Cooking In the Red Zone

The explosion shook the hotel and nearly knocked the skillet off the stove. The guards ran toward my dank cooking space, and a few minutes later I was hovering in a stairwell, under their protection, to wait out a mortar attack while my onions burned.

After I returned to the kitchen -- a converted hotel room with a greasy stove and a dirty, blood-stained carpet -- I threw out the smoking onions and started over, now 20 minutes behind schedule but fortunately still intact.

This was the reality of cooking in the "Red Zone" -- the dangerous world that lies outside the secure "Green Zone" in Iraq. During my 13 months there as a correspondent for The Post, we sometimes had to flee the kitchen to take cover. Because the electricity shut off unexpectedly, I learned to keep a flashlight with me so I could watch ingredients simmer in the artificial spotlight. I was always grateful when the handle didn't fall off the pan.

Our kitchen, in addition to an ancient gas stove, was equipped with a freezer and a refrigerator that worked only when the power was on, a few hours each day. Frozen chicken thawed and froze, thawed and froze, hour after hour. (We survived the chicken, but don't try this at home.)

Yet I came to love my war zone kitchen; I volunteered to cook at least once a week. It was simple and familiar, comforting and gratifying. And now that I'm back home, I don't sweat a complicated recipe, a missing ingredient, a dirty stove. Cooking, I've learned, need not be precise. Precision suggests comfort, exactness, a sense of security. I'm all about the inexactitude of cooking. A little burned? A little cold? Who cares. We're alive! Throw in what you have and what you find. And don't talk organic eggs or wheat germ. Talk simple: green pepper, onions, garlic, a half-rotten tomato whose good half can be salvaged. Talk the language of my Baghdad kitchen.

I started cooking on Friday nights when our chef, Muhnthir, took the evening off (and later defected to CNN). The first time I offered to cook, I scanned the dusty cupboards for something I could throw together to go with a half-frozen chicken. The shelves held cans of peas that were past their expiration date, dried white beans that needed at least 10 hours of soaking, day-old bread, some canned peaches, boxes of pasta and plastic bins filled with green peppers, overripe tomatoes and onions. I whipped up a passable minestrone soup and served it with spaghetti in a homemade tomato sauce.

I had no sharp knives, no measuring spoons or cups and no cookbooks. I had just my hands and a teacup, and so I came to think in terms of a small palm of cumin, a handful and a half of rolled oats or three good shakes of soy sauce. I also had a stove with a dial so covered with grime that I couldn't tell the temperature at which my cookies were baking, even if I had been able to convert the Celsius reading to Fahrenheit without a calculator.

The only thing that was ever certain, particularly during the sweltering summer months in Iraq, was that I, myself, was baking quite nicely. The temperature inside the kitchen often exceeded 100 degrees. Compiling a Thai dinner of peanut noodles, baked chicken and onion pancakes for 30 guests left me dehydrated and exhausted. But we loved entertaining our journalistic colleagues, as well as the guards and translators we depended on for our stories and our lives.

After spending month after month in Iraq, we journalists craved the eclectic American food experience. We had hankerings for Cuban, Thai, Chinese, Mexican. We wanted food free of oil -- and for me, free of meat.

The first time I tasted one of the rice dishes prepared by our lunch cook, Um Mohammed, I detected liver chunks. "Oh, I can't eat this," I said, handing back the plate. "This is dirty rice," meaning New Orleans-style.

"Um Mohammed rice nooooo dirty," she replied, walking away, insulted.

"No, no," I called out. But it would have been futile to try to swim that cultural barrier. I was already an oddity as a vegetarian. Now I was a rude vegetarian.