Cooking In the Red Zone

By Jackie Spinner
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, February 1, 2006

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.

The biggest challenge of cooking in Iraq was finding ingredients. Several of the larger grocery stores in Baghdad stocked American and imported goods. Fortunately, I had scouted the stores before it became too dangerous to go shopping so I had an idea of what was available.

"Bassam, do you guys have basil?" I asked one of our Iraqi translators while compiling a shopping list. However, Bassam's English vocabulary did not include basil. I tried to describe the plant's appearance and taste, but we were getting nowhere. I moved on to scallions and again struck out. Ultimately, I found a picture of a basil plant on the Internet and showed it to Bassam. "Oh," he said, "that is reehan ." From then on, whenever I needed something from the store I printed a picture and attached it to the shopping list.

We made everything from scratch in Baghdad: mayonnaise, salsa, salad dressing, cream of mushroom soup. I learned to break down dishes made back home and piece them back together without prepackaged foods and ingredients. In a soy-free world, I made vegetarian burgers from scratch. My macaroni and cheese tasted like my grandmother's -- nothing processed was in it.

My war zone meals were a way to bring everybody together -- Iraqi guards, translators and Western correspondents. We started each meal with a poem, our love of words uniting us in the midst of suicide bombings, mortar attacks and kidnapping threats.

Rajiv Chandrasekaran, the Baghdad bureau chief in 2003 and 2004, often asked me to cook when he grew tired of Iraqi food. "Why don't we make something else?" he would ask and then disappear in his room to work. I didn't mind. Although I was the only woman in the bureau for most of my time there, I like to cook, and it was something I could contribute beyond reporting.

I hesitated only after a kitchen mishap. When I turned on the stove to light the internal burner with a match, a ball of flame shot out of the oven, singeing my hair and eyebrows. The sound of the explosion brought two of our Iraqi staff, Dhia and Baldy, running into the kitchen. Dhia sniffed. "You smell baked," he announced. I wasn't hurt, but I had no hair left on my right arm. Rajiv had heard the commotion, too, and walked into the kitchen.

"What happened to the brownies?" he asked. I glared at him. "You're okay, too, right?" he responded, sheepishly. Baldy, whose real name was Mohammed, answered for me. "Mohammed Baldy. Jackie Baldy." I refused to light the stove myself again, but the next night I was back in the kitchen, baking banana bread with real bananas.

On Christmas Day in 2004, I spent the day in the kitchen after pulling "story duty" the night before. That was always the deal. When I cooked, I didn't write. We ended up with quite a feast: turkey, mashed potatoes and gravy, corn pudding, green bean casserole, broccoli and cheese. The only thing missing was a fruitcake. Part of the turkey was undercooked, so we had to cut around the pinkish meat. The mashed potatoes turned out slightly runny, more the consistency of pudding.

But we had our Christmas miracle. Muhnthir, our one-time chef, showed up with a Christmas yule log cake he had made for the occasion. We were a family, and we did what families do when estranged relatives show up for Christmas dinner. We welcomed him, and the green frosted log, with open arms.

Then we dug in.

Staff writer Jackie Spinner was a correspondent in Baghdad from May 2004 to November 2005. The full names of Iraqi staff are withheld for security reasons. This article is adapted from her book, "Tell Them I Didn't Cry: A Young Journalist's Story of Joy, Loss and Survival in Iraq" (Scribner, 2006).