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 (click here for link), for one of my favourite bloggers / friends, a British girl 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…)

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…)

In his memoirs; the Tuzk-e-Jahangiri, Mughal Emperor Jahangir expresses his desire to visit Pampore, Kashmir, to see the land where the fields turn amethyst in the Autumn, when the saffron crocus sativus is ready for harvesting. It is from this flower that delicate hands nimbly extract three crimson-hued stigmas, also known as “Red Gold”; the most dear spice in the world. A spice which was once known to be worth its weight in gold. (more…)