It is 9:30am and Vincent Joseph has just finished his breakfast of puri-bhaji at Tadmur Cafeteria; a place well-known for its value meals and snacks, apart from Karak Chai which is perhaps the hottest-selling item on its menu, on Jamal Abdel Nasr Street in Sharjah. Vincent has lived in Sharjah for over 13 years and…
Category: Urban Sketching
Muslim Cookery- Fish: Meen Porichathu, Machchi Memoni
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…
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…
AFTERNOON SKETCHING – TEA TRADITION
It’s extremely hot in Jaipur since the summers are here and every other day, there’s a sandstorm or a long queue outside Barbecue Nation. Either way, annoying. Amidst short power cuts and the occasional scary-as-hell cricket jumping out at you from the most boring edge of something you didn’t know you owned, I had an…
COMPOSING THE VIEW
Street sketching is obviously not the same as sketching everyday objects at home or at a restaurant or café where you’re comfortably seated and can take as much time as you’d like to get the sketch right. The activity of people and vehicles on the streets and roads makes it difficult to capture basic outlines,…
