Machchi Memoni | Memoni Barbecued Fish Ingredients: 500 gms any round fish like seer ½ lime 1 ½ tsp salt ½ cup yogurt 4 tbsp oil Spice paste 1 small onion 4 garlic cloves 4 whole dried red chillies 1 tsp red Kashmiri chilli powder ¼ tsp turmeric powder 1 tbsp cashew nuts, coarsely crushed…
Category: journal
Lebanese street corner bakeries
The manóushé is the quintessential Lebanese breakfast. Named for the Arabic word na’sh which refers to the way the fingertips of the baker “engrave” the dough, the manóushé is indeed engraved upon our collective memories as Lebanese. The smell of manóushé bi-zatar in the morning catapults a Lebanese person back in time to a lively…
Journey to the heart of Turkish Cuisine
People are always eating and drinking around the clock in Istanbul: grabbing chewy sesame-crusted simit (bagels) on every street corner, sipping refreshing freshly-squeezed pomegranate juice, small glasses of sweetened tea or thick mastic-flavored Turkish coffee on their way to work, stopping at hole-in-the-wall döner and köfte joints for a quick snack or slurping bowls of chickpea and…
Bread and Salt
Bread, called nan in Persian, is the staple food of Iran in all regions except around the Caspian, where rice supplants it. Nan is a Persian word first used in Achaemenid Iran (550-330 BCE), from which all other languages borrowed it. In Iran, bread and salt are treated with great respect. The main Persian breads are flat breads but…
Persian Tea
Tea was discovered about 5000 years ago in China. In the early 17th century, tea was introduced to England and its Chinese name, tay, changed to the English name tea. In England, tea was brewed in china teapots. The English believed that a drop of milk in the teapot would prevent it from breaking and thus…
Armenian Sweet Bread (Nan-e gisu)
Makes 3 loaves Preparation time: 20 minutes plus rising time overnight Cooking time: 35-40 minutes INGREDIENTS 1 package or 1 tablespoon dry yeast 1/4th cup warm water 3 eggs 1.5 cups sugar 1 tablespoon honey 2 tsp ground mahlab 1 cup whole milk 1 cup melted, unsalted butter or Oil 4.5-5.5 cups cake flour, sifted with…
Romanesque Architecture : St-Nectaire
Regional Developments in France The emergence of Romanesque architecture was not a simple, linear process. Rather, during the tenth and eleventh centuries, the region that is now France served as a fertile experimental ground. The separate regions exhibited tendencies toward different architectural forms, and their sacred as well as secular institutions also pursued a variety…
An Omelette is Born
In 1835, during the Carlist uprising in Spain, the rebels laid seige to Bilbao. One day during the siege, the Carlist commander, General Tomas de Zumalacarregui y de Imaz, was passing a farmhouse and demanded that the farmer’s wife prepare him something to eat. All the woman had were some eggs, a potato and an…
The World’s Most Expensive Salad
Heinz Tomato Ketchup : 57 varieties. Not really. While riding in an elevated train in New York, H.J.Heinz was struck by a shoe shop sign declaring that it offered ’21 styles’. He was thus inspired to come up with the slogan ’57 varieties’ for his own company – even though at that stage it…
Making time to sketch
I was a bit busy the past two days or so and didn’t find the time to sketch. Today, however, I decided to just sit in the kitchen with my sketchbook and watercolor palette to draw whatever was right in front of me- in this case, dirty dishes which also make a very interesting subject….
Bon appetit!
Food is comforting. Reading about food is as comforting if not more because as you read, you become aware of that feeling (which we often define as ‘comfort’) shared by others. In other words, maybe you had an omelette at a certain time of the day with some things on your mind or perhaps nothing…
Rapunzel! Rapunzel! Let down your hair!
You surely must have read the story of Rapunzel; a German fairy tale assembled by the Brothers Grimm, first published in 1812, in which a man and his wife desire a child and while the woman is pregnant, she longs for a rapunzel plant (some versions also mention rampion) that grows beyond a wall, in the…
