(Photos by Jas Lehal)
My piece on Pakistani cooking and learning to cook with my mum, appeared in The Times in the food section, The Table, this morning – and I’d love to share it with my blog readers too – click here to read it.
The piece was in part inspired by my reading Yasmin Alibhai-Brown’s The Settler’s Cookbook, which is a food memoir of her growing up, her relationships and her travels from East Africa to London. I met Yasmin at a book reading-discussion she took part in recently (by sheer coincidence, we discovered that my mother and Yasmin were pupils at the same school together in Uganda), and she spoke of how part of the need for her to write a food memoir about the food she grew up with was so that her children would have some sense of the place that their mother, and so in part, they too come from. It sort of got me thinking that I should know that too.
I’d recommend her book to anyone with a love of food and culture; and I hope you also enjoy my piece too. I’ve had some lovely praise and feedback from it via emails, Facebook and Twitter, and hope it touches in a nice way. My mum and I had a huge amount of fun doing the all-day photo shoot as we cooked “live”, the result of which can be seen in the paper today if you managed to get a chance to see it.
There are also several recipes that go with the piece too, and with time, I’ll post them up here as well (if you can’t wait, then look for the “Related Links” section on The Times’ website – although it’s not very clear).
Enjoy the sun, maybe my piece will put you in the mood for a curry tonight!
Beautiful photos. What a great experience! I'm always in the mood for curry.
P.S. I made the chocolate aubergine cake last week. My Husband gobbled the whole thing. Didn't even know it was eggplant until I told him. He hates them.
Love your Times piece Huma, and the dishes you made look great – looks like you did your mum proud! What did she think when she tasted them – did they meet with her approval?