Laffa-ing, all the Way to the Bank

So, this Friday night dinner, my vegan son and one of his friends came over to celebrate. I especially love these remnants of “family dinner” and go all out to make sure everything is pretty damn good.

So for the better part of two days: roasted eggplant with crushed lemon paste and herb dressing topped by pickled onions and chili, grilled carrots on a bed of vegan labane and topped with tarragon oil and dukka, slow cooked red kidney beans with muhammara sauce, topped with toasted pistachios, roasted butternut squash and caramelised tomatoes with toasted pumpkin seeds and a lime sauce. Homemade mezze on the table (hummus, tahini, harissa, etc.). And as we are sitting down to eat, I tell my son, “A, by the way, there’s fresh warm laffa in that basket over there.”

His eyes literally lit up. “Laffa,” he said, “real laffa?”. He unwrapped the warm, towel, wrapped laffa and dug in. “Real laffa!”. It was the only thing on the table that night that I had NOT prepared. And it made his evening.

I could chalk it all up to delivering the unexpected. Apparently, this typical flat middle-eastern bread — lacking the pocket of pita but having a circumference easily 5 times as extensive — despite how typical it is, laffa is not something my son expected on our Friday night table.So much more powerful the surprise element. Or perhaps it was the simplicity of it all, in stark contrast to the rich, colorful dishes alongside. Or perhaps it was simply that laffa spoke to him in a deeply visceral, cultural way.

Hard to know the mysteries of the heart, much less the mysteries of the stomach. “It works,” is simply one way of summing up a life of memory’s tastes. Even a life as young as my son’s. It’s still very powerful stuff.