Iraqi · Baghdad
Tbit
Baghdadi chicken & rice
The Iraqi-Jewish Shabbat pot that cooks low overnight, so the rice turns deep gold and the whole house smells of cardamom by morning.
A table set in Baghdad, Bombay & Istanbul.
Two decades behind a bakery counter, and a lifetime of family recipes carried across three countries — finally written down, the way my mother and grandmothers made them.
20 yrs
3
Sun
Everyday recipes
Weeknight dinners and big-batch classics, simplified so anyone can make them.
From the bakery
Challah, baklava, ma'amoul — twenty years of muscle memory, finally written down.
The holiday table
Shabbat and the festivals — the food, and how to set the table around it.
Lately on the table
All recipes → From the bakery
Ma'amoul
date-filled semolina cookies
Tender semolina cookies pressed in a wooden mold and filled with spiced dates — the cookie I made by the hundred at the bakery for every holiday.
Turkish · Istanbul
Su böreği
layered cheese börek
Silky boiled-then-baked pastry sheets layered with feta and parsley — the Istanbul classic that eats like lasagne's pastry cousin.
Indian · Bombay
Aloo makala
crisp whole fried potatoes
Whole potatoes simmered, then fried slow and low until glassy-crisp outside and soft within — the Baghdadi-Bombay table's most fought-over dish.
From the bakery
Pistachio baklava
rose & honey syrup
Paper-thin filo layered by hand with green pistachios and bathed in rose-honey syrup — the bakery bestseller, twenty years running.
Turkish · Aegean
Yaprak sarma
stuffed grape leaves
Grape leaves rolled tight around herbed rice and pine nuts, cooked low with lemon and olive oil — a whole quiet afternoon, worth every minute.
Three kitchens, one table.
I'm Tamara. I learned to cook from women who never measured a thing — a grandmother who carried Baghdad's kitchen to Bombay, a mother who brought it on to Vancouver, and a mother-in-law who set all of Istanbul on the table. I spent twenty years running my own bakery, and these days I cook for the people I love around our table in San Diego — which is the part I loved all along.
Every recipe here is the real one: tested in a busy home kitchen, written down at last so it doesn't get lost.
Sofra SOF-rah — in both Turkish and Arabic, the table where everyone gathers to eat. The one place all three kitchens meet.
Baghdad
my grandmother
Bombay
my mother
Istanbul
my husband's mother
San Diego
our table
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One tested family recipe a week — the story behind it, and how to bring it to your own table.