Who can forget the scene in Khaled Hosseini’s second beloved novel, A THOUSAND SPLENDID SUNS, when Maryam excitedly tells her father that she made Sabzi and he praises her for it. We all felt her pride in this achievement but knew that this joy was not going to last long for poor Maryam. This may be why Sabzi is the second most ordered dish in Afghan restaurants or, it could be that it’s so damn delicious.

If you’ve ever cooked spinach, you know that it reduces down to nothing in an instant. In Afghanistan, cleaning, chopping and handling enough fresh spinach to feed our large family was a morning’s worth of thankless work for my mom, Jeja. Once we moved to the US, she adopted frozen spinach as a respectable alternative and has never looked back.