Right after we made the Halway Gula Zerd, my friend Raz showed me how to make another Kurdish dessert: Halway Ard, or “flour dessert.” It’s a really simple and delicious recipe that is traditionally made for new breast-feeding mothers (though of course it can be enjoyed by everyone all the time…). I’ve posted the recipe in our recipe bank since it's the season to be thinking about our mothers.

We used regular flour, but Raz says that it should be made with barley flour. The texture and taste reminds me of a barley dessert that we are obsessed with at Tsampa, a Tibetan restaurant in New York- except there they serve it with yogurt instead of toasted almonds.    

As we were filming the process of making the dessert, the power went out- luckily everyone uses gas stoves- so we could keep on cooking! Power outages are a common occurrence throughout Iraq; though power is much more steadily available in the Kurdish region, there are still several hours a day that houses have no electricity.  Each family has to get power from multiple sources- so for example they might get power from the national grid at night, and power from a neighborhood generator during the day. Even houses like Raz's that have a third private generator are not exempt from the occasional outage--- we didn't let that slow us down... The video below proves you really can cook in the dark!