Nuseirat, Gaza – As all of Gaza suffered under Israel’s siege and food ran out, my family had to figure out ways to make small supplies of food stretch further, and compensate for ingredients that were no longer available.
We experimented with new recipes, created combinations we never imagined trying, and managed to come up with some solutions that would help us a bit to endure the harsh realities of famine and survive as best we could.
Turning pasta and lentils into bread
When the wheat flour ran out, we resorted to using pasta to make our bread, like almost everyone in Gaza.
Bread is a core part of our eating habits, and the current famine means there is nothing else in the market – no fruits, vegetables, eggs, cheese, chicken, or meat.
People here prefer using pasta for bread-making rather than cooking and eating it as is. Bread can be eaten at every meal, unlike pasta, which is usually meant for lunch.
We also genuinely believe bread is more filling and keeps us satisfied longer.
We first tried making pasta bread at the beginning of June. My brother Fady’s wife, Doha, contacted her family, who had been living on pasta bread for a while, and they gave her the recipe.
Doha started working on the recipe with the help of my mum, Saham.
They soaked some of the pasta until it became soft, then added a little wheat flour and kneaded it well until it came together as a dough. It takes much more effort and patience, and the texture is a bit different from bread made with just flour.
After shaping the dough as usual, my brother, Fady, 35, went out to bake the bread in a communal oven, where he had to wait in line for about 30-45 minutes for his turn.
When Fady came back with the bread, it was a crucial moment for us – we were all curious about the taste. The bread looked not much different from our usual bread, which gave us a sense of reassurance.
When we shared a loaf to taste it, the flavour was acceptable, and we were happy – it would serve the purpose.
But as more and more people in Gaza relied on pasta to make bread, pasta became scarce and its price skyrocketed over the next few weeks, just as flour had done.
Many people, my family included, could no longer afford it, and we found ourselves desperately looking for another substitute in July.
So we thought: Maybe lentils would work for making “fake” bread in Gaza.
Fady, following a recipe from a friend, ground lentils into flour at the mill and then brought that to us to knead with a bit of wheat flour, as we had done with the pasta.
But lentil dough was far harder to work with than pasta dough, taking my mum and me forever to turn into dough. And it tasted terrible – actually more like lentils, not bread.
We tried to ignore the strange lentil taste while eating, but we failed; it was deeply unpleasant. Yet we had to eat whatever was available; we simply don’t have the luxury of choice.
The next day, the lentil bread became even worse; it got drier, harder, and each bite felt like a rock in your throat.
We resorted to warming it over the fire to make it softer and edible, then tried to eat it with Dukkah, our standard meal for breakfast and dinner.
Dukkah is a mix of toasted wheat and spices, like dried coriander and dill seeds, ground up and combined with sesame seeds – but in these lean times, we make it with lentils instead, like everyone else in Gaza.
My brother Fady started joking – terribly – about how we were eating bread made of lentils stuffed with dukkah, which, of course, was also made of lentils.
Although many people kept making lentil bread as their only remaining choice, we preferred the taste of cooked lentils on their own rather than in bread form; we never made it again.
A burger treat, but faked
On May 11, I was volunteering at a shelter in Deir el-Balah and decided to visit my sister Fidaa when I was done, since I was only a few minutes from her place.
My 37-year-old sister works as a WASH officer and lives in a shared shelter with her colleagues, provided by her workplace after she lost her nice home in Khan Younis.
Fidaa was in her small cooking space in the shared kitchen, getting ready to prepare something.
When I asked her, she gave me a sarcastic smile and said: “Fake burgers from canned meat and lentils. I found the recipe in a local Facebook group.”
She wanted to make it as a special treat for her four little children – Basma, Ward, Assem, and Omar Abu Daqqa.
I started helping her shape the patties, but they weren’t easy to deal with, as the canned meat we used wasn’t made for such purposes.
It was ready-to-eat and was so different from fresh meat in both texture and certainly taste, so we added some meat spices, hoping it would give it a touch of familiar taste.
When we finished shaping the patties, my sister’s husband, Anas, went to the balcony to chop wood and light the fire for frying them, while I stayed in the room with the kids, playing as we eagerly waited for lunch.
As soon as the burgers were ready, my sister brought them – again with the same sarcastic smile on her face. Their smell wasn’t bad, but their texture was disastrous. The round patties were so soft and crumbly that Fidaa could barely remove a few intact ones from the pan.
We had no buns to put the burgers in, so we made them into sandwiches using everyday flatbread with some cucumbers on top.
When we first tasted it, we agreed that it didn’t taste too bad, but with the next few bites, we weren’t so sure.
I still don’t know if our fake burgers were good, but they were eaten – every one of them.
Snacks
As an attempt to ease the weight of this cruel famine for ourselves and our children, we tried making some fake snacks.
In June, Doha made chocolate spread from the halva that we used to get in the aid kits before the complete blockade.
Halva is a well-known sweet in the region, made of tahini and sweeteners. It can be good, or it can taste cheap like the ones in the aid kits.
Doha added water to the halva and mixed it until it was a liquid sauce, then added a lot of cocoa and heated the mixture over the open fire.
We could still taste the halva in the spread, yet the cocoa made it tasty, and we happily made our breakfast sandwiches with it.
My little nephews, Mohammed and Adam, were overjoyed and asked their mum to keep making it, but she only managed to make it once or twice before the cocoa ran out.
As a salty treat, we made fake chips by frying pasta and adding spices to it – a famous famine snack.
One Friday, my friend and neighbour, Afnan Baraka, roasted chickpeas as a substitute for nuts, then seasoned them with spices.
Nuts are a very popular snack among people in Gaza. We used to enjoy nuts anytime, anywhere, salted and flavoured with various spices.
When Afnan made the chickpea nuts, it was a new invention for us all. We truly enjoyed it and found it a really good substitute. Yet, it’s not easy to prepare often, as it all is made over an open fire, consuming time, effort and many smoky tears.
My family often jokes that we eat many different forms of food, but they’re all basically the same things: Chickpeas, pasta and, most prominently, lentils.
They were common in the aid kits distributed by UNRWA before the blockade in March. However, even these foodstuffs have now become scarce and expensive.
My sister, Mariam, joked bitterly that we should be grateful for pasta and legumes for holding out with us and helping us create substitutes for as long as they did.
But for me, and I think for many others, we feel a deep need for compensation.
When this terrible blockade is over, I want to eat everything and anything – except those things I ate during these merciless months.
I want compensation. Compensation for every time I craved fruit, vegetables, eggs, chicken, or anything fresh and found none. Compensation for every moment I was dizzy and weak from hunger.
Compensation for every time I craved anything I wanted to eat but only found lentils, in their various forms.
