With a dash of love for home
Syrian refugee’s recipe for life mixes kitchen talent with social cooking sessions
Wafdia Ibrahim’s favorite part of her home in Homs, Syria, was the garden in her backyard, where she grew fresh herbs, fruits and vegetables. But when civil war erupted in 2011, her beloved garden was scattered with bullets. Ibrahim and her family of seven fled their country months after the war began, leaving most of their belongings behind. But Ibrahim made sure to to grab her antique falafel scooper and a 200-page cookbook filled with family recipes passed down through generations.
Ibrahim’s hands fly over cutting boards, chopping and slicing vegetables in mere seconds without looking at her fingers to make sure they don’t go with the produce — her natural instinct tells her when to stop see-sawing the chef ’s knife she carries. Her arms wave over hot stove tops, steaming pots and sizzling pans, unfazed by the oil and flames that threaten to consume her black sleeves. She effortlessly stuffs her falafelscooping tool with her freshly prepared mix, dropping six balls into the angry, popping, hot oil in the time that her onlookers manage to prepare one ball.
“I’ve followed this falafel all over Houston,” Sophy Ashworth, who hosted the dinner party where Ibrahim cooked on a recent Saturday evening at her West University Place home, said of Ibrahim’s falafel. It’s crunchy on the outside, soft on the inside, and an explosion of fresh herbs and garlic bursts into your mouth with each bite.
“You can never go back after trying Wafdia’s falafel,” she said. “And it’s the perfect after-school snack for the kids.”
Every few months, Ibrahim harnesses her cooking skills to soulfully prepare a meal native to her hometown for a group of dinner guests. For Ibrahim, it’s not about making money (she charges $50 a person for the meal).
“The most important thing is that they enjoy the food; money doesn’t matter,” she said in Arabic.
Ibrahim’s outfit never changes: a long-sleeved, floor-length black dress — sometimes with embroidery — and a black hijab that frames her tan, leathered face. Sometimes her eyes cloud over, signaling her mind may be floating to darker places, darker memories. She is intense. And she is incredibly warm.
Ibrahim, 51, grew up in Homs, a major metropolitan city in Syria that sits near the border with Lebanon and is about 100 miles north of the capital, Damascus. She has been cooking for as long as she can remember. Her father died when she was 10, so she started cooking for her four siblings so her mother could focus on working.
Cooking was never really her passion — it has been a necessity.
Ibrahim and her husband, Khalaf Alajil, had a one-floor, three-bedroom home near the main alSiteen Street in Homs. Her favorite part of her house was her garden, where she grew herbs, fruits and vegetables to use in her cooking and sell at the convenience store she and her husband owned.
But when the civil war began, al-Siteen Street, and Homs in general, became locations of major violence and devastation. Civilians took to the streets to protest the authoritarian rule of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad; his army responded with force. Factional divides began soon after, and eight years later the bloodshed hasn’t stopped.
“The gunshots would come, and we wouldn’t know where they were coming from,” Ibrahim said, imitating the noises they would make.
Life became unbearable soon thereafter. Ibrahim said she couldn’t walk anywhere without getting stopped at multiple checkpoints and asked where she was going. Soon, she heard that girls were getting kidnapped — she has four daughters.
So the family left for Jordan in 2011, renting a house near a refugee camp in Erbil, before eventually coming to Houston in 2015.
“I didn’t want to leave,” she said.
The 10 or so women who attended the dinner party were in awe. Most of them working moms, the ladies unwound with glasses of wine and chatted, occasionally daring to enter Ibrahim’s space to chop a vegetable or two or take a whiff of her masterpieces. The loyalists excitedly waited for the food they raved about to first-timers, claiming it to be more delicious than any restaurant’s.
Zainab Alajil, Ibrahim’s 22-year-old daughter, clearly inherited her mother’s ease in the kitchen. Her eyes roamed the room as she quickly sliced white mushrooms, eventually sticking her tongue out and rolling her eyes to express her boredom.
She threw the mushrooms into a pot in which she was sautéeing ground beef with onions, provoking a billowing steam that carried the strong aromas of garlic, cumin and allspice. Coals were being heated on two stove tops, which sent occasional sparks up into the air. In the meantime, Ibrahim prepared hummus and dakous — a spicy tomato To host a cooking class with Wafdia Ibrahim, contact Interfaith Ministries Women’s Empowerment Team at ckrane@imgh.org.
sauce to top the star dish of the night, mandi.
Alajil turned to the pot of rice — the base for the mandi — and splashed it with green, red and blue food dye.
“Do you have the silver thing?” she yelled to Ashworth over the music and chatter — one of many tests of her English proficiency throughout the night.
“Foil!” Ashworth understood, running to grab her a roll.
Alajil placed a square of foil in the middle of the rice and placed the coal on top, then covered the pot. She placed the remaining coals on the tray of chicken legs roasting in the oven, basted in a thick tomato paste — to top the colorful rice for the mandi dish.
Alajil has a cheery, round face that almost always has a smile on it.
Unlike her mother, Alajil cooks out of joy, not always necessity. She learned the trade from her older sister Tahani, and has a camera roll filled with pictures she proudly takes of her finished dishes.
Alajil also cooks for her job at The Halal Guys, the popular chicken and gyro fast-casual restaurant. On top of her work and learning English, she’s studying to become a nurse.
On the back patio of their west Houston apartment, Alajil has multiple pots in which she’s growing her own produce: mint, parsley, basil, tomatoes, eggplant, cucumber. On a recent afternoon, she plucked a mint leaf and inhaled its fresh smell before chewing it, letting its earthy and minty flavor explode on her taste buds.
Ibrahim and her family had a picturesque life in Syria.
They had a community, a social life. People were always walking in and out of their house, the front door of which remained open at all times. The neighbors were of all different ethnicities and religions, but it didn’t matter — they were one big family, one big support system.
But their house caught fire after they fled the war, all of their furnishings still inside. Another family repaired the damage and moved in. Their house is no longer theirs.
Ibrahim picked up her falafel scooper and bowl of falafel mix. In rhythmic motions, she spooned the mix into the scooper, poked a hole in the middle of the circular shape with her thumb, then neared the uncooked falafel to the surface of bubbling oil, which greeted the falafel with a tsssss when she dropped it in .
She and her daughter smeared hummus onto plates and topped it with olive oil and spices; spooned out the ground beef cooked with mushrooms; and topped the colorful rice with the baked chicken, fresh parsley, fried almonds and lime slices.
An echo of “mmmmm” and “wow” circulated across the table as Ibrahim and Alajil’s cooking greeted the Houstonians’ taste buds with immense flavor. The guests had come to a consensus: This was some of the best food — if not the best — they had ever eaten.
Adjusting to the U.S. has been a challenge for Ibrahim and her family.
She and her husband came home from an English class on a recent weekday exhausted. In the nearly four years they’ve been living in Houston, they have managed to learn how to speak broken English, formulating choppy sentences with just enough words to get the point across.
Khalaf, Ibrahim’s husband, works at Walmart. Ibrahim has been using her cooking to attempt to generate an income, through her cooking classes and almost weekly bake sales at the Antidote Cafe in the Heights.
They’re grateful for the opportunities they and their kids have in the U.S., but they miss the warmth and simplicity of life in
Syria — their ever-present neighbors, the friendliness of strangers, the strong support they received from their community. And the food.
Ibrahim sat back with a satisfied smile — seeing her guests enjoy her cooking was the most rewarding experience.
Her guests asked if the food was even tastier in Syria.
“It’s so much more delicious there; the vegetables are actually vegetables,” she said, her eyes widening with enthusiasm. “And you can get fresh chickpeas that haven’t been sitting in water — you wouldn’t believe how delicious it is.”
Her smile twinged with nostalgia, and her eyes glazed over as her mind drifted to memories of her homeland.