Read my essay "Love and Labne"

[image description: A bowl of savory yogurt with parsley sprinkled in the center. Around the bowl is whole cloves of garlic and an unpeeled lemon.]

I’m generally a hungry person, more often abiding by the "I could eat” philosophy than not. I find food to be an opportunistic venture: I won’t go out of my way to make it, especially considering my lackluster cooking skills, but if it can be easily acquired I’ll partake.

The holidays have me thinking about food more than usual, though the food on my mind isn’t the traditional holiday fare. I’m always searching for the food of my youth: the food my Palestinian grandmother made before she died; before I became estranged from that side of my family.

I thought the food that most evoked memories for me was grape leaves, but more recently I’ve found there are others too, namely a savory yogurt called labne.

I wrote about it in my essay “Love and Labne,” published in the literary magazine The Other Side of Hope. I’d appreciate it if you’d give it a read!