The Joy of Homemade Date Bread and Tea: A Childhood Revival

As I stand in my kitchen, surrounded by the familiar sights and scents of my childhood, I am filled with a sense of nostalgia and wonder. The aroma of freshly baked date bread wafts through the air, transporting me back to memories of afternoons spent sipping tea with family and friends in Somalia. My mother's date bread was always a staple at our gatherings, and I remember being fascinated by the way she could make it from scratch using just a few simple ingredients.

To make this delicious treat, one needs to keep the moisture in the dough intact, which can be done by wrapping it in plastic and storing it in a dry area. If the bread starts to get too dry, a quick trip to the oven at 300 degrees Fahrenheit for a few minutes will restore its moisture and texture. I love how easy it is to make this bread - simply mix together flour, dates, cinnamon, cardamom, cumin, and black tea bags, then shape into a loaf and bake until golden brown.

As I prepare the date bread, I am reminded of my own childhood experiences with making tea for company. My mother would often let me take charge of brewing the tea, and I would carefully measure out the cinnamon, cloves, and cardamom to create the perfect blend. She taught me that a little bit of spice can go a long way in adding depth and warmth to the tea. To this day, I love experimenting with different spices and flavors to create unique blends that are both soothing and invigorating.

One of my favorite things about making tea is the process of boiling water and then carefully measuring out the tea leaves. It's almost meditative, watching the leaves unfurl as they steep in the hot water. My mother would often tell me that this was a skill that could be learned with practice, and I found myself getting more comfortable with it as I grew older.

As my date bread bakes to perfection, I take a moment to appreciate the simplicity of this recipe. It's a testament to the power of ingredients and their ability to evoke memories and emotions long after they're gone. The combination of vanilla and dates is particularly delightful, transporting me back to afternoons spent snuggled up by the fireplace with a good book.

Now that our flour has disappeared, I'm determined to make more date bread using this simple recipe. It's amazing how easy it is to shape and mold into a loaf, and the resulting texture is both soft and dense at the same time. A little pat of goat cheese on top adds a creamy touch that elevates the flavors even further.

As I take my first bite of warm date bread, I'm struck by its earthy, sweet flavor profile. The vanilla adds a smooth and velvety texture, while the cardamom and cinnamon provide a subtle warmth that lingers long after the last crumb is gone. It's like biting into a piece of my childhood, wrapped up in a delicious bundle of spices and flavors.

And speaking of flavors, I've been experimenting with making coffee using Ethiopian beans. My grandmother, who hails from Yonkers, taught me how to roast them to perfection, and now I can make my own bunna, the traditional Ethiopian coffee that's an integral part of our culture. There's something magical about watching the green beans transform into a rich, dark liquid that's both energizing and soothing.

As I savor each bite of date bread, paired with a steaming cup of tea or coffee, I'm filled with a sense of gratitude for these simple pleasures in life. They remind me of my childhood, of family gatherings, and of the love that was shared around the table. And as I look around my kitchen, now filled with the aromas of freshly baked bread and brewing coffee, I know that I'll be making many more memories like these for years to come.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enthe real story of global culinary tradition can be found in the kitchens of everyday women cooking for their families so much so that i wrote a book about it featuring grandmothers from different african countries sharing traditional recipes from their homeland now i want to share my take on some of these classic african dishes for you to enjoy welcome to hawa at home hi i'm hal hassan and today i'm making a date bread from my home country and also my cookbook in bibi's kitchen date is one of my favorite favorite fruits it's something that i grew up on it's something that somali people eat a lot and muslims all across the world i'm so excited to be sharing this recipe because it reminds me so much of my childhood so let's get into the recipe i've got my oven at 350 i'm going to go ahead and coat the bottom of my pan there we go i've got about 12 dates here i'll pit these dates besides banana are some of my favorite fruits and this is not a recipe that belongs to a bb in the book this is a recipe that was developed for the book 24 recipes in the book are from grandmothers and the rest are from uh recipes that i developed and so i was really interested in this bread because one it comes together quickly and it bakes fast uh it to me seemed like a very easy thing to teach a new audience but also i grew up as a little girl loving dates dates are native to the middle east and northern africa they're eaten often in places like morocco muslim people eat them for iftar which is the evening meal during ramadan so we eat a lot of dates so many of the recipes in somalia feature date often times date is a way that we gather around to have conversation and over tea together dates from my upbringing were always present in our home which is a huge snack for somalis um when company comes you know americans have cheese plates somalis have a plate full of dates you know some of the history about dates is that it is a fruit that often muslims used to break fast it's one that the prophet muhammad had introduced to to muslims and so in that way i was really interested in it dates are not technically a dry fruit they're a lot more moist than say apricots they're often found in the produce aisle at your local grocery also they're the oldest cultivated fruit these little guys and girls have been around for over 6 000 years so keep that in mind so they serve a lot of purposes i use them in the morning time in my smoothies the medjool dates are also on the sweeter side they're also very dense and meaty so they make for a great add-on to desserts can can i please have a half a pound of medjool dates yeah thank you i like that why not medjool dates are my favorite not only do i use them in my cooking but i eat them as a snack most days i also use them to sweeten up almost everything and so it's so fun to see a natural medjool date and then a different variation of it i've never seen them like this so this is really interesting to me it looks like they're still on like a little branch all of this i'm told is imported here so this is incredible to see a store of this size carrying these many variations of dates medjool dates might be a little bit harder to find know that you can substitute any of the recipes with apricots they're a lot easier to find available at most supermarkets again it serves as a flavor agent in the same way that the dates do it's it's a little sweet so i'm gonna take all of our dates in here while my dates are there i'm gonna go ahead and put in a little bit of water to soften them and a little baking soda the baking soda helps counteract the tannins in the dates i'm just gonna throw one teaspoon of baking soda in there it softens them and it makes them sweeter and do a half a teaspoon of salt so now that i've got my dates softening i'm gonna go ahead and start on the rest of the recipe i'm gonna use a big bowl to mix our ingredients together so i'm gonna do about four tablespoons of butter which is a half a stick just wanna make sure it's room temperature so it's easy to to fold in i'll add sugar i'm gonna use a handheld mixer but if you have another one that's okay as well so be sure to beat this all together until it's really creamy i'm gonna go ahead now and get my egg plus my vanilla and i want to make sure i beat this in together very well before adding my flour and my dates i'm going to do two teaspoons of vanilla this vanilla comes from madagascar madagascar produces about 80 percent of our vanilla it's rich in texture it's smooth it's expensive but worth it i love it i use it in everything i use it in my morning juices my smoothies i use it in my cooking so madagascar is the number one producer of vanilla in the world and the number one importer of vanilla in the world um hence why their vanilla is so expensive at the grocery store you know it is for them it's a flavoring agent and it touches almost every single dish whether it's their lobster there's a lobster sauce that we make in the book where the vanilla is a big part of it there's a papaya treat where a vanilla bean sauce is a big part of it and so it shows up in many different ways it shows up in dessert it also shows up in big glamorous dishes like our lobster our lobster recipe all right it's really creamy i'm gonna go ahead and fold in my dates oh they smell yummy they look great i'm also gonna go ahead and add my flour this is about two cups all right this is an arm workout so get ready this batter is thicker than most quick breads you're used to but that's okay you just want to fold this together until the flour disappears i could already smell the dates and the vanilla and this batter often looks like cookie dough so if it's really dry don't worry that's exactly how it's supposed to look the dates will make this bread moist as it sits another trick to keep the moisture in is that you can wrap it in plastic store it somewhere out of the sun and in a dry area if it gets a little dry just throw it in the oven again at 300 for a few minutes i love love love eating this date bread with sha which is a somali tea just it's like our chai it's got cardamom cumin cinnamon just the black tea i had vivid memories of making tea i think four-year-old hollow was above you know i was the second eldest i have a brother who's older than me by a year and a month and so we're basically twins and i i have a hard time trying to remember what his job was because i don't really remember him being you know anything but like our so-called protector but my jobs were really you know to make tea for company so i remember a lot of cinnamon a lot of cloves love cloves for my teas cinnamon there was in there i don't remember a lot of times when my mother said like that's too much cinnamon or that's too many cloves um you know i cardamon uh i would put in a bunch of bags of black tea and then she would add more water in it so i did a lot of that and then i boiled a lot of pasta water again things you can't mess up as a child you know so sometimes before i make my shop i'll boil a big pot of cinnamon cloves cardamon a little cumin all whole and i'll let the air get moisturized since it's been so dry and we've been staying home a lot i've been doing that about once a week to soften the air in our house so now that our flour has disappeared i'm gonna go ahead and put it in my pan you could do little by little and just pat it down this is actually my favorite part i love getting my hands dirty again don't stress if it feels or looks like a cookie dough that's how it's supposed to look it's super easy to make it's really really simple the ingredients are all available at your local supermarket so i'm going to put it in the oven at 350 for about 40 minutes or until my toothpick is dry waiting for the date bread to bake is also a good time to prepare your favorite warm beverage to go with it i prefer to have tea with my date bread but many of my friends enjoy it with coffee so when i was researching the book um i spent a lot of time with the grandmother of a yonkers called magnet and she taught me a lot about how to roast beans coffee beans to make the bunna which is the coffee that ethiopians drink so i can i could take these home myself and roast them right so i can make my ethiopian yes eritrean coffee my bunna okay starts out this green going on to being that was the very first time even though i had grown around grown up around the culture of ethiopian and eritrean people that i actually got to roast my own buna and got to serve people sit at you know at the adult table and and pass around the coffee in that way so those are like small bits that i picked up from her so now that our bread has baked for 40 minutes i let it cool and now i'm gonna go ahead and serve myself i also did make myself some tea so i'll be having it with that smells so wonderful in here the whole kitchen right now smells like vanilla and dates really does feel like my childhood home in here so let's see remember this is a look how beautiful that looks this is a treat that can be eaten for lunch or after lunch as a snack it could be eaten for breakfast it could also be eaten as a snack in the evening so as a topping you can use ricotta you can use goat cheese cream cheese a little bit of honey today i'm gonna use goat cheese because that's what i have at home okay i'm so excited spread that all over you can never have enough goat cheese don't be shy feels like a treat that my mom would make for me so see and then of course my my somali aka chai cardamon human clothes a little cinnamon date bread it's sweet it's earthy it's smooth mmm this is warm it's got some savoriness to it from the vanilla it tastes incredible and it was so easy to make the combination of the vanilla and the dates is incredible it reminds me so much of my childhood the tea adds a different layer but if you're you know if you have coffee at home use that as well and remember you can wrap this in plastic and it'll keep for a little bit longer because the moisture from the dates really does keep the bread for a little bit longer it tastes just like my mother's and remember if you start dancing that's a side effect of the date bread youthe real story of global culinary tradition can be found in the kitchens of everyday women cooking for their families so much so that i wrote a book about it featuring grandmothers from different african countries sharing traditional recipes from their homeland now i want to share my take on some of these classic african dishes for you to enjoy welcome to hawa at home hi i'm hal hassan and today i'm making a date bread from my home country and also my cookbook in bibi's kitchen date is one of my favorite favorite fruits it's something that i grew up on it's something that somali people eat a lot and muslims all across the world i'm so excited to be sharing this recipe because it reminds me so much of my childhood so let's get into the recipe i've got my oven at 350 i'm going to go ahead and coat the bottom of my pan there we go i've got about 12 dates here i'll pit these dates besides banana are some of my favorite fruits and this is not a recipe that belongs to a bb in the book this is a recipe that was developed for the book 24 recipes in the book are from grandmothers and the rest are from uh recipes that i developed and so i was really interested in this bread because one it comes together quickly and it bakes fast uh it to me seemed like a very easy thing to teach a new audience but also i grew up as a little girl loving dates dates are native to the middle east and northern africa they're eaten often in places like morocco muslim people eat them for iftar which is the evening meal during ramadan so we eat a lot of dates so many of the recipes in somalia feature date often times date is a way that we gather around to have conversation and over tea together dates from my upbringing were always present in our home which is a huge snack for somalis um when company comes you know americans have cheese plates somalis have a plate full of dates you know some of the history about dates is that it is a fruit that often muslims used to break fast it's one that the prophet muhammad had introduced to to muslims and so in that way i was really interested in it dates are not technically a dry fruit they're a lot more moist than say apricots they're often found in the produce aisle at your local grocery also they're the oldest cultivated fruit these little guys and girls have been around for over 6 000 years so keep that in mind so they serve a lot of purposes i use them in the morning time in my smoothies the medjool dates are also on the sweeter side they're also very dense and meaty so they make for a great add-on to desserts can can i please have a half a pound of medjool dates yeah thank you i like that why not medjool dates are my favorite not only do i use them in my cooking but i eat them as a snack most days i also use them to sweeten up almost everything and so it's so fun to see a natural medjool date and then a different variation of it i've never seen them like this so this is really interesting to me it looks like they're still on like a little branch all of this i'm told is imported here so this is incredible to see a store of this size carrying these many variations of dates medjool dates might be a little bit harder to find know that you can substitute any of the recipes with apricots they're a lot easier to find available at most supermarkets again it serves as a flavor agent in the same way that the dates do it's it's a little sweet so i'm gonna take all of our dates in here while my dates are there i'm gonna go ahead and put in a little bit of water to soften them and a little baking soda the baking soda helps counteract the tannins in the dates i'm just gonna throw one teaspoon of baking soda in there it softens them and it makes them sweeter and do a half a teaspoon of salt so now that i've got my dates softening i'm gonna go ahead and start on the rest of the recipe i'm gonna use a big bowl to mix our ingredients together so i'm gonna do about four tablespoons of butter which is a half a stick just wanna make sure it's room temperature so it's easy to to fold in i'll add sugar i'm gonna use a handheld mixer but if you have another one that's okay as well so be sure to beat this all together until it's really creamy i'm gonna go ahead now and get my egg plus my vanilla and i want to make sure i beat this in together very well before adding my flour and my dates i'm going to do two teaspoons of vanilla this vanilla comes from madagascar madagascar produces about 80 percent of our vanilla it's rich in texture it's smooth it's expensive but worth it i love it i use it in everything i use it in my morning juices my smoothies i use it in my cooking so madagascar is the number one producer of vanilla in the world and the number one importer of vanilla in the world um hence why their vanilla is so expensive at the grocery store you know it is for them it's a flavoring agent and it touches almost every single dish whether it's their lobster there's a lobster sauce that we make in the book where the vanilla is a big part of it there's a papaya treat where a vanilla bean sauce is a big part of it and so it shows up in many different ways it shows up in dessert it also shows up in big glamorous dishes like our lobster our lobster recipe all right it's really creamy i'm gonna go ahead and fold in my dates oh they smell yummy they look great i'm also gonna go ahead and add my flour this is about two cups all right this is an arm workout so get ready this batter is thicker than most quick breads you're used to but that's okay you just want to fold this together until the flour disappears i could already smell the dates and the vanilla and this batter often looks like cookie dough so if it's really dry don't worry that's exactly how it's supposed to look the dates will make this bread moist as it sits another trick to keep the moisture in is that you can wrap it in plastic store it somewhere out of the sun and in a dry area if it gets a little dry just throw it in the oven again at 300 for a few minutes i love love love eating this date bread with sha which is a somali tea just it's like our chai it's got cardamom cumin cinnamon just the black tea i had vivid memories of making tea i think four-year-old hollow was above you know i was the second eldest i have a brother who's older than me by a year and a month and so we're basically twins and i i have a hard time trying to remember what his job was because i don't really remember him being you know anything but like our so-called protector but my jobs were really you know to make tea for company so i remember a lot of cinnamon a lot of cloves love cloves for my teas cinnamon there was in there i don't remember a lot of times when my mother said like that's too much cinnamon or that's too many cloves um you know i cardamon uh i would put in a bunch of bags of black tea and then she would add more water in it so i did a lot of that and then i boiled a lot of pasta water again things you can't mess up as a child you know so sometimes before i make my shop i'll boil a big pot of cinnamon cloves cardamon a little cumin all whole and i'll let the air get moisturized since it's been so dry and we've been staying home a lot i've been doing that about once a week to soften the air in our house so now that our flour has disappeared i'm gonna go ahead and put it in my pan you could do little by little and just pat it down this is actually my favorite part i love getting my hands dirty again don't stress if it feels or looks like a cookie dough that's how it's supposed to look it's super easy to make it's really really simple the ingredients are all available at your local supermarket so i'm going to put it in the oven at 350 for about 40 minutes or until my toothpick is dry waiting for the date bread to bake is also a good time to prepare your favorite warm beverage to go with it i prefer to have tea with my date bread but many of my friends enjoy it with coffee so when i was researching the book um i spent a lot of time with the grandmother of a yonkers called magnet and she taught me a lot about how to roast beans coffee beans to make the bunna which is the coffee that ethiopians drink so i can i could take these home myself and roast them right so i can make my ethiopian yes eritrean coffee my bunna okay starts out this green going on to being that was the very first time even though i had grown around grown up around the culture of ethiopian and eritrean people that i actually got to roast my own buna and got to serve people sit at you know at the adult table and and pass around the coffee in that way so those are like small bits that i picked up from her so now that our bread has baked for 40 minutes i let it cool and now i'm gonna go ahead and serve myself i also did make myself some tea so i'll be having it with that smells so wonderful in here the whole kitchen right now smells like vanilla and dates really does feel like my childhood home in here so let's see remember this is a look how beautiful that looks this is a treat that can be eaten for lunch or after lunch as a snack it could be eaten for breakfast it could also be eaten as a snack in the evening so as a topping you can use ricotta you can use goat cheese cream cheese a little bit of honey today i'm gonna use goat cheese because that's what i have at home okay i'm so excited spread that all over you can never have enough goat cheese don't be shy feels like a treat that my mom would make for me so see and then of course my my somali aka chai cardamon human clothes a little cinnamon date bread it's sweet it's earthy it's smooth mmm this is warm it's got some savoriness to it from the vanilla it tastes incredible and it was so easy to make the combination of the vanilla and the dates is incredible it reminds me so much of my childhood the tea adds a different layer but if you're you know if you have coffee at home use that as well and remember you can wrap this in plastic and it'll keep for a little bit longer because the moisture from the dates really does keep the bread for a little bit longer it tastes just like my mother's and remember if you start dancing that's a side effect of the date bread you\n"