Thanksgiving Recap

I promised you all a recap... but what to say without tooting my own turkey?!

Perhaps it would be more modest to review it in the words of my guests: Maryam said "5 stars habibti!" Denise proclaimed it "a triumph!" Mohammed said "indescribable" (which I hope is good!). Maya kept sighing and whispering to herself "mmmm, mashed potatoes..." Mahmoud and Emil didn't say anything because their mouths were full. And Amira said "excellent everthing, including the company!" Nuria, the world-famous food critic, hasn't weighed in yet -- I believe her review will appear on the 'Vini Edi Dormi' blog...

Our menu:
Roasted turkey and gravy (big thanks to Denise for the bird-mentoring)
Stuffing (classic Baba recipe)
Mashed potatoes
Corn casserole
Cranberry sauce with fresh herbs and pomegranate syrup
Brussel sprouts
Sweet potato casserole
And for dessert: pumpkin pie, chocolate pecan pie, and vanilla ice cream

In addition to the pleasure of the feast, I enjoyed making it. I especially got a kick out of learning that cranberries pop when you cook them! And I was amazed to discover that there is no wizardry involved in roasting a turkey.

Now the only problem is that, as with any good thanksgiving spread, there is a fridge full of leftovers. Since I live with only one person, and that one person doesn't really believe in leftover-eating, I anticipate a full week of thanksgiving-sandwich dinners. It will be carbo-overload, but the fact is that I do love the thanksgiving-sandwich! It reminds me of high school, when we used to order thanksgiving subs from the store in middletown which called them "Bobbies" for some reason that none of us ever understood.

Happy Thanksgiving!

After 3 years of hilariously bad thanksgiving dinners in restaurants in the UAE (read: chickens instead of turkeys, HOT cranberry sauce, “pumpkin what?”, etc.), I have decided to take matters into my own hands. After all, this is my favorite meal of the year and why should I be deprived just because I’m a few thousand miles away from my grandmother?

Building the menu was easy and making the shopping list and preparation schedule was a pleasure (after all, my brain works in bullet points and timelines). However, sourcing ingredients was more of a challenge than one would expect for a city this awash in American brands and franchises. I had to make 4 trips to the store to get my hands on good turkey, I had to make my own bread cubes for the stuffing, frozen cranberries don’t exist, you wouldn’t believe how much I had to pay for fresh cranberries or for pecans, and so on. But where there is a will, there’s a way and by the shiny buckle on my pilgrim shoes I swear to you this will be a respectable Thanksgiving dinner!

I’m a bit intimidated by the turkey roasting. It is a form of magic I have dared not dabble in. But my superneighbor Denise is here to supervise and I’m armed with instructions from Baba over the phone and – here’s my secret weapon – written instructions from my mom! How cool is that?! I was rummaging through my recipe box when I found this, which is her menu and prep schedule from Thanksgiving in 2001. I remember looking at it when I was going through all her kitchen stuff deciding what to keep but I completely forgot I had it. It’s amazing! She should have been a project manager for one of the big developers over here. The buildings would have gone up on time and tasted delicious!

Ok, now it’s time to get to work. Please keep your fingers crossed for a juicy outcome. I’ll report back tomorrow (if I haven’t burnt the house down)….

Last Cupcake in Marienbad

Wowee this season of Mahmovies! is kicking some cinematic booty. This week's screening of "Last Year in Marienbad" was stunning, mysterious, and atmospheric. This was the first time I ever watched a French movie and didn't even bother to read the sub-titles the whole time -- it almost didn't matter what they were saying. It's all about those costumes! And cornices! And, sacre bleu, those cheekbones!

We're doing well with the cupcakes, too. This week's flavors were chocolate and tiramisu and they sold well (which is good because otherwise Mahmoud and I gain weight from the leftovers). We're well on our way to raising enough to cover food costs for a MESCO nursery for 6 months!

Next week I'm thinking about carrot cake... and some sort of chocolate something... any requests?

Cupcake Revolution

Nearly everyone who knows me knows that I will seize any excuse to stuff you full of cake. Really. Any reason at all. It’s your birthday? Here, have some cake! It’s my birthday? Here, have some of my cake! You’re having a bbq? Why, it would be better if we had some cake! It’s Friday morning? Let there be cake! And so on.

But it’s only Mahmovies that allows me to really rev my kitchen engine because, for Mahmovies, I get to bake for the whole town. It’s a deluge of cupcakes! I bake and bake and bake all day until every level surface of my kitchen is covered in cupcakes. During last season, we christened our apartment “Le Chateau des Gâteaux.” Here is the sign I made this summer out of some scrap material.

Today is the second screening of this season, “Last Year in Marienbad,” for which I will create some chocolate cupcakes with chocolate icing and also tiramisu cupcakes (dark coffee cake with marscapone whipped cream icing). I don’t have a recipe for the latter, but I’m feeling confident.

Last week’s cupcakes (vanilla with vanilla icing and chocolate cheesecake) were a big success. In fact, to stay in keeping with the theme of the movie, “I am Cuba,” I think we have to call it A CUPCAKE REVOLUTION. As the icing on the cake (no pun intended), I even had a t-shirt to announce it so! The one and only Fatima Najm gave me a fabric cut-out of Che Guevara... and that evolved into this nice cupcake revolution t-shirt!

Fatima also gets credit for the other major innovation of this season, namely that all proceeds from cupcake sales will go to charity! My personal mission is “cupcakes for you = batatawada for them!” I’m working with a group called Creatives Against Poverty, which is a collective of journalists, consultants, photographers, NGO workers, entrepreneurs, etc. who pool and contribute skills for social impact. We support many different NGOs, one of which is the MESCO schools and nurseries in Mumbai (http://www.mescotrust.org). This organization works on the quality and affordability of education for children from the slums, who often fall through the cracks of the education system in India. My contribution particularly is towards the daily provision of batatawada (a potato patty sandwich), which is sometimes the only hot meal these kids get in a daily diet of stale bread and chili paste. MESCO started providing food when they realized that faintness and hunger pains were among the leading causes for student absenteeism. Now they include the expense of batatawada in their operating costs and they have a full, smiling class!



My goal is to raise enough money from the Mahmovies cupcakes to support an entire nursery of 20-30 kids with batatawada for 6 months.

Happy Belated Fighting Breast Cancer Month

I celebrated the final weekend of October, which is the official global month of pink-ribbon-wearing, with a breast cancer walk. It was fun to do something like this in Dubai. The city’s typical recreation activities are indoors and commercially-/gastronomically-oriented, so it was quite a sight to see however many thousands of people up bright and early to parade around like normal bipeds. Granted, the walk route was circling a mall, but at least we weren’t IN the mall! This is progress.


Plus we got to raise money for breast cancer research and treatment while marveling at how much pink clothing some people own. Here’s Marwa, for instance, looking ravishing in rose from head to toe to camera.







I was not quite so pink, but I enjoyed wearing my various breast cancer event pins and also a tremendously unfashionable magenta baseball cap, emblazoned with a capital B. I would like to believe that the B is for BREASTS, but it is in fact for Bur Juman, the mall sponsoring the walk.

My only complaint is that we celebrated the start of the walk with a balloon launch. A balloon launch! In a region with enough of a littering problem as it is, we released thousands of pink latex balloons into the skies. Granted, it was beautiful, but really! Are we going to have a walk next week to raise money for the little beach birds who choked on these balloons?

On the positive side, we injected some amusement into the day for the construction workers working nearby. Here they are, clustered along the route, snapping pictures of us on their mobile phones to send home. I can’t imagine what captions they put on them…