosts becoming increasingly nervous when a suspicious-looking car kept circling the restaurant. A lot of the restaurants are still open, but it’s become too dangerous for westerners to go to them. Like most news organizations, we’re based outside the Green Zone, and it’s even become too dangerous to send Iraqi drivers after dark to pick up food. So for dinner, when we’re not putting together stories for the Nightly News, we take turns cooking. Kiko makes silken green curries and ethereal cakes.
Apart from the curry spices and chocolate brought in people’s suitcases, a lot of the food we eat comes from the local market. When we were able to go out and do our own shopping before the war and for a while after, one of my favorite things to do was buy field greens there, often sold by the women who grew them. I never knew what a lot of the greens were, but it didn’t really matter—they were wonderful. Now, our drivers shop for us, although for safety reasons, they don’t go out to buy food every day. The fruit and vegetables grown in Iraq are organic by necessity, and the lamb and beef are from butchers who display the meat hanging from hooks in the windows. You can always find tomatoes, cucumbers, zucchini, eggplant, potatoes, and onions—staples in Iraqi cooking—at sidewalk vendors, who cover the produce with burlap soaked in water to keep it cool. Those vegetables don’t wilt in the sidewalk stalls the way that lettuce does when it’s 130 degrees in the summer. When it’s hotter than 130 degrees, it’s difficult to find lettuce.
Diyala, where soldiers are fighting one of the worst battles against al-Qaeda, is famous for its orange groves, and the markets are usually full of them, along with bananas that are imported from Central America through Turkey. Iraqis who can afford it can’t seem to live without them.
There are also wonderful pomegranates and mulberries in season. Oh, and in the spring for a few weeks, during the rains, the markets are full of desert truffles, country cousin to European truffles. Iraqis fry them, sometimes with eggs. Unless there’s an extraordinary amount of violence on the roads into Baghdad, the markets are almost always full of produce: The problem for Iraqis isn't availability, but that the violence has increased the cost of almost everything. One of the most amazing things about the city is that even when there are car bombs exploding, a few streets away there are usually throngs of people out shopping.
Small supermarkets carry packaged foods—a lot of it imported from Turkey—and are awash in frozen chickens, but at some of the most exclusive shops that once catered to foreigners and wealthy Iraqis, you can find things like frozen Butterball turkeys brought in from Jordan. Those shops are usually among the most dangerous places to go, so we tend to avoid them. This is where improvisation comes in, because sometimes the supermarkets are out of ingredients you want, or a curfew has been imposed, or it’s just too dangerous for people to be in the streets. That’s when we make do with what the drivers can safely find at the market or what’s in the storeroom.
NBC is a mix of American and international staff. The Americans specialize in barbecue—steaks, ribs, and chicken grilled in a 44-gallon oil drum cut in half on the patio. The others are full of surprises. Our Polish soundman, Rob, made borscht once, along with spare ribs and gammon steaks with mushroom sauce. It was particularly selfless act since he was, at the time, on a diet that involved eating nothing but eggs and vegetables. During the course of a few weeks, he practically melted away. Dessert that evening was a fluffy lemon pudding, a lovely, delicate thing flecked with lemon rind whipped up by Johnny, a mountainlike New Zealander who is one of our security advisers.
It doesn’t always work. When I adapted a chocolate-mousse recipe for an improvised dinner party, the milk-chocolate bars I melted in lieu of bittersweet chocolate substituted wonderfully, but I forgot that in quadrupling the recipe, it needed four times as long to set. Dessert ended up as sort of a chilled chocolate soup.
We all hope for rotations in Baghdad with Dale, a security adviser who was a chef in the best restaurants in New Zealand. On evenings when we’re busy with news, he often strolls into the kitchen, takes a look at what the Iraqi staff have found in the market that day, and prepares the most amazing meals for 20.
The kitchen is not a chefs’ kitchen by any means, but it works. The centerpiece is a large, temperamental gas stove. There’s a large island where two or three well-coordinated people can work at the same time. And it opens onto a makeshift dining room where plastic flowers decorate tables covered in colorful plastic tablecloths. The walls are lined with photos of NBC’s American and Iraqi staff. If you squint, it could be a country diner.
Like a lot of the security advisers here, Dale had a military career with the Special Forces. Given a choice between a professional soldier and a professional chef, he says he knows which is more of a strain. "Working in a restaurant is far more stressful than being shot at or being in the military," he says. "Cooking for one to two hundred people teaches you to cope with stress very well."
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