Sara remembers watching her grandmother roll dough for Sambousek
Get to know Sara in this Q&A, and get her 🧀Meat and Cheese Sambousek, Tuesday (12/22) from 6:30-10PM!
Q: What can you tell us about the dish you’re making and what inspired it?
Sara: The dish I’m making was the first thing I made when I was homesick. It is a delicious puff pastry stuffed with either meat or cheese. It is proof that wherever you go, someone, somewhere, has a dumpling of some sort; and that’s basically what it is in its essence.
Q: Who do you think about when you make this dish?
Sara: Sambousek reminds me of home. It reminds me of my grandmother in her kitchen rolling dough. It reminds me of my mother making the filing early in the morning.
Sara’s 🧀Meat and Cheese Sambousek, Tuesday (12/22) from 6:30-10PM. Flaky filo dough filled with a ground beef mix or cheese.
Q: Where did you grow up? What kind of food did you grow up with?
Sara: I grew up in Jordan with Arabic food.
Q: What’s your cooking background?
Sara: I was my grandmother’s favorite, so I began watching her cook at a very early age. Once I could turn on a stove, I began to cook. My grandmother and I would spend hours preparing for meals and shopping for ingredients.
When I was in college, I worked at a restaurant as one of the cooks for a few years. After college, I moved to Mexico and created a whole community around me of people wanting to learn about food. I found a lot of similarities between Mexican and Arabic food and so I began to offer cooking classes to my friends and community. When I moved back to Chicago, I got my food handlers licence and started cooking for friends and family again.
Q: What’s your favorite food memory?
Sara: My favorite memories are when I tried something for the first time, walking around spice markets back home, eating the most delicious sandwich on the train tracks in Switzerland, walking through a tiny door in Italy to the best pizza restaurant. Too many to count.
Q: Anything else we should know about your cooking?
Sara: I make food because I love it. I love bringing people new flavors and introducing them to alternative ways of cooking. All my food is made with the best ingredients I can find and imported spices that my mum personally flew on a plane from Jordan!
Get Sara’s 🧀Meat and Cheese Sambousek, Tuesday (12/22) from 6:30-10PM on Shmeal!
