As I am almost over the jet lag after being back from hols in Lahore…

(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…)

 
As promised, this is recipe part II, from the menu at the Nairobi Reunion dinner I hosted in my home for my childhood friends. (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…)

This is a recipe, as promised, from the menu at the Nairobi Reunion dinner I hosted.  (My recipe was awarded an Editor’s Pick on Amanda Hesser -the ex- New York Times Food Editor- and Merrill Stubbs’ Food 52 project). (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…)

The Nimat-Namah, known as The Sultan’s Book of Delights, is a late 15th Century book inscribed in Persian, for the Delhi Sultanate represented by Sultan of Mandu, Ghias ud-din Shah and completed under the reign of his son, Sultan Nasir ud-din Shah. Bearing the son’s seal, this gem is housed at the Oriental and India Office Collections of the British Library, containing page after page of fifty intricate miniatures, painted in the distinctive Shirazi school style in jewel-like tones. (more…)

Surely, we all have childhood-related food indulgences we don’t like to discuss. Of course banana purée wasn’t our first solid; it was foie gras mi-cuit. At age 2, we weren’t fed spaghetti with tomato sauce, but rather, we slurped a slippery noodle out of a bowl of assam laksa. But of course. All foodies were born foodies. So, how many of us will admit to eating as-orange-as-a-fake-tan-gone-wrong-cheese known as Kraft Singles? Grilled between two white, flaccid pieces of toast. Anyone? *A hand slowly creeps up from the crowd*. (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…)