Kubbeh Libre

Irit came home from a few days working in Jerusalem waxing hugely about this meal of vegan kubbeh (Mediterranean dish using a combo of meat and rice as a filling/stuffing) she’d had there. “You,” she said, pointing pointedly, “should do this dish.”

Ok. But kubbeh is not really a tight fit for our southern soul food cuisine. This was going to take some thinking. I was familiar with various guises of stuffed hushpuppies, would that do? No. She wanted something far healthier, nothing fried. Hmm. I could think of dishes such as quail and roast duckling, both of which lent themselves well to the concept, except, of course, not vegan. Texans do exotic (to me) things like klobasnek (a stuffed sausage pastry) and kolaches (sweet, not savory, with fruit, cream cheese, poppy seeds).. There was always the classic standby: green bell peppers stuffed with ricey things. That brought back too many childhood memories of really bad leftover cooking. It was going to take a while to free my mind from these various preconceptions.

Beets, I thought. Roasted beets. Super healthy, perfect for hollowing out and stuffing. And the roasting was elegant and simple, with virtually no oil or salt. Eezy Peezy. Pfffffff.

Roasting the beets was of course the easy part, even though I am not a big fan of cleaning up the beet juice that seems to spread itself everywhere during the process. It was the stuffing that started to take on a life of its own: quinoa, separately seared mushrooms and shallots, A few diced potatoes and yam, also separately prepared. Chopped, raw walnuts, a dab of pomegranate juice for the sweetness and an equal portion of jalapeno-infused olive oil for the heat. You get the idea. My vegan kubeh was starting to take on a life of its own.

And that process of letting the dish kinda dictate its own course — reminiscent of a Pindarello-esque notion of fictional characters charting their own narrative arcs — makes total sense. It all serves as something of a revelation, at least to me, about the creative process by which a non-native dish morphs into an entirely different, regional cuisine. In this case, a classic Mediterranean dish (kubbeh) being transformed into something that to my mind is distinctively southern (roasted beets, stuffed with quinoa, seared mushrooms, shallots, and other root vegetables.

To be a bit simplistic, it’s all about freeing one’s mind. I think.