Dining Out: Souk Mubarakia
This is for Skunk – he recommended the outside restaurant at Souk Mubarakia, which also happens to be one of our favorite places to go.
Does anyone know of a restaurant around here with an old Kuwait theme – like where they have private small rooms where you sit on the floor, like a small majlis?
Kuwaiti Drugged, Robbed in Thailand
Today in the Kuwait Times:
“Thailand/Kuwait. A Kuwaiti claims he was drugged and robbed at a hotel in Thailand. The 45 year old man stumbled from his room at the Marine Palace Hotel in South Patayya, Thailand yesterday morning, telling the reception staff that two women had stolen 10,000 Baht (around KD 82) in cash, a digital camera and a mobile phone.
The women had earlier entered the hotel, telling reception that they were going to the room occupied by the victim. They allowed the reception staff to take photocopies of their civil ID’s, reported local press yesterday. Arrest warrents for both the women, a 20 year old from Bangkok and a 21 year old from Nhakon Sawan Province were issued.”
Comment: I would love to know the rest of THIS story.
Liberation Tower at Night and Qatteri Cat
We love going to Souk Mubarakia. Took this recently on a cool, clear night from the souks
The Qatteri Cat has not lost interest in the tree, but no longer seems interested in pulling it over. The blanket is Masai, from Tanzania. Great Christmas colors!
Qatteri Cat in the Dog House
Last night, Qatteri Cat had what we call the cat-crazies. I think he misses my husband, who chases him around, throws his ball, tosses him on his back and rubs his tummy. We hang out together, but I’m not so much FUN as Adventure Man.
So last night, just minutes after I had turned out my light, I heard a great !!!CRASH!!! I knew what it was, as I could hear crunchings, tinglings and things falling even as I “rushed to the scene” (and a tip of the hat to the Kuwait Times who use that phrase endlessly).
Here is what it looked like before:
It was late at night. I couldn’t deal with it. I found a large sheet and covered the mess and went back to bed. Qatteri Cat was too embarrassed, he hid until he thought I was asleep, and then came in – he was cold – to sleep snuggled up next to me.
This morning, I faced this:
The cross at the top of the tree is broken, but I think me and Mr. Elmer can fix it:
Of course, any of you who have cats and understand their little pea-sized brains, will know that this morning the Qatteri Cat is totally mystified as to how this carnage happened.
That’s him, skulking back behind the newly upraised tree, still a little embarrassed and hoping I don’t remember he did it.
Adventure Man and the Space Shuttle
The phone rang this morning at 4:30 a.m. That’s never a good thing.
My husband’s voice came over the line. “I’m here in Florida. I’ve been in a terrible accident. I’m OK, but I’m standing by the side of the road freezing my a$$ off waiting for the police to get here. And the woman who hit me is really really mad at me.”
It’s OK. I’m wide awake. The first “ting” of the phone sends a shot of adrenalin running through me that never fails to give me instant focus.
“You’re sure you’re OK?” I ask.
“Yeh, I just need to hear your voice. There are all these people waiting for the space shuttle to take off, and I knew they weren’t paying attention to their driving. There are people parked all along the sides of the road, people pulling in, people pulling out and looking for a better place to park . . . .”
“Oh. . .the space shuttle. I forgot about that.”
“Yeh, there’s a huge crowd here. There hasn’t been a night take-off for a long time. So I could see traffic slowing down in front of me, I slowed down, and this woman just plows into my rear end. You should see the rental car! What am I going to do? . . .oh, the police are coming. Will you look up our insurance policy and claims number and I’ll call you back.”
I get the information, put it by the phone and go back to sleep. It’s cold here, too, but I have a very warm cat snoozing away next to me, so I drift off again.
The phone rings again at 6 and I give him the information he needs. He is still a little shaken, but the police have been very good to him, and are going to give him a ride to a hotel where he can spend the night, contact the car rental people and calm down.
“The woman who hit me is really really angry,” he says in a hushed voice, because she is still near. “The police cited her for hitting me, and she says it’s my fault for slowing down!” We both get a good chuckle out of that – in the US, under pretty much any circumstance you can think of, the person who hits another car from behind is always, ALWAYS wrong. You’re supposed to be paying attention.
“Oh – and while the police were taking the information and clearing the accident (both cars had to be towed) the shuttle took off!”
“Have you ever seen that before?” I asked
“No! And I didn’t care to this time, either. But there it was, in the middle of all this accident chaos, and everything stopped. It was pretty spectacular.”
The police told him the nearest hotel was a roach-infested druggie hangout and took him down the highway, with his three pieces of luggage, to a nicer Holiday Inn. At the Holiday Inn, the desk clerk took pity on him and gave him a very nice room and an accident victim discount. The car rental people brought him a brand new great big car with leather seats in the middle of the night and apologized that this had happened to him in Florida. He is still a little shaken – the woman really hit him hard – but all in all, things went pretty well. He is on his way to his cousin’s house this morning, and a good, hopefully uneventful, visit.
And he got to watch the shuttle take-off. We once lived in Florida. People would travel from all over the world to come watch a shuttle take-off, and it was always iffy. Shuttle take-offs get postponed all the time, weather, mechanical malfunctions . . . sometimes the delay is short, sometimes a week or more.
So I just have to laugh at his luck. He doesn’t even care about the shuttle launch, all he wanted to do was to get to his cousin’s house, and the shuttle launches when he is in the perfect position to view it.
Photo courtesy of http://www.astronautscholarship.org
Santa’s Wish List: Cookbooks
You might think I love to cook. You would be very wrong.
I had a great friend for many years, one of those Southern gals with a last name first name, and when one day I told her of my secret guilt – that cooking wasn’t FUN for me, she said “what we do, every day, is SURVIVAL cooking. We just meet the expectation of getting a meal on the table. That doesn’t have to be fun, it just has to be done.”
That’s pretty much what I do, and why I have been giving you all these great recipes. The truth about the recipes I am giving you is that most of them are EASY and they taste good. A few require special equipment and mastering a new skill, but it’s like swimming – once you’ve done it, it’s easy. There is nothing complicated about the recipes I am sharing with you – they are ones I use, too!
Books About Food and Eating
First I will share with you two books available through third party vendors at Amazon. The first is Food Lover’s Companion (A Comprehensive Definition of Over 4000 Food, Wine and Culinary Terms) by Sharon Tyler Herbst, which is available starting at $14.93, and the second is M.F.K Fisher’s The Art of Eating, also available through Amazon at $11.53. The Companion is invaluable when someone uses a term for a cooking technique or ingredient you don’t know; it has words for everything! My husband reads this book sometimes just for fun and is always sharing new information he has learned. The MFK Fisher book is just plain fun reading about food, full of information and anecdotes and stories, written in an enormously readable way.
Beginner Cookbooks
The first cookbook I used was the McCalls Cookbook – no longer in print. It had photos of how do do the things I found so intimidating, and that is where I got my earliers Christmas cookie recipes – the Russian Tea Cakes and the Candy Cane Cookies. The second was The Joy of Cooking, which I mentioned in an earlier blog entry. What is good about these books is that they keep it really simple. In Joy, they give you a long theoretical section, which you can read if you have the time, and which helps, but at the beginning it isn’t always easy to even understand the basics. That takes time. Then you can go back and read later and go “Aha! Now I understand!”
Cookbook Secrets
Actually, I love reading cookbooks. I have a huge collection. And almost all of them are Junior League Cookbooks. So here’s the secret – when you are looking for cookbooks, look for ones where women who contribute have to put their names. If their name is on the recipe, you can trust that the recipe will work, and that it will be one of their best recipes – they don’t want to be embarrassed!
The majority my cookbooks are from the South. And narrowing it down even further, most of my favorites come from Louisiana or Georgia.
The first one I ever bought was Talk About Good! And oh, it WAS good!
These recipes use ingredients like real cream and real butter and lots of salt. Southern people have some of the lowest life-expectancy rates in the United States – I suspect their eating habits have a lot to do with it. But if it isn’t a habit to eat so richly, every now and then it just tastes SO GOOD to use these ingredients. You will also notice that it has what they call a “plastic comb” binding. That means when you open it up to follow a recipe, it will lie flat. That’s a really good thing!
My second favorite is Quail Country, by the Junior League of Albany, Georgia. You would really have to scour the book stores to find this out-of-print classic, because so few people would ever want to part with it. Another gem is The Fort Leavenworth Collection, if you can get your hands on it – again, yard sales, used book stores would be your best bet.
There is a wonderful group of stores in the USA called Half Price Books. If books are not being bought as gifts, if you plan to just read a book and pass it along, or if you like to have a few on hand to pass along because you think they are so great, Half Price Books is a great place. They have the most obscure books, books you never thought you would see again. Many of their books are new, but remaindered (left over from book stores that couldn’t sell the, or from publishers who published too many copies) so they are sold at half price. They will also buy used books from you, but to me, they offer so little that I would just as soon give them away. (No, I don’t own stock in Half Price Books.)
There are some other fabulous Junior League cookbooks – the California Heritage Cookbook, the Seattle Classics, and there are other cookbooks produced by churches and charities that also have “real people” recipes that are drop-dead good. I remember once sharing a recipe for Chocolate Cheesecake from Seattle Classics. My friend told me she made it for Christmas dinner, but everyone was too full to eat dessert. But she said all night she heard doors opening and closing, as people snuck down to the kitchen to slice a little of the cheesecake and eat it, and in the morning, only a fragment was left!
Seeking out the best cookbooks can make every vacation an adventure. I have cookbooks from Kenya and Tunisia, Qatar, Jordan and Saudi Arabia . . . all full of great recipes, recipes with names attatched. I wish you a grand adventure seeking out cookbooks that will thrill your heart. Happy Hunting!
Evening out: Learning to be Flexible
A post from Little Diamond on having passport photos taken in Lebanon reminds me of how differently we live in our foreign adventures. She tells how patiently the photographer dealt with her, encouraging her to comb her hair, and finally, after showing the first photos, convinced her to clean up her act for a second, more glamorous, round.
I read a book Almost French by Sarah Turnbull, in which she describes her arrival in Paris, dressed in typical Outback Australian style, and her adventures learning that in Paris, you don’t even leave the apartment in sweatpants to run to the baker because “it might hurt his eyes.”
I remember returning home from life in Germany and thinking “the women here are so COMFORTABLE in their own skin. They wear jeans, even into their 80’s, they go hiking, they go without makeup, and they look happy!” and I wanted that for myself. In my neck of the woods, too much make-up is a big no-no. And too much is anything beyond mascara.
Identity photos in the USA are simply expected to be awful, so no one thinks too much about it, and we all just avoid showing our ID’s if we can help it (maybe that’s why we drive so lawfully, so that we don’t have to show our dismal drivers’ licenses?)
So when I had to have my first residence card done in Saudi Arabia, I didn’t go to a lot of effort. I cleaned up, combed my hair, put on my abaya and scarf around the neck, and went to the local photo guy and got the photo taken. It happened to fall on the day of a significant birthday, you know, one of those with a zero in it. Later that day, when we picked up the photos from the beaming photographer, I looked, and I mentally gasped. The photo looked fabulous.
What to do? I know the law says photos are to be unretouched, but this photo is clearly a little doctored. As any woman would, I decided to just go with the local customs. I even bought a few more enlarged versions to sent to my family. I still grin when I look at that photo. Yes, I even framed one for myself.
Here in Kuwait, I have had to had these photos taken several times, I don’t know why, for several different cards, and then the cards take time and someone loses the photos and I have to have them taken again. There is a very nice man, he takes them and I can get them almost instantly from him. I even got to pick out the one I wanted, and then, he started airbrushing.
“What are you doing??” I exclaimed, as he brushed broad strokes across my face.
“Oh Madam, I am just evening out your makeup a little bit,” he said, as freckles, crow’s feet, shadows, and any blemish totally disappeared. I wasn’t wearing any makeup, only mascara.
Hypocrite and vain as I am, I just rolled with it. It’s another culture, and I know, because I asked, that everyone gets the same treatment, the re-touch, so all the ID photos look pretty good. Mine would draw attention if it weren’t retouched, I tell myself.
Rain, Dear
My husband called me this morning from Germany and said “I am so glad we don’t live here anymore, it is all dark and grey and rainy today.”
I laughed and said “That’s the exact weather we are having in Kuwait.”
I have only recently started driving, really driving, the way I used to drive around Qatar. (One time my husband took a day off to take a trip around Qatar. We left early in the morning. We were back in time for lunch.) I was fearless, at least during daylight hours. Traffic was heavy, but much calmer, much tamer than in Kuwait.
When I first got here, I thought I would never drive. Then, little by little, I would drive here, drive there, mostly for groceries or meetings, then, little by little, more. Now, I am actually pretty good, or at least getting pretty good.
Or so I thought until today. I had to drive home in the rain. I am confident and also cautious as a driver. I was surrounded by two kinds of drivers – nervous and UNconfident drivers, and drivers who were totally oblivious to the dangers of a newly slick wet highway and driving their normal fast, weav-y way. That makes for a hair-raising ride, especially when you are caught between the nervous brak-ers and the cavalierly speeding weavers.
Did I mention school had just gotten out, so many of the cars were Mums with children, and the others were young bloods who had been trapped in the classroom and were eager to break loose? Deadly combination.
Made it home, mentally designing a medal. Soldiers get medals just for participating in a campaign and living to tell about it. I think the Kuwait freeways and ring roads should be combat-medal qualified. Maybe black, with a yellow stripe down the middle . . .and you get stars for acts of extraordinary bravery?
Patricia Wells, France and Fallot Mustard
As I was scrambling through the Salmiyya Sultan, looking desperately for a few good ingredients on Thanksgiving morning, I stopped short in sheer wonder. There, on the shelves, here in Kuwait, were mustards by Edmond Fallot.
Monsieur Fallot makes the best mustards in the entire world. One year, we did a “French” turkey, slivered with a thousand slices of garlic carefully placed in a thousand tiny slits just under the turkey skin. It was magnificent. We served the turkey that year with a variety of Monsieur Fallot’s mustards.
We lived in Germany, and we often travelled to France for a couple weeks at a time, exploring different regions. We used lots of books, but the three we used most often for France were Patricia Wells Food Lover’s Guide to France, Patricia Wells Food Lover’s Guide to Paris, and a book published annually called Europe’s Wonderful Little Hotels and Inns.
We didn’t have a lot of money, but what we lacked in money, we made up in energy, optimism and research. We found wonderful places to stay, fabulous meals and affordable side trips. We lunched out of charcouteries and boulangeries, we dined demi-pension in Michelin “Red R’s” (good local food at reasonable prices.) We found ourselves in the Burgundy area again and again, and Patricia Wells led us to Monsieur Fallot’s mustard factory in Beaune. Click there for a virtual visit to his factory in preparation for your real time, in person visit.
As I stood there, transfixed, in the Sultan Center, I was back in Beaune, travelling in France with some history and “foodie” friends, and we made a special stop at M. Fallot’s factory, whose address was listed in the original Food Lover’s Guide to France I was using then. I am guessing he has asked NOT to have his address given any more, maybe he had too many visitors like us. We couldn’t get enough of his mustards – we stayed and watch him filling jars with many different kinds, and bought at least one of each variety. His mustard is the gold standard of mustards. Worth a trip to Beaune.
Except you don’t have to go to Beaune – you can find M. Fallot in the Sultan Center in Salmiyya, or in William-Sonoma if you are in the U.S. and in other parts of the world where you find fine condiments.
The latest edition I could find of the Food Lover’s Guide to France was 1987, for $1.99 used, through Amazon. The latest edition I could find of Food Lover’s Guide to Paris was 1999, and the cost, used, was $9.99, again through Amazon. (Disclaimer/Disclosure: yes. I do own stock in Amazon. Help me keep Amazon stock high, please. 🙂 ) I imagine some of the information in both books is outdated, restaurants have closed, newer, haute-er places are open, but I would still say they are worth the price.
Both guides list market days for various arrondisement/towns/villages, and for that alone, they are worth the price. Wells describes local specialities, and best of all, Wells is deliciously readable. Even if you don’t have a trip to Paris or France in your near future, Wells’ books are fun to read, and full of wonderful, valuable information.
The most recent edition I can find of Europe’s Wonderful Little Hotels and Inns on Amazon is 2003, but I know there are more recent editions because mine is 2004. It is edited by Adam & Caroline Raphael, and has hotels listed throughout Europe, not just France, although the lion’s share of hotels listed ARE in France. They range from budget to unbelievable luxury – and the twist is, this book is made up solely of recommendations from customers. Someone has to recommend the hotel, another has to second the recommendation, and readers keep the postings up to date. We have found some truly memorable hotels using this guide, hotels full of charm but affordable for the region. Most of the hotels were awesome. Even used, even outdated, one good hotel stay at a charming but reasonably priced hotel will pay the cost of the book.
How Thanksgiving Really Went . . .
The day after Thanksgiving is traditionally a HUGE shopping day in the U.S. Stores have sales that start at 7 a.m. in the morning, some even reward customers who get there at 6 a.m. People start putting up their Christmas decorations. Almost everyone is in calorie overload – no matter how much you tell yourself you are going to go light, you end up eating more than you intended.
The really good news is that leftover turkey and cranberry sauce make dynamite sandwiches. Pies are great the second day.
I didn’t do the pecan pie. When I went to make it, I didn’t have any Karo syrup, and you can’t make a pecan pie without corn syrup. We made an early trip to the Sultan Center, where they DID have those gorgeous huge Kuwaiti shrimp, (they were yummy) and I bought some corn syrup, but by the time I got home, I needed to focus on other things and didn’t have time to make another pie. I had made a plum pie the day before when I discovered I didn’t have corn syrup, and that would have to do. As it turned out, my friend had made THREE pies, two stunningly beautiful pumpkin pies with little leaves of pastry crust on them, and a cranberry/lemon pie that was a tart surprise, and a welcome change from all the sweet stuff. She also baked three kinds of bread – she is one talented lady. She made it all look so easy. Whew!
Pumpkin Pie with Autumn Leaves
My friend did the turkey, and it was PERFECT. She also did the gravy, and it, too, was perfect. I will have to learn her secret. She also made a smokey black bean soup that was to die for.
Balsamic Sweet Potatoes
Mom’s Roquefort dressing was a big hit, the cranberry jello was great, all the side dishes were great – something for everyone.
But I have to get the recipe for that smokey bean soup from my friend. . . WOW.
Best of all – good conversation with good friends, people you can be comfortable with.
My parents are doing OK, and were baking a turkey when I called and would be sharing Thanksgiving Dinner with my youngest sister and her husband. I give thanks they still have the drive to do their own Thanksgiving.
Enough of the Thanksgiving. . . time to move on. I want to thank all of you who had fun with this meal, who tried making even one dish – you inspired me. And I guess there is a need for easy recipes, because once I had put those recipes online, I was getting huge hits every day – the day before Thanksgiving, I had almost 700 hits. . . it was a huge shock.
I especially want to thank 1001 Kuwaiti Nights for her inspiration, and her questions. I don’t even know what I know, until I know what you don’t know! See her first Thanksgiving dinner at that link. What courage! To try a Feast and to bring it off! I especially love the after photo of her first Pecan Pie! Woooo Hooooooo, 1001!
Recent Comments
intlxpatr on Shampoo Ginger tigerbutterya0c5ff1d… on Shampoo Ginger intlxpatr on British Soldier Kidnapped, Esc… John on British Soldier Kidnapped, Esc… intlxpatr on British Soldier Kidnapped, Esc… Wikipedia Donate Button
Amazina
Early Voting in Florida
