![]() Stir in garlic, spices, salt and vinegar and set aside.Ģ / Stir in onion mixture. Add onion and cook, stirring occasionally, until onion is tender and silky but not browned, about 20 minutes. While the meat simmers, cook the aromatics: In a large skillet, heat oil over medium. Bring to a boil over high heat reduce to a medium and simmer quickly for 1 hour until chickpeas and meat are almost tender, but not quite. I’m grateful this stew we love now holds part of this beautiful place in it I plan to share it with Sarah’s family next summer.Ģ pounds boneless lamb leg, cut into 2-inch piecesġ pound fresh okra, sliced into 1-inch pieces crosswiseĨ ounces (about 2 cups) dried chickpeas, soaked overnightġ / In a large pot, combine lamb, okra, chickpeas, tomatoes, and chilies add 8 cups (2 quarts) water. Sometimes I serve it over rice or quinoa (to stretch it out, really), others plain. I make a giant double batch - as much as my biggest pots will hold–so I can freeze a ton and bring it out for a homerun dinner. To come up with this one, I combined a few different recipes I love, including the starting place, a Meat and Okra stew from Egypt called “Bamia Matbookha,” and arrived at this. I’m grateful I can now make family’s favorite stew, a recipe I created while in Dallas (where okra is omnipresent in summer). When I told Sarah this, she asked her dad to send me a box of his crop. I hope her place burrows itself into my sons’ memories as it has mine, giving to them the living dream my parents passed to me. It is the only place in summer I would exchange the wonderland that is summer in Seattle to experience. Next summer, I plan to take my boys to the farm to join Sarah as she brings her brood home, to get what we call “the cousins” together. Our families hold our friendship with similar pride as we do, marveling at its rarity and preciousness like the gem it is. Like a myth, its meaning is presented as the moral of many stories, most revolving around the unexpected reward of trying something new or taking a risk. Our friendship has come to represent to both of us a mythical kind of hope, rooted in going to summer camp and making a friend in the lunch line. We both agree that we hope we can foster friendships in this way for our kids, and wonder if we would be as astute as they were to understand how special our friendship was before we did. Without them, we wouldn’t have the friendship we do. Now, both of us with kids of our own, we talk about our friendship as it relates to our parents: how amazing it was that my parents sent me to visit her, how her mother came with her to my high school graduation. I vowed I would make it back one summer to see for myself, to pick tomatoes maybe and visit for her birthday, an annual family crab boil (which, funnily enough, she couldn’t eat then, and, even funnier, nor can I now). We were constantly discussing summer’s bursting fields, what they grew, how it was harvested, and, most importantly to our teenage selves, how Sarah and her beautiful sister would work alongside their endless supply of cute country boys in the field as a form of flirtation. Sarah’s dad is a farmer, so the conversation among the hosts for their houseguest always revolved around what was missing from my experience that I felt to be so full and incredible. ![]() And at the center of her family’s orbit was talk of food: Sarah’s allergies, of course, but also what was resting beneath the snow outside. It was fun, a kind that wouldn’t have existed within a hundred miles of my parent’s house. There, at the parties around bonfires, I was as exotic to her friends as they were to me. At Sarah’s house, I learned about the ghosts of the Civil War, how to drive on country roads in the blackness of night, and sisterhood. I came to Virginia for part of my education to escape home and find another, the first in a string I would try on in the years that followed. I would arrive to rural Virginia to the winter wonderland my Floridian hometown couldn’t provide, dressed in layers of summer clothes and wearing running shoes, the warmest footwear I had, that I only owned because doing so was in fashion at my high school. ![]() To stay in touch, my parents sent me to see her after Christmas for the following two years to spend the remainder of my vacation from school. I met Sarah at art camp in Michigan one summer between my freshman and sophomore years in high school. That the story didn’t happen I blame only on my ability to communicate its majesty, because it is a kind of beauty I’ve never known. I vividly remember pitching the story of my best friend Sarah and her family to the editors at Martha Stewart Living because of how idyllic and old-worldly her childhood and hometown is. ![]()
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