A little spice makes for a tasty culinary adventure

It's all the same raw materials: rice, oil, salt. Meat, onions, bread crumbs. Chicken in simmering water.

The difference was a spice here, a pepper there.

The idea was to turn a family meal into something more. A bit of culinary travel mixed into the annual gathering, however little I really knew about how to get us there.

Iraqi meatball and lentil soup. Rice cooked Iranian-style. Jerusalem kugel.

I was looking for inspiration. Maybe consolation. As always, exhilaration.

Obviously, I was flying blind. I'd never eaten any of these dishes, so there was no way to know how close I came or how far I missed. Neither had anyone sitting at my table, though, so all I really needed to do was satisfy.

The rice was something I'd tried once months ago but felt like it had eluded me. It's a near-mythical dish -- a pot of delicate, nutty basmati rice boiled and then slowly steamed and fried at once for hours, turned out with a delicate crust of crunch.

The crust is called tahdig, sometimes tahdiq. An Iranian housebuilder raved to me about his wife's version. A co-worker gave me a detailed explanation of how she'd learned from family. Both made it even more tantalizing by explaining how no one can get good tahdig at a restaurant, only at a Persian home.

For the Iraqi meatballs, I was depending on a friend who'd gathered his recipe from who-knows-where. He didn't testify to its authenticity, but that didn't really matter. It was good. And so was his word.

It was basically lentils cooked in chicken soup, sharpened up with lemon. The meatballs were not far from the meatballs I'd grown up with -- bread crumbs and parsley, chopped onions, salt and pepper. The only departure was freshly ground allspice mixed in, an aromatic bite of sweetness behind the tart.

Kugels were the one thing I knew -- a pudding from eastern Europe, sometimes slow-cooked noodles and eggs and cheese, sometimes (as in my preferred version) potatoes and onions and eggs. But this was something different -- noodles stirred with freshly made caramel and cooked slowly with eggs spiced up by a handful of rough ground pepper. I could imagine the pepper's snap alongside the mellow caramel, but I'd never tasted it.

Everything worked, or at least worked well enough. They'll stand until the day I luck into a restaurant or a home cook who can offer me the real thing. They all were the colors of the earth -- brown lentils and meatballs, white rice with a yellowish crust, yellow kugel with specks of black.

The meatballs and lentils were so satisfying and familiar that I felt I could have been eating my grandmother's recipe. Easy, too.

The rice, despite the hours of soaking and boiling and then the final two-hours-plus of frying/steaming, was a dish worth trying again and again, with all the variations of crust and flavoring I've read about -- saffron or scallion, spinach or yogurt. I just need a bigger platter to turn the rice onto so I don't once again create an overflowing mess on the countertop.

And the kugel -- even though I let the caramel cool too long so I wound up with chunks of candy amid the peppery noodles rather than the mix of sweet and pepper that was promised -- was so addictive that I think I'll try it again next weekend.

Any deeper culinary understanding remains elusive. There were nice bits of surprise, but the familiarity was even more satisfying. And like just about everything (except french fries), they were even better as leftovers.

• Robert Tanner has eaten his way around the world as a national writer for The Associated Press.