Reem Assil’s Recipes for a Family-Style Feast

    

My grandmother was the nexus of our family, and she always built these amazing, elaborate menus around us all coming over to her house. I'm just coming up on the first anniversary of her passing, a time that’s very sentimental to me, and one of the things that I’ve realized is that I'm continuing the work that she did. 

I’m using my kitchen, or food, as a way to build community, both at work and at home. I’m trying to figure out how to find my way back to the kitchen at home, because when I opened Reem’s I had pretty much no time to do my own cooking. Now, as I've become a mother and a different kind of leader, I'm trying to build a little bit more of those boundaries to be able to take care of myself.

Cooking at home is a different kind of cooking. I really do love it, but it stresses me out to figure out how to get home in time to cook. As a result, a lot of my meals are based on what I can put together very last minute, which is the way my mom, a working mom, cooked. 

I always imagined as I got older that my house would be the place where I could invite people over and cook these elaborate meals. Also, Arab-style cooking is very communal. There’s a feeling of abundance that’s my cooking style. I can't just make chicken breasts on rice. I have to make the whole stuffed chicken — it's just my style.

When I cook with Great Jones products in my own kitchen, I feel like I could be on a cooking show. They're just so pretty and yet still very functional. I feel I'm taking care of my kitchen. They don't burn or get scorched. They really retain their integrity.

Arab hospitality is sweet torture, as I would call it. It's feeding you until you cannot be fed anymore. It’s our virtue to stuff you, and we won’t take no for an answer. It's part of our duty; it's that central to our culture. I think it's also the way we survived for thousands of years — welcoming people into our homes and taking care of them. I try to embody that in everything that I do.