‘On Exile’ (to borrow Edward Said’s phrase)

My post is inspired by an evocative piece entitled, ‘York’, by Belgian Waffle, a fascinating blogger who has written about the things she misses whilst being away from the city of her birth and her homeland. And so, I wanted to write something about my city of birth, Lahore. My homeland, Pakistan.

I was born in Lahore, Pakistan and left my homeland when I was two years old. My life, if sketched as a path on a map, would be a series of zig zags, going from Pakistan to America, to Nigeria, to America, back to Pakistan, then to Kenya, to Bangladesh, to the UK, back to America again, to Italy and  finally, Canada. At the age of 13, when we were living in Washington DC, Baba, my father, decided to send me to live in Pakistan with Mader, my paternal grandmother,  because he didn’t want me to become “Americanised”. I didn’t want to leave my parents, my sisters, and I especially didn’t want to leave my Ami; my mother, my best friend. But I didn’t resist or fight back; racist children in school had made my life miserable beyond comprehension, and all I wanted to do was to run away from them.  (more…)

I am utterly excited as I have taken these photos with my brand new lens.

Ami made sure there was always a kulfi popsicle in our freezer for me, for an after-school snackette. The equatorial temperatures soared above 40C in Lagos, Nigeria and on a day like that, a kulfi popsicle was just the ticket. No tea and biscuits, just something cool, milky and creamy. (more…)

My first published article came out in Edible Toronto’s Summer Issue. Edible is a magazine based on sustainable food and the farm scene with over 65 chapters across the United States. The inimitable Gail Gordon Oliver is the founder of the Edible Toronto chapter in Canada. The article was about my move from Rome, Italy to Toronto, Canada a year and a half ago, and the aromas of my childhood which made me feel at home in a new city.

Here is the link to the article, which I have also pasted below, with the recipe and a video of myself talking about kheer. (more…)

I was in the 7th grade when I baked my first cake. At school, we had been reading Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird, in which Aunt Maudie bakes a Lane Cake for Aunt Alexandra’s homecoming. Our extra credit assignment was to prepare this cake.

I arrived at my Aunty Shelly’s to find she had measured out the ingredients and placed them along the wooden counter with the recipe in her Arabesque-like penmanship on a notecard. We were going to bake Lane Cake together; tall and ivory frosted, belying the four layers of neatly stacked sponge beneath. Each layer sandwiched together with a sweet, dense filling of buttery pecans, plumped-up raisins and aromatic coconut, held together with egg yolks and butter.

The kind of filling you lick off the spoon because it tastes even better than the cake itself. (more…)

Ami’s recipes are scribbled on small pieces of paper. Soft pages which crumple in your hands; torn out from my elementary school ‘exercise books’ in Lagos, Nigeria. Another scribbled on the back of a Pan Am ticket sleeve. Or maybe on an index card, in her friend Liz’s cursive handwriting. The curly kind of writing your Third Grade teacher used to have. Liz, the first friend my mother made after moving to the United States as a young bride. The mother of my first boyfriend, at age 3. (more…)

Yassi’s As-Moist-As-a-Pudding Date Cake

Yassi sits on her stool in the kitchen kneading the glossy détrempe for la pâte feuilletée; puff pastry. There is no beurre sec, but Lurpak will do. Her silver and black hair is in short waves and immaculate as always; her pastel kurta is starched. Yassi’s slender, milky fingers are bare as they push the dough back and forth, like a potter with her clay. Her mother’s vintage ring bearing three overlapping leaves in rose, yellow and white gold removed and placed in the porcelain Wedgewood jewelry jar given to her by her daughter-in-law. She looks at the granite counter, “It would be lovely to have a cup of champagne resting there for small sips while the dough rests,” she thinks. But she is no longer in her Paris kitchen, she is in Karachi. (more…)

Before I leave for the holidays, I would like to post something about Christmas. This is my last post for the year. Wishing Happy Holidays, Merry Christmas & Happy New Year to you and yours. See you in 2010.

Christmas is almost here. Having spent Christmas season all over the world, there are memories from some places which remain a favourite. (more…)

This is the recipe for the vermicelli pudding my mother, Ami, prepares every Eid, which I wrote about in my post about her on Motherhood: The Final Frontier. (more…)

It’s been an absolute honour for me to have had the opportunity to write a guest post on Motherhood: The Final Frontier, for one of my favourite bloggers / friends, a British girl (former pop-star) who blogs anonymously from California about her life as a mum. She inspired me to write a short piece about my mother. In Missing Person’s Report , I write about the difficulty in coming to terms with the fact that one’s mum has aged; I still see her through the optic of a young child. (more…)

A Pudding-less Nairobi Reunion

Nairobi is where we learned to love safari parks and dislike zoos. We would take trips to the Nairobi National Park on most weekends, bobbing up and down on the inner roads in a Land Rover. As we peered out to look at the statuesque white- and caramel-jigsawed giraffe, we would eat sliced, plush, cinnamon loaf bread and cucumber sandwiches, prepared by our beloved cook, Simon Mackenzie, wrapped in tin foil. We would stop for a bit and drink dense and milky Kenyan tea out of flasks, hoping to spot a cheetah. (more…)