In the Beginning...

New Beginnings with Old Memories. Photo by Mir Masud-Elias. Copyright 2012.

"Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were."

"...[Increase] me in knowledge."

In the name of lost things that are found again, I begin here because you have to start somewhere.

I started to cook seriously after turning thirty. This was so surprising to my family that it took my mother (a creative and innovative cook) many years to accept this fact. My paternal grandmother (an expert cook with the most delicate of touches) never really did accept this fact before she passed away. (There's a story here of her passing and my cooking, but that's for another day.) I didn't have to cook to feed a family as they both did, and my older sister (the most precise and relaxed of cooks who remembers all my favorite dishes) does, and it was not an interest that evolved from childhood. So, what prompted my interest in cooking?

Like many immigrants, I started out in fits and starts to try to capture some taste of "home" -- a place that existed mostly in my mind and that bore little resemblance to the place I left when I was 17 years old to come here. In recent years, cooking together with my husband (a superb cook with the power to replicate most dishes by taste) acted as a way to unlock each other's memories of times past, and thus, to get to know each other more intimately. Cooking also served as a creative and social outlet during the period in my early to mid-thirties when work was all-consuming. Finally, like my mother, cooking served (and, to some extent, continues to serve) as an unattenuated expression of myself to others.

In my choice of recipes, instead of being comprehensive, I'm afraid that you'll have to put up with some whimsicality. I started out by cooking what I liked to eat or would like to eat. However, my urge to cook what I like to eat isn't necessarily prompted by pure gastronomic pleasure (not that there is anything wrong with that!). I'm curious to cook and learn to cook dishes that tell me stories that I once knew and have forgotten or stories that I never knew and find intriguing.

Most importantly, I'm drawn to dishes that originated in one place and changed form along the way to ending up in another place. I know what you're thinking! It's a metaphor for those of us who (while extremely lucky to have multiple, actual places to call home) feel homeless in the world. One of the advantages to my feeling of uprootedness is that I see common threads in many diverse cuisines in the Islamic world, namely, North Indian (from Bangladesh and Pakistan), Turkish, Persian, Arab, and yes, even Spanish. It is in these interstices (whether real or imagined) that I find the food stories and histories that resonate most with me and that I'm here to share with you.

This food blog/memoir is an exploration of these interstices, one dish at a time, and notes on the journey along the way. This blog is also a tribute to my parents who never discouraged my unflagging curiosity, to my two siblings and one nephew who are the brightest lights in my world, to my grandmothers for their cooking genes, and to the many animals, plants and other creatures of the planet that sustain and enrich our lives and our cuisines. Most importantly, I dedicate this blog to my husband and my mother who've both inspired me to be a better person and a better cook.

(My husband has also agreed to keep my blog typo-free;-))

Thank you for reading. I would love to hear from you, especially if you make one or more of these dishes, have any questions or have stories to share. Finally, all my recipes, unless indicated otherwise, are gluten free.

Eat well. Be well.

Notes:

1. All the text and images in this blog are my own (unless, indicated otherwise, by quotation marks, etc.). Please be courteous and don't use without proper attribution.

2. All meat that I cook and that are featured in this blog is organic, free-range and pastured-raised, whenever possible. It is a core part of my personal philosophy that the animals who give up their lives for my sake live as good a life as possible prior to suffering as good a death as possible.