Roast Chicken with Za'atar and Aleppo Pepper

and dancing together in the desert.

Last night Dan and I made a za’atar roast chicken.

We returned from a long anticipated trip to DC this past Monday that I dreaded would be a whirlwind for many reasons and ended up being a week of me laying in foreign beds when I came down with a really nasty flu. Part of me still believes that this was a response—a confirmation, if you will, that DC and I still need a break from each other. Maybe that’s a bit extreme. Perhaps the flu was my body finally calibrating all of the fresh grief from current events that it has been storing over the past month, or maybe it was my experience with antisemitism that I had encountered just a few days prior bubbling to the surface of my gut. Regardless, I spent most of the week canceling video shoots, dinner plans, and meetings with friends in need of rest.

Anyway, I’m feeling better, save the lingering fatigue, and I’m very grateful to be back in our little treehouse in the woods again. We took the chicken out to thaw yesterday morning and then worked from a coffee shop on the Delaware River, looking out on the water surrounded by rust-colored leaves and a single boat with a man fishing from it. I tried to write, but writing has been really difficult for me lately—my brain feels heavy with anger and confusion and sadness and also so deeply driven toward a higher purpose. I keep trying to center on that last part.

On Wednesday I cried after dinner, explaining to Dan through tears how I will never understand how we got here. How is this where humanity stands in 2023? How do I exist? A multicultural human of West Indian, Israeli, Turkish, Spanish, Chinese, Ethiopian, Scottish, Irish, and Venezuelan descent. A mashup of cultures that represent oppression, freedom, grief, celebration. All of these things are housed within my skin and bones and function together to give me breath in my lungs and a beat to my heart, yet here we are, still fighting one another on this one, precious planet we have to thrive on. I will never understand it. I cried because I was angry at myself for my continued hopes for peace and deep listening and for us to all come together in a circle and hold hands and hum in harmonious tones that would give us chills. I was angry at my naïveté but also because I know, in my deepest of souls, when humans come together above all else, they have the power to heal and to remember their similar basic desire for joy.

We bought aleppo pepper and a fresh bag of za’atar from Johnny, my Palestinian-Jordanian-American friend whose family makes the best manoushe in DC—a thing we used to stockpile in our freezer when we lived in the area and had at least once a week with the Israeli chopped salad that my dad taught me to make. I spent the morning with Johnny and his father last Friday, one of my only outings while visiting DC, and we prepared the dough for their manoushe together, making one fresh to enjoy together for breakfast.

We began our dinner preparations yesterday afternoon, loosely following a recipe for roasted chicken from Adeena Sussman’s new recipe book, Shabbat. We sliced two potatoes super thinly, and made a garlic mixture with kosher salt to slide in between the skin and the meat of the chicken for flavor. We liberally covered the potatoes and chicken in olive oil, aleppo pepper sourced from Syria, and za’atar from Jenin—one of the best places in the world to get the really good stuff with no fillers or bullshit. Dan put the blend under my nose. “Smell this”, he said, his eyes wide in joyful satisfaction. It smelled like home. It smelled like my grandmother’s kitchen on Friday afternoon, trays of pastel and bourekas and crispy rice all attempting to find space in the oven. Their smells would swirl together, filling my body with ultimate comfort as I sat on the couch with my grandmother’s soft arm holding onto my thigh—that smell filled the gaping hole that exists in me whenever I’m away from home.

I posted a picture of our prepared chicken to Instagram stories. “DAMN looking might fine” Johnny wrote. It always brings me immense pleasure and pride to be representing a part of the world that’s flavors and music and people feel like home—are so much home for me.

After dinner I learned that November is Mizrahi Heritage Month—a celebration of the Middle Eastern Jews. These Jews originate from various parts of Africa, Central Asia, and Arabic nations, most of which were, at some point or another, expelled from their homelands and landed in Israel. These Jews are not considered white—just like my own Sephardic origins. I love Mizrahi music. This music brings my soul home. It is a mixture of instruments and vocals and passion that simply vibrates from the center of my heart out to my skin giving me goosebumps. To me, this music represents the mishmash that is being a Jew, but also even further, the mishmash that is being a human on Planet Earth. To hear this music is to begin to understand the nuance and progression of humanity.

I have always envisioned this big dance party in the desert, all of us coming from our proud, different, lineages and finding common ground through the beat of the drums and melodies of our voices. My bare feet would kick up sand and we’d all move our hips, sharing dance moves and body shapes that our ancestors had passed down to us. And we’d gift each other with our stories through this—teaching and then receiving, and maybe beginning to understand. Celebratory ululations would fill the warm night sky, and we’d all laugh together, all of us unique pieces of the tapestry, joining together as one.

I put on a playlist, curated by Spotify, of all the Mizrahi music in my music library and I danced. Even though my chest still feels so heavy with grief, I moved and I smiled. I grabbed Dan and embraced him in our living room. I turned up the volume, attempting to let this joyful music permeate my entire being. Maybe, if we all listened more—to the music, to people’s rich stories of their unique heritages, to their celebrations and what they love, maybe then we may begin to learn that we are all, above everything, human beings.

Shabbat Shalom.

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