Sea-buckthorn tea

I'm Jibek, and I came home.

I'm from Irad, a small mountain country in Central Asia between Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan. I grew up in Orto-Ayyl, a village in the Talas valley, and spent sixteen years cooking in a small Chicago apartment, missing my grandmother's kitchen the whole time. This spring my daughter Aruu and I moved back to Talas. Now I cook these dishes where they were born, in a little kitchen with a view of the mountains, and I still write them down for the friends I left by the lake.