*NO SPACES LEFT*

IF YOU WOULD LIKE YOUR NAME PLACED ON THE WAIT-LIST, PLEASE E-MAIL ME, (ADDRESS AT THE END OF THE POST).

On Saturday, June 22nd, I will be hosting a lunch which is themed ‘Cooking Along the Silk Route‘. As such, we will prepare dishes from Afghanistan, Iran and Pakistan and then share a meal together, family-style, in a beautiful home in the Washington, DC suburbs, (near Tyson’s Galleria).

While we cook together, we will :

• Learn how to prepare a mocktail, appetiser and main dish. I will provide my homemade dessert for the meal.
• Prepare and assemble the dishes in groups of 3-4.
• Enjoy a lovely Saturday chatting and eating with others who adore food from my part of the world!

Sample Menu:
Pakistani Sekenjabeen – Sweet & Sour Sparkling Lime Mocktail with Mint
Afghan Aushak* – Leek pâté dumplings, served atop yoghurt and crowned with savoury mince
Persian Tahchin (see photo above) – Rice timbale with saffron-poached chicken
Pakistani Kheer aur morabba – Rosewater-fragranced rice pudding with seasonal fruit compote

Timing:
10am-1.30pm
Lunch will be served between 1.30 and 2.00pm.

If you would like to join us:
Please e-mail me at shayma (at) thespicespoon (dot) com.

*We are using store-bought wonton wrappers.

My interview appeared in The Express Tribune Magazine, (which works in partnership with the International Herald Tribune), this Sunday. Many thanks to the editorial team at the Express Tribune.

Here is the link to the magazine pages – Shayma Saadat Mistress of Spices. It is also available online here.

I don’t remember Amma Subraayi. Our family’s seamstress, she died a few years after I was born, and by that time we had already moved to Washington, DC. My Nani Ami bought the jewel-toned fabrics for our razais, (winter quilts) and Amma Subraayi would stitch them painstakingly, by hand, with a curved upholstery needle. Sitting under the winter sun on my grandparents’ rear terrace, she laid the fabric out on a woven bed called a charpai and nimbly stitched the fabric together, stuffing it with cotton for weeks on end. Each razai was stitched in its own geometric pattern and with special fabric. Ami’s was a plaid burgundy and my Khala’s (aunt’s), was a candy-coloured orange with a floral design.

My razai was purple. How it came to be my razai, I don’t really remember. But I chose it. It was made with a beautiful two-toned purple velvet, the sort of colour you see on your tongue after eating a bowl of blueberries. Depending on which side you were looking at the razai from, it was a deep purple or a lighter, amethyst hue. The razai was so big that when I covered myself with it in bed, it would refuse to curl around my body. Nani Ami would sit by my bedside every night when we visited her in Lahore and tuck the razai under me on both sides.

When I went to Lahore for the 2012 winter holidays, I didn’t sleep with my razai. But that’s just as well, because Ami tells me all the quilts were donated to the flood victims a few years ago. The terrace where Amma Subraayi used to sit is now gone, as is my Nani Ami’s rose garden that surrounded it. The roses were a neon-coral, particular to the subcontinent. As my Uncles’ respective families grew, the house was expanded and parts of the rear garden, where we used to have cups of green tea, disappeared.

Nani Ami’s dainty tea cups – mint green, duck-egg blue, dusty rose and powder blue – were still lined up in the glass armoire in the dining room. My Uncle says that I can have them. One day I will wrap them in newspaper sheets and bubble wrap so I can bring them to my home, here in Toronto. I forgot to have green tea in one of those cups on my last day in Lahore – the way I used to with my grandparents, sitting near the gas heater, shelling pistachios and chatting with them.

I didn’t get this recipe from Nani Ami. After the aubergine had heaved and sighed in the oven and I took it out to rest, I looked at the soft, velvety flesh, wondering what I should do with it. And I thought of her. Nani Ami’s cooking was pure; she used a few ingredients – ginger, onion, garlic, turmeric powder, red chilli powder. I don’t know what she did to make her dishes sing. But even a simple meal of chicken curry, lentils and rice made by her would turn into a family gathering, followed by a semolina and currant pudding and cups of cardamom-infused green tea.

I have put together a very humble aubergine dish, which I think I could have served alongside Nani Ami’s creations.

Serves 4

Ingredients:

*800g / 1.8lb aubergines
*3 + 2 tbsp neutral oil (I use sunflower)
*2 garlic cloves, minced
*1 tsp roasted cumin powder (zeera)
*salt to taste
*½ tsp + pinch turmeric
 powder
*1-2 small green chilies chopped (optional)
*300g yoghurt
*½ tsp red chili pepper
*handful crushed walnuts, for garnish
*fresh herb of your choice

Preparation:

Step 1: Prepare the bharta; aubergine base
*Pre-heat your oven to 200C / 400F;
*Pierce aubergines with a fork and lay them on a tray lined with aluminum foil on the bottom rack of the oven turning every twenty minutes, for one hour and fifteen minutes;
*When they are ready, they will appear to be wilted and soft;
*Remove from oven and allow to cool;
*Scoop out the flesh from the aubergines, discarding the skin. 
Set aside;
*Place large frying pan on medium-high heat 
and add 3 tbsp oil.
*Add minced garlic and sauté for 30 seconds, (make sure the garlic does not turn brown). Add roasted cumin powder and stir for another 30 seconds, till fragrant.
*Add aubergine flesh, salt, ½ tsp turmeric and green chilies and turn heat to high.
*Sauté rigorously for 5 minutes, till you see that all the excess liquid has been absorbed.
*Turn heat off and set aside. Allow to cool.
*Transfer aubergine to a mixing bowl and stir in yoghurt till fully incorporated. Taste for salt.
*Transfer to a serving dish and refrigerate for at least one hour.

Step 2: Prepare tempered oil; tarka
*Place a small frying pan on high heat and add 2 tbsp of oil. When hot, add a pinch of turmeric and red chilli powder and immediately remove from heat.
*Before serving, gently pour oil in a circular design over the yoghurt and aubergine mixture in the serving dish.
*You can serve it cold or at room temperature.
*Adorn with crushed walnuts and your favourite fresh herbs.

*SOLD OUT*

Crisis. That’s the face of a punctilious cook who can’t use a certain oil over another one for shallow-frying. When you’re teaching participants to make blinis in your first ever workshop, you unnecessarily stress over such trivial matters. To make matters trickier, you feel nauseous and soporific because you are expecting Tiny Spoon, unbeknownst to everyone at the workshop.

I was invited to host my first workshop last year in February, which turned out to be a lovely experience – we finally settled on olive oil (as the picture depicts) – and all the participants went home happy after having a few sips of Pomegranate & Rosewater Essence Sparkling Wine Cocktails.

I am in the kitchen again, (this time, stress-free) – teaching another workshop. I will be over at The Depanneur showing you how to make aushak – dumplings which hail from the Afghan kitchen.

The cost is $40+HST – more information on the workshop and how to sign up for it is available here.

I am on instagram – follow me here. 

Here are some pictures from our pop-up – sold out this past Saturday! A huge thank you to all the lovely guests.

*SOLD OUT*
Hello, lovelies. On March 23rd, this coming Saturday, I will be a guest chef along with my partner, Bahareh Hosseini, at The Depanneur, hosting a dinner to welcome in Nowruz; Persian New Year. Tickets cost $40+HST. Bring your own favourite bottle of wine to pair with our Persian meal – we look forward to seeing you there!

Tickets can be purchased here.

We will be preparing:

First Course
Kashk e bademjoon o sangak e sabzi khordan*
Persian Eggplant Caviar served with traditional flatbread and fresh herbs

Second Course
Zereshk Polow**
‘Jeweled rice’ adorned with almonds and pistachios, served with saffron-laced chicken and barberries

Dessert
Baghlava Cake**
A family heirloom recipe made with almond flour and pistachios
Served with fragrant Cardamom Tea
—–

*This dish contains dairy
** This dish contains nuts

Dear readers, I am honoured to have been invited to speak at TEDxWaterloo on March 27, 2013 in my capacity as a food writer and photographer. I hope to see many of you there. For those of you who won’t be able to attend, the event will be live-streamed. My talk will also be on the TEDxWaterloo site soon after the event. Here is the link to my bio on the TEDx page.

I was commissioned by BBC Good Food Magazine, India to develop and photograph a ‘Pakistani Feast’ as an 8-page feature for their current (October, 2012) issue.

Shir Khurma

Shahi Zafrani Sharbat

Chicken Karhai

Baingan Borani

Hunza-style Khobani ki Chutney

Yakhni Pulao

I wanted to share with you that our ‘Tiny Spoon’, our little darling baby, came into the world this August! That is what my ‘non-food related project’ was, and the reason why I have not been able to cook, write or blog as of recent.

I wanted to thank all of you for your readership, encouragement and support. I will be back in The Spice Spoon kitchen, inshallah later this year. And no, I won’t be blogging about baby food

I hope all of you had a lovely summer.

x shayma

NB – The magazine accidentally changed my phrase bhanson (bamboos), to bhainson (buffaloes) - which is wrong. 

It must be white-hot right now, your sun shining strong above the canals of Lahore, where children come to wade in the brown water to cool themselves off. Summers remind me of siestas in my Nani Ami’s home on the bhanson (bamboos) wali sarak, when all the bedrooms would turn ink-dark by pulling down the bamboo blinds after a long, lazy meal of her spicy ginger-laced chicken stew, scooped up with light-as-air tandoori rotis from nearby Dharampura. I would love to have mangoes from your fertile Punjabi earth, those fragrant chaunsa mangoes, egg- yolk yellow from inside, through which my knife slices like butter, the juices running down my arm with each bite, seated at my grandmother’s dining table. Or maybe one of your anwar ratols or the parrot-green skinned langras, all reminiscent of my childhood in my city of birth, Lahore.

Do you remember when I used to walk alongside my Mamoo in the evenings, grasping his hand, under the shade of the bamboo canopy outside Nani Ami’s home? I so wish you had not cut those bamboo stems down to widen the road. Our local samosa wallah used to be seated under that shade, forming triangular pastry parcels with his dexterous hand, pushing and pinching in cumin-spiced mashed potatoes, then frying them in his orb-like karahi. I loved watching them bobbing up and down in the musky oil. He sold them hot and steaming in a khaki paper bag, to be taken home and enjoyed with our afternoon tea. But after you cut down those bamboos, one by one, all the food hawkers in Nani Ami’s neighbourhood disappeared, and with it, so did our evening walks.

Even on the canal bank, I wish you had not decided to cut down your beautiful willow trees. Don’t you remember the challi wallah on the canal bank near Aitchison College? He always sported a yellow and white checkered scarf, resting lazily on his left shoulder, and a perfectly-starched kurta, even when your sun shone almost unbearably. As a bemused child, I remember looking on as he fished the challis out with his bare hands from the smouldering heap of coal dust. After removing the husks, he took half a lime, dipped it in chili and salt and smeared it all over the golden, blistered challi. And surely you remember that across the street from the challi wallah were those weeping willow trees lining the canal bank, drooped and in prostration, praying for the monsoons to come. I was very saddened to learn you had given people permission to chop your trees down last year. I hear the children have no shade to shelter them when they come out of the water from their swim. And the challi wallahs are also long gone. When I arrive in Lahore this year, as our car drives along the bank, the canal will be bare and naked.

I hope you don’t continue to change, because my family and you, well, we go back a long way.

I wanted to wish you a Happy 65th Independence Day and thank you for the childhood memories. In your honour, I’ll slice through a sindhri from a desi store here. And I’ll even add a dollop of clotted cream in place of the malai I had in Nani Ami’s home all those summers.

Dear All,

Thank you for all your kind messages regarding my lack of blogging as of late. I haven’t given up on blogging; I am just working on a non-food related project which has made it difficult for me to devote time to my blog at the moment. Inshallah, I hope to be back in the Fall with new recipes / posts. Thank you so much for your readership and warm and encouraging messages.

In the meanwhile, I leave you with a taste of summer – an Afghan- / Persian-style fruit spread called moraba, which is more similar to a compote than the western-style thick, gooey jams. What I love about the moraba is that you can spoon some of the syrup into a glass, add ice and pour sparkling water over it to transform it into a sharbat. On a warm summer evening, it is just the ticket.

Enjoy this peach moraba spooned over yoghurt, or your favourite crusty bread. I love to smear some sar shir; a thick Persian breakfast cream similar to clotted cream, on bread and then drape slices of the syrupy moraba over it in the morning.

Have a lovely summer, everyone.

xo, shayma

Ingredients:
*1 kg peaches, peeled and cut into 1cm slivers, pit discarded (approximately 2lbs)
*½ tsp cardamom powder
*½ tsp cinnamon powder
*75g brown sugar (approximately 6 tbsp)
*1 cinnamon stick
*2 whole cardamom pods
*120 ml water (approximately ½ cup)

Preparation:
*Place peaches in a heavy-bottomed medium saucepan on medium heat
*Sprinkle with cardamom powder, cinnamon powder and brown sugar
*Add cinnamon stick, cardamom pods and water
*Stir very gently to combine, so as to ensure you don’t break the peaches
*Cook the compote for about 30 minutes, stirring every 10 minutes, or until the liquid is reduced to a thick syrup. The peaches should still retain their shape. You don’t want them falling apart and becoming mushy. NB If the syrup or compote begins to catch at the bottom of the pan, reduce the heat
*Allow compote to cool and spoon into jam jars
*Enjoy over yoghurt or spread over bread and clotted cream