brownie politics + a recipe for espresso pecan brownies

espresso pecan brownies

when i was in secondary school i had a classmate whose mother made exceptional brownies. they were gooey and fudgy with a thin, flaky epidermis several shades lighter than the deep brownness of what lay beneath. in fact they were my first real brownies and became the benchmark for all others in islamabad. no other brownies ever measured up to them and even my own attempts to recreate them at home failed miserably. in those years the closest i ever got to approximating auntie r’s brownies were through betty crocker’s brownie mix.

vulcan the smoker + burger night

a full view of vulcan

in roman mythology vulcan is the god of fire. at number five in bani gala he has been reincarnated as a barbecue grill/smoker. his body is fashioned from a large steel barrel supported by a rectangular frame. his fire is contained in a little hatch fed by coal or wood. his name brandished in metal is proudly displayed on the lip of the curve of his upper body. in a jar beside him are tools that are capable of withstanding his wrath. they are used to retrieve large hunks of meat and poultry after they have been smoked or grilled. 

vulcan was inspired by a combination of arizona living and the pakistani love for grilling. the yusuf family’s adventurous appetites led us to try mexican and american meats and we fell in love with long slow smoked brisket and ribs. barbecue in the land of red, white and blue is an extended affair. the southern states are famous for cooking tough cuts of meat over indirect heat usually a wood fire for a long while. in pakistan meat is generally grilled after being marinated which essentially helps tenderise the meat. it absorbs some of the smokiness of the grill but it is nowhere near the deep almost tobacco like smokiness of american barbecue. i have fond memories of baba’s barbecues on trips to murree. back then he used a rectangular grill with a mesh of diamond shapes as a platform for grilling chicken tikka and bite-sized pieces of beef.

top of the pops and a childhood tv dinner: cheese béchamel with toast fingers

cheese béchamel

i know. you are wondering why i am giving you a basic recipe for a cheese béchamel. the truth is, sometimes the simplest of things are the most memorable. there is childhood pleasure in this pale ivory sauce whose colour attains a little depth from flour toasted in butter. it recalls a particular tv dinner on a weeknight when mama would allow us to eat in front of the television. the programme that warranted this special treatment was top of the pops (totp), which was broadcast on a local private pakistani channel called ntm. before that the public broadcaster ptv maintained a monopoly that equalled to boredom.

toast with personality + a recipe for 'accidental cardamom peach butter'

sunday afternoon with the observer + accidental peach and almond
butter toast

when i was little toast was limited in my imagination to slices of either dawn or continental white bread. the toaster would bronze their whiteness. it would crisp the epidermis while allowing the centre to remain a little soft. one had to be careful to not exert pressure on the slice given its unsubstantial thickness because unlike in england one could not get thick sliced bread in pakistan. brown bread made an appearance in the late 90s and was largely ersatz, merely coloured wheaten.

a green and white supper for the pakistan election

asparagus spears

there are some things in life that one is not prepared to feel emotional about like elections for instance. nonetheless this saturday both o and i woke up with a lump in our throats and a feeling of pride. eleventh may was the day that pakistan went to the polls in what was the first real election in my lifetime. pakistan has had elections before but never one in which one democratically elected government has been succeeded by another. up until now pakistan’s system of governance was a pendulum that swayed between the military and the political offspring of dictatorships. the terms of the latter were aborted by the military before they were able to complete them.