Now we're cooking

A rerun of one of my fav posts, as I´m watching the movie Julie and Julia, a culinary delight.
"Chocolate cream pie! You know what I love about cooking? I love that after a day when nothing is sure and when I say nothing, I mean nothing. You can come home and absolutely know that if you add egg yolks to chocolate and sugar and milk, it will get thick. That's such a comfort."
Tomorrow I will cook.
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I brought back from Panaji a beautiful hand carved wooden box decorated with flowers and smelling of spices. Inside the box lay perfect bay leaves, cardamom seeds, cloves, cinnamon sticks and a couple more Indian spices of which I cannot recall the name. Examining the ingredients I decide: perfect for chicken Curry and saffron rice.

As I dissolve saffron in boiling water (hot tap water won't do, attention to detail makes all the difference when you cook) I remember my friend in Alicante who gave me this jar so I could cook Fideuà, a Valencian specialty which imitated Paella only to beat it. I also remember how we got the recipe from a notebook decorated with the most beautiful retro cut outs and filled with recipes in swirly handwriting. "Recetas de la mama mía" was my friend's wedding gift from her mom. That day we didn't cook Fideuà, we cooked vegetarian pasta with herbs, to celebrate my favorite couple's moving to the country side and growing cilantro in their own garden.

As I savor the curry marinade after adding a bit of garam masala (literally hot spice) I can't help but feel sorry for those with low tolerance for spicy food. It is amazing how different cultures mix similar spices to create completely different feelings, I find myself remembering Mexican spices, for no good reason at all. I just wish I could stock up on Salsa Valentina, the local brand of hot sauce and then add it to pizza like we used to do at my Mexican friends' kitchens.

Once you've tasted a nation's food you immediately feel a sort of kinship (that's if you get to like it), and when you go there you're less of a khawaga or guiri* (it also helps get a bit of a conversation going round the dinner table). Having cooked Patacones in Madrid with a dear friend from Colombia, mashing the plantains and then frying and refrying them, I find myself feeling a sort of familiarity with Bogotá while still on the plane (mind you, none of Patacones I ate in Bogotá would compare to the ones we used to cook. Tasting Okra a l'Indienne and asking a dinner companion for the recipe I find myself familiar with the spices she lists, having seen them in action in the kitchen I shared with a friend from Trinidad and Tobago of Indian origins (only the best ingredients shipped from the homeland for us, none of the supermarket stuff). I also know that I don't need to set foot in a restaurant when I go to Mexico, as I have helped cook tamales and dined in a zillion Mexican restaurants with my favorite pal in Madrid (the one in Chueca has a green volkswagen zooming in from the ceiling replicating a taxi in the streets of Mexico city). I also recall two colleagues bonding over lobsters in India, oh Goan seafood prepared Portuguese style is just undescribable1

As recipes are passed from generation to generation, people preserve a sense of belonging to a distant land of origin where they have never set foot. Till this day, my grandmas cook Harira and Sharkaseya, reminiscent of Moroccan and Turkish roots and my friend's grandmother has Matzah always ready for Passover.

It is a fact that food unites. Friends would tell tales of meeting fellow expats mainly to share festivities, I can relate. The first Ramadan I spent away from home, I had just landed in town and had no kitchen of my own, luckily I was adopted by a bunch of Egyptian friends and fed Mulukhiya (if only airport authorities knew the amount of the serious smuggling that takes place everywhere around the globe). Smuggling indeed makes you take a bit of home with you, that's what my Tunisian friend did when he brought a good stock of harisa for the weeks we spent studying in Toledo.

I tend to think of cooking as a hobby**, creative cooking is not something I can do often, and cooking for hungry individuals on a daily basis even less. Cooking is supposed to be fun that's what I always say.

Cooking with friends entails laughing over fiascoes and sharing the sweet content of a well prepared meal, then dodging the task of preparing coffee or tea (depending on where you are) after the meal.

One of my clearest memories is going to the premiere of Ratatouille with my roomies and bringing back a poster of the Little Chef -which is still on the kitchen door till this day (the kitchen that is no longer mine in a house I still call my own). The next weekend we invited friends over for an elaborate dinner. There was some dude to impress and he was impressed - I hope I don't get killed over disclosing this one my friend!

I guess I'll never forget the endless international cooking days with my dearest friends in Madrid; ill equipped kitchens would not stop us, it just took challenging one of the guys to whisk the batter to give an electric mixer effect with only a manual whip (throwing in a couple of lines on not exercising enough helped too).

I also smile when I remember Wednesday evenings in Cairo at my friend's place and her baby daughter; while we chopped veggies she played drums with a wooden spoon and a cooking pot.

I add to my cooking memories, all the times my friend and I sang Luis Miguel in a kitchen; first in our dorm's kitchen in Toledo, then at her place when I went to visit in Morocco, the Cairo edition is due this summer inshaa'Allah (Luis Miguel would better be proud of us).

When I travel I always take a look beyond the buildings, the contemporary culture and the socio-economics of the country are usually more interesting for me. The way dishes are served and the table is cleared tells you a lot about the culture.

Mediterraneans tend to share mezzah or tappas and would also share salads, while others don't share dishes at all. At one end of the continuum, some cultures serve individual plates in the kitchen and send them out to the dinning room (sort of too bland for my taste) , and others eat from the same serving dish or fuente (memories of Morocco and the delicious Tagines come to mind), in the middle would be serving the main dish on the dinning table and having seconds and asking people to try this and that and that.

You can also find an indicator if you observe who clears the table and does the dishes. In some culture it's the host or just the women, in others it's the ones who didn't cook, in some plastic plates and cutlery are just thrown away (we love mother earth), and in many the dishwasher deprives those who would have washed the dishes from the greatest post-meal gossip.

Needless to say, in most societies suffering of large income gaps, affordable catering and delivery services (I'll never forget the expression at my friend's face when she saw the Mc Donald's motorcycles in Cairo, I totally related when I saw all the "a domicilio" signs in Latin America) and and other people relieve you of it all: cooking, setting the table and clearing the table.

Keep cooking and smile while you do, for it makes all the difference.

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*Egyptian and Spanish slang for "foreigner"
** Apologies to those who think cooking is a chore

Photo:
Changed this time to Carrot Cake by my friend Sweets Ninja

For recipes and more cooking flicks and and lit check the original post.

Cracking the egg

“With their tinted windows up, the cars of the rich go like dark eggs down the roads of Delhi. Every now and then, an egg will crack open - a woman's hand, dazzling with gold bangles, stretches out of an open window, flings an empty mineral water bottle onto the road - and then the window goes up, and the egg is resealed.” Balram the driver, a.k.a the White Tiger.

Many of us live in Cairo in eggs, car windows rolled up, AC on, music muting the sounds coming from outside. It's a polluted city? Didn't even notice. No one inhaled the fumes nor got eye allergies, why should they care?

and those outside the egg suffer from its fumes...

Volunteer vacations

Photo above: Médcins Sans Frontieres Ad, as published in my fav Lonely Planet magazinde.

My friend Veronica went to Togo and made an orphanage work, the girl can move mountains. You can read all about it at her blog and you can contribute too, Vero is spending every penny in the best way possible, none of the Aid money squandering.

I am fascinated by stories of grassroot projects that have worked, and I have stories to tell about initiatives that have failed because people went with all the good intentions but also with their own limited frame of reference, don't get me started . Aid is a most controversial topics, I could ramble on forever, so to spare you I encourage you to read The White Man's Burden instead.

Let me know if you want to volunteer somewhere and I'll try to link you to a decent NGO there if I know one (think there are a couple of helpful links on the right too).

Mannequin

A blogpost caught my eye, it linked to an article by Egyptian author Ahdaf Soueif, evoking the view from Café Riche in down town Cairo in its past and present. It reminded me of a play I watched on the American University in Cairo's stage a few years ago, Mannequin (أو مانيكان بالعامية المصرية). The story takes us back in time and then forward again, through Noussa, a vitriniste in Wist El Balad (downtown Cairo), and her boss, the shop owner. Noussa makes a living by dressing wooden (now platic) models in shopwindows. The garments change and so do our society's values, as we can hear in Noussa's monologues at night when she talks to the dummies, who are one minute donning hipster pants and floral shirts a l'Européenne and the next fully covered in Gulfy garments after returning from the oil-rich nations.
Oh we are a chameleon nation...

Photo, Café Riche by Al Ahram Weekly

Staycation

staying home on a vacation people feel stuck, frustrated and left-out

whether it's because you're stuck at work and can't leave for too long, or because you're broke, or there's no one to go with, or you were too late in planning and all the good slots are taken, or you're simply not a fan of overcrowded and hence overpriced vacation spots, or maybe you can't be bothered to plan or are too fidgetty to handle waiting at airports or train stations, you need a staycation.

Explore your city with new eyes and do things you wouldn't normally do because of traffic or because you have to book too early on. They're all gone, it's all yours now.

It seems like 2009 is the year of the staycation in many places because of the recession!

share your staycation ideas

It's my way or the highway

A couple of days ago, my friend and I were talking about ranting on blogs, I said I mostly stay away from it (except for a couple or more bitchy posts which you can find if you scroll down), he said: "just wait till you start writing about politics and you'll write in an angry tone just like us." There are still no political discussions under my roof , but a recent "law" of sorts was imposed by the Egyptian Ministry of Interior condemning and punishing food consumption in broad daylight during the holy month of Ramadan. It made me cringe :s

For starters, it made me question one more time the logic of those offended religious people out there who can't handle someone eating in their vicinity . Fasting is by definition an act of abstinence, of discipline, compassion and sacrifice, but "fasting in a bubble" I'm not sure about that... not eating nor smoking can't be that difficult if no one else around you is doing it, it should be fairly easy if you are not constantly reminded of it. One of the dev. pals wrote from Senegal to our NGO's mailing list, updating the group on his Ramadan in Dakkar, marvelling at how everyone respected the holy month and still carried on with life as usual, bars serving alcohol included, he wrote "The reason why I appreciated this is that faith for most Senegalese is a CHOICE and not imposed nor by the state or a marabout." If I speak for myself, I'd say fasting in Spain made more sense somehow and was completly ok. Mmm so based on this logic, really, eating chocolate while our orthodox friends are fasting should be illegal, right? and eating savoury food while someone's dieting is an unrefined attitude?

While we're at it, let's discuss the logic of turning Ramadan into a feast of mass consumption from dusk till dawn, getting an adrenaline rush from the thought of a myriad of delicacies after hunger and thirst. And while we're still at that, let's discuss my Coptic Christian friend sacrificing meat while indulging in the finest saumon fumé & gruyère, with a pious look on her face. And maybe we should all take a moment to look back and consider how it is probably more useful to mankind if you have your bloody cigarette or cup of coffee and stop having this self-righteous anger because you're fasting, and perhaps focus on the task at hand, because yes, work is an act of workship too. While do we constantly feel this need to "exteriorize" that we're "on the right track" (assuming there's only one of course)

At Iftar feasts I keep on reminding myself that human beings need the notion of discipline and reward to be engraved in their minds (that much I can affirm after hiking the Road to Santiago), but then again, really, why is it all about rituals now without questionning the logic, aren't rituals after all just symbolic acts of faith...any faith?

As for the question of respect for other cultures, don't get me started, there are people out there who think they should kill the "infidels", yeah go ahead, God couldn't kill them so he definitely needs a hand in this.

And really, all this talk just gets me more confused, chasing the elusive thread between respect for other cultures, tolerance, diversity on the one hand and maintaining one's values and culture on the other hand. Whether in the home country or abroad, what to wear, what to do, how to greet people, how to adapt, the debate is long and it would take us hours to decide: if it is ok for an American woman to wear shorts in midan el tahrir in Cairo on the premise that men shouldn't look at her because they are averting their gaze or that she should dress conservatively and do as the Cairennes do (3/4 sleeves and pants ok? that's middleground), and whether the law should or should not punish a Moroccan family living in Spain because they circumcised their daughter, as female genital mutilation is simply illegal in the country but also just necessary from the family's viewpoint. And don't get me started on the French headscarf dilemma in the land of so called Liberté. Now even mono-cultural Spaniards who, thirthy years ago, would've been spanked by Franco if they were non-Catholic, communist or gay, now want to be "progressive", celebrating Europe's biggest gay pride walks and still criticizing a harmless dress code (the Hijab) just like their sophisticated neighbors. Logic people, LOGIC!

Instead of the current ban, can we work out a formula of respect for differences and tolerance? Really, can't we be more grown up about this, does Mother Government always have to decide for us because we're too bloody immature?

In the end people would still need their differences to feel that their way is the right way and that they are more "enlightened" (whether that means irrational consumption of alcohol or not talking to a member of the opposite sex).

Let's not dwell on it and let's learn to live together. There you go, a cliché picture for you (my fav UNICEF card since I was 5) & a few lines I never forget:
“We should consider each group, racial, or cultural as a fruit: an apple, a pear, a mango. We want to make Mauritius not a marmalade, where we mix up everything and grind everything and end up with one marmalade with one taste. But we would like to have a fruit salad, where in a fruit salad each one retains its individual flavour and taste.” Monsignor Bargeau of Mauritius as quoted by Franklin Covey in the 7 habits of highly effective people.

Following yellow arrows

I am following little yellow arrows down the road, wishing that life had more arrows leading the way and sparing me difficult decisions at crossroads.

The arrows mark a road, El Camino de Santiago, an old pilgrimage road, now equally visited by some complying with a sacred rite, others seeking a journey of self discovery, many taking a challenging hike in the pine scented air of northern Spain, some wanting to make new friends, and others seeking the healing power of mother earth in the villages that are still uncontaminated by the modern consumption culture. I was each and everyone of them.

In this journey, I came to understand the logic of pilgrims, fasting and religious rites. Exhausting one's body to purify the soul, carrying one's cross in a procession (in my case a green backpack) or going to the holy city on camel back under a blazing sun. Enjoying the enlightement that comes gradually on the road and what the holy site symbolizes.

The Road left me wondering if all journeys to the self start with penance and if we are meant to suffer before we can rejoice. Can we really look inside for all the answers if we're constantly deciding what to wear, what to eat and what to buy? Constantly rushing to make money and then trying to buy time; building new cities everyday and then trying to escape them to hear ourselves think, it's somehow... absurd if I may say. I had to carry what I would need for the week for over a 100 km, there was no feeling more liberating than throwing away objects I previously thought I needed -my friend realized that the weight of the backpack always equals our attachment, couldn't be more right. I hope the time before Ramadan doesn't steal away this energy, as I look forward to more self discipline and reward, a clearer mind and more sharing and solidarity.

The Road is a maquette of life. With strangers and friends you share the agony of a knee-bending slope, seeking distraction from the pain in your feet and back in random conversations and laughing the pain away. You also share the relief of getting to a refuge and hug people you met only a few days ago when you get to the final destination. Sharing the little food and first-aid we possessed created a bond with friends as well as strangers, reminded me of our desert trips somehow. Sharing reflections on what The Road taught us over a cook-together or near the washing machine was more than enlightening.

I realized that any journey has moments of solitude to savour, bonds that last beyond the journey, and sometimes just fun company or moral support for only a few kilometers, and it's ok to part at resting spots, we can't all have the same pace all the way. The Camino showed me that everyone has a good side which the constant fight over a job or parking space kills, everyone has a nurturing healing power, everyone has something to give. It is also true that the collective environment builds it, you want to be good when everyone around you is good, if it's just you, people mistake your giving -and the strength it requires- for weakness and try to take advantage.

To have the stamina that the road requires we need frequent stops to regain our strength, it is really absurd to get to the milestones or the ultimate destinations exhausted (speaking of stops, I send all my love to María, one of our hosts, owner of a rural house and farm, who makes the best flan I ever tasted).

After all, it's the journey not the destination. As beautiful as the Santiago de Compostela cathedral was, it was like any other big cathedral in Europe, it's real value was what it symbolizes, that persistence pays off. I met a girl wearing a T-shirt featuring the drawing of feet with plasters and blisters, it read "sin dolor no hay gloria", as in "no pain no gain".

When you read this send me good vibes, anything that would reinforce the walls of light I am trying to build around me to conserve the mountain spirit from all the traffic, city lights, billboards and most of all the nervewrecking noise that the neighbours in Madrid are making as they're tearing down the walls, and soon fmore traffic in Cairo and people who don't want to do their share of work.

Compassion, patience, breathe in, breathe out, imagine a protective purple light around you, send out love... sigh ...just reminiscing over our meditation sessions in the woods... I hope that the little yellow arrow pin I got will remind me of the journey's peace at times when i feel like cracking someone's neck :)

About the Road:

My route was on foot, part of the Camino Francés, an orange line on the map. I heard stories about the other routes and I highly recommend biking the road if you can, you'll cover more ground and have fun if you get a high from crazy slopes. Here are the links and you can always drop me a line to know more or to get packing tips (the lighter your backpack, the easier your life will be)

http://caminodesantiago.consumer.es/

http://www.caminodesantiago.me.uk/

Have a good journey wherever you're heading, as they say around here, buen camino!