Cooking without borders: Cuisine from Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran & beyond.
Kadu Bharta.
Two words which sent shivers down my spine as a child-that Pakistani roasted squash dish which I just could not abide as a child. I don’t know whether it was the nursery food-like texture on my tongue of the cooked vegetable or the sight of it; one amorphous mound on my plate. I remember my parents scooping it all up with a chapati and adding spoonfuls of piquant mint chutney to the equation. It wasn’t for me. [Read more...]
French-Indian. Mexican-Japanese. Thai-Chinese. Fusion cuisine? Not really my brand of gin.
But when you have a family who is originally Afghan, now settled in Pakistan- invariably, there will be lots of ‘fusion-cuisine’ type of dishes prepared in the kitchen. [Read more...]
Wishing everyone Eid Mubarak. [Read more...]
Baba tells me that Bobby Darin’s Dream Lover would play repeatedly at picnics with his friends in 1960s Lahore. But for real affectation, there had to be some Françoise Hardy. Baba also tells me that if you didn’t know her hit La maison où j’ai grandi, or at least pretend to know it, then you were essentially a nobody.
And there were no picnic invitations for nobodies. [Read more...]
“A monarch, regardless of being a queen or a king, must defend his or her land and treat the people with justice,” declared the Sassanian Empress Porandokht, (AD 630-31). An advocate of sexual egalitarianism, she was the first female monarch to rule over the Sassanian Empire. Under her 16-month rule, before she died, Empress Porandokht signed a peace treaty with the Byzantines and reformed her empire by re-structuring and lowering taxes.
Every era has had their crop of strong women, and Mader, my paternal grandmother, was most certainly one from hers. [Read more...]
This recipe won the competition on Food 52 for “Your Best Spinach Recipe”. It will be published in the Food 52 book by HarperStudio. Here is the link.
In Memoriam- for Mader and the innocent victims who died on Friday, March 12th in Lahore…
Asked what one thing he wanted from the outside world before being hanged, a prisoner once said, “Bring me a bottle of Shalimar, to remind me of the best things in life.”
Feeling a little flat all day, after hearing about the 10 suicide bombings which took place in my hometown of Lahore, I took a little walk after work to our local department store. I went to the Chanel counter to apply Chanel No. 19 to my wrists. Bergamot and sweet cut grass, the scents of my grandmother, Mader, who left us 20 years ago this March. [Read more...]
