Fatty Fatty Boom Boom: A Memoir of Food, Fat, and Family

by Rabia Chaudry

We always had pounds and pounds of ground beef stacked in the freezer, after all; we had to buy nearly a quarter of a cow at a time from the halal butcher, and we never had anything smaller than a twenty-pound sack of basmati rice at home. It wasn’t the regular, stodgier American white rice, which was probably best used in the recipe, but at that time I had no idea there was even a difference between them. We didn’t have parsley, we never used parsley, but we had a veritable harvest of cilantro Ami planted everywhere we moved. It seemed close enough. Worcestershire sauce? I had never heard of it. But we had soy sauce, and they looked similar, so that would do. Breadcrumbs weren’t ever a staple in our house, but I knew Ami added besan, chickpea flour, to her meatballs to keep them soft, so besan it was. If you know the show Nailed It!, in which contestants try to recreate exquisite dishes, often with disastrous results, well, my meatloaf “nailed it” decades before the show was a twinkle in the eye of a network executive. I seasoned the beef with spices as close to the recipe as possible and flattened it out on a piece of foil. I layered on steamed basmati rice and began rolling it up, like a meaty, garlicky yule log. Finally I topped it with plain ketchup because we didn’t have brown sugar to make the tomato sauce, which seemed like a weird thing to add to a meat dish anyway.