Truffles

This truffle season was the best in years, this man told me at the Baghdad Cafe, in the Syrian desert, near the road to the Iraqi border. Bedouin wisdom says winter thunder and lightning brings truffles. This was a stormy winter in the desert.

In the spring, herders scour the rocky moonscape for the delicacy -- called kema in Arabic -- and carry it to markets, like the Baghdad Cafe. In Aleppo, I ate a truffle kebab: alternating slices of truffle with tender chunks of ground lamb. Mmmmmm.