On Spot @ Eastern Gate

I've already established how strong my love for Lebanese cuisine is, and that's justified seeing as I was born and raised in Saudi Arabia. And considering that love for Lebanese cuisine, last night my parents decided to take me to a new restaurant they'd discovered. That was probably the best decision of the day!
My sister kept voicing her evident doubts on taking me there, since they'd only there once and she wasn't sure about their quality control. But after one small taste of the food, I didn't know why she was so unsure about it. The food was perfect.
My Mom had a great time picking out items from the menu. First, we couldn't decide whether how to order the mixed grill as there were 9 people with huge appetites, then we couldn't stop laughing because there was a dish named "Maryia" (pronounced like "Maria") and then my sister couldn't figure out whether to order the Chicken Elizabeth or the Chicken Breast Fillet - there were obvious puns there.
Here's what came to out table...

The Famous Lebanese Mixed Grill

The Maryia

 Maryia, we came to know, was a classic flat-bread stuffed with garlic minced meat. It was light, crisp and delicious.

Chicken Elizabeth

Athena's Fish

Kofta Tagine with Tahini

Everything was great. But the Kofta Tagine was probably the best! My Mom later told me that 'tagine' means that the dish has a gravy. This Kofta Tagine was meat kebabs in a tahini gravy. 'Tahini' is a sauce made from sesame seeds. The whole dish was perfect, I couldn't stop eating and I did NOT want to share this one!

So here's the scores:

Ambiance: 4/5 (The waiters were dressed in traditional Lebanese clothes & they had a fountain in the middle of the restaurant!)
Presentation: 3.5/5

Serving Size: 4/5

Taste: 4.5/5

Overall: 3.5/5

To top off a great evening, there must be ice-cream. And when people say ice-cream, all I hear is Baskin Robbins. Do stop by and try their Flavor of the Month "Sugar 'n' Spice".

Always a delight!

Attack of The Baking Bug (Part 2)

One fine day, I opened the door to the fridge and there were carrots, carrots, CARROTS everywhere! It was as if Bugs Bunny had been put in charge of the groceries. I couldn't figure out what had happened at first. But then I started raking my mind for all the things I could do with a bunch of carrots. And I made the first thing that came to my mind...

Carrot Cake!

I love food, but there's something about carrot cakes which makes my drift off to a Winter Wonderland, with my sitting in a glass covered veranda, watching the snow drift down from the sky in its beautiful white perfection while drinking cinnamon-spiked coffee and munching on an ooey-gooey carrot cake. Sigh

*drools*

Check out the recipe. The only things I changed about it were;

1. I used AP Flour and added a teaspoon of baking powder.
2. I didn't have walnuts so I threw in some raisins instead.

Ingredients

For the cake:

• 2 cups self-rising flour
• 2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
• 2 cups white sugar
• 1 1/2 cups vegetable oil
• 4 eggs
• 3 cups grated carrots
• 1 cup chopped walnuts

For the icing:

• 1 (8 ounce) package cream cheese
• 1/2 cup margarine, softened
• 1 pound confectioners' sugar
• 1 cup chopped walnuts
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract 

Directions

• Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C). Grease two 9 inch round cake pans.
• In a medium bowl, stir together the flour, cinnamon and sugar. Add the oil and eggs, mix until blended, then stir in the carrots and nuts. Divide the batter evenly between the two prepared pans.
• Bake for 25 to 30 minutes in the preheated oven. A toothpick inserted into the cake should come out clean. Cool cakes on wire racks before removing from pans.
• To make the frosting, use the second set of ingredients. In a medium bowl, cream together the butter and cream cheese; add the sugar and cream well. Stir in the nuts and vanilla. Use to fill and frost the cooled cake layers.

Pizza!

I have urges; I think of something and then I just have to do it. I'm also very lazy. So the urge to do something has to be much MUCH more stronger than my primal urge to not get off my ass.

There was one urge like this, recently, and that was an urge to make pizza - all by myself, from scratch - which I did.

Cheese! <3

I remembered my Mom making pizza once when I was a kid and the dough looked fine but when it came out of the oven, the base went all stiff after 5 minutes. So, I decided I needed to try something new. And hence I found a dough recipe on the internet which didn't use any yeast. Instead, there was yogurt. And the base was fluffy soft even after 30 minutes out of the oven (YES, I waited that long to eat pizza. Sigh).

The flavors I went for were Traditional Pepperoni (because my brother likes no-fuss kinda pizza) and Alfredo (because I have a strong affinity for anything Alfredo). And they both turned out great!

Plus, there HAS to be dessert, there is just no way that my brother and sister let me walk out of the kitchen without making something sweet. And hence came the Vanilla Latte cupcakes.

This is what happens when you pour chocolate syrup on cupcakes that haven't  had a chance to cool down.

Here's the recipe for the cupcakes!

With a whole lunch and then with the cupcakes with tea, it was indeed a great day!

Happy eating! :)

The Arabian Experience

The best part about being back home is being able to spend time with family.... Eating kabsa.
I love being back in Saudi Arabia. There's just something about the food here; a bland yumminess. Sigh.
My problem is I can never get used to desi (read Pakistani) food with all its spices and all the amount of water you have to drink to get yourself to stop breathing fire. My taste-buds are more tuned to the delicious blandness of Arabian/Lebanese cuisine.
My all time favorite would be hummus! I mean, who doesn't like hummus? It goes with everything!

• You can dip fries in it.
• You can eat it with falafel.
• You can eat it with grilled/deep-fried chicken.
• You can use it as a dip for Doritos.
• & if you're feeling diet-like, you can slice up a cucumber and use the hummus as a dip for that too!

I tried introducing a room-mate of mine to hummus once, brought from the Lebanese restaurant in F10.. Not only did she not like it, she made a face that made me go all defensive on account of the bowl hummus sitting in front of us.

But of course, that bowl of hummus was nothing compared to the REAL hummus that you can get here, in Saudi. Creamy perfection, indeed.

Hummus, my love. <3

And how can I forget the staple of Arabian cuisine, the one thing you can NOT miss when you're in any Gulf state: Kabsa. No Arabian dinner is complete without it. It's like as soon as the first spoonful goes into your mouth, you start hearing drum-beats and the image of Shakira belly-dancing suddenly appears in front of your eyes! But what's even better than kabsa is...

... Fish Biryani!!

Thanks to Shawaya House for an amazing dinner!

Stuff like this can only be found in the Gulf. And since I am here for only 4 more days, I ate much more than I should have and was at the point of exploding when my Mom reminded me I had the perfect thing to avert any food-explosion.

Excellent photography, indeed.

For those of you who can't read or speak or understand Arabic, this is yogurt, the peach and apricot kind. And it is very yum. The perfect dessert for when you feel like you're about to explode. It's like a blanket for the inside of your stomach; makes everything feel OK!

"Draw me, like one of your French girls."

In the end, here's a picture of my cat, to wrap things up.

Happy eating!

On Spot @ Roaster's

[On Spot will be a series of reviews of all the different restaurants that eat at & I'm hoping there's many of those. Happy eating! :-)]

Birthday's are a grand affair, especially when you're a university student and birthday's are just another excuse to party.

On a recent birthday of a friend, we decided to take the party to Roaster's, a cafe, bar & grill in Islamabad - which we later realized wasn't one of our best choices. Firstly, we couldn't figure out whether we were at the right place or not because there was no electricity and there was some issue with their back-up generator because of which most of the place was in the dark and their sign board wasn't lit up either. When the light finally came back on and the food was finally delivered, everything tasted the same even though it looked pretty. (Yes, I tried everyone's food!)

Steak # 1

Steak # 2

The steak I ordered was the Monterey Jack, which individually gets 4 stars out of 5 because it tasted good enough. But all the other steaks were just OK, nothing special.

What saved the day was the cake that we got from MJ's Bakery, a chocolate bundt cake...

...with a chocolate cupcake placed in the middle!

"Make a wish, deary!"

So, if you're planning on going to Roaster's, I'm sure the coffee is better than the steaks.

Ambiance: 4/5
Presentation: 3.5/5

Serving Size: 4/5

Taste: 2.5/5

Overall: 2.8/5

The one thing I loved about Roaster's though was that the lighting was perfect and with a new DSLR in hand, a friend took some of the most amazing shots of the whole gang and also the food. Check out his page on Facebook! (I would like to apologize to him because I picked probably the worst pictures of the food, probably because I didn't enjoy it a lot. lol)

The Attack of The Baking Bug (Part 1)

Every time I'm bake home in Saudi, I feel so full of energy and since there isn't much else where I can put it, I channel all that energy to one of my all-time favorite hobbies - baking. I started baking about a year or so go, and by that I mean I started to really bake, make my own cakes and cookies as compared to the cake-mixes I used to throw together and put in the oven before that. I still use cake-mixes (thank God for Betty Crocker!) but there's a certain sense of accomplishment that comes from taking a bite out of a cupcake that you've made from scratch!

So, on my current, almost at its end winter break that I'm spending at home, I've been baking my ass off, literally! My siblings are over-their-heads in love with me because of all the cupcakes and the cookies that vanish almost as soon as they come out of the oven.

The first item that I baked when I got home were a batch of plain Vanilla Cupcakes, a no surprises, no labor task that I took over because I was feeling too timid for an over-the-top dessert and also because my Mom doesn't like chocolate as much as I do.

Yes, they were as yumm as they look!

My Mom loved these cupcakes. She declared them to be one of my best cupcakes yet, even though I wasn't particularly excited about them. But well, "mother knows best!"

If anyone is planning to make these, here's the recipe I followed. The only changes I made to this were:

1. Replaced cake flour with AP flour because I didn't have any.
2. Used Hershey's chocolate syrup as topping instead of making the dark chocolate icing.

Happy baking! :)

Pinterest Pick

I recently joined Pinterest on the demands of a dear friend. And now I have to muster up all my willpower to get off it. But there's definitely some pretty good stuff on it, especially when it comes to easy recipes - which I'm a sucker for. So, "Pinterest Pick" is going to be a series of recipes that I find on Pinterest. It might not be daily or weekly or on any regular basis, might be just as random as the nest word that comes out of my mouth (DRAGON!) but I'll definitely try to document these easy recipes coming for everyone's convenience and for my own future references.

For the first Pinterest pick, I want to warn all of you that I'm a big Harry Potter fan. I might not be as big a fan as most kids who enjoy fandoms and all the fantasy writing that comes along with that. But I'm fan enough to have wanted, at one point in my life, to be as nerdy as Hermione Granger.

So, for the love of Harry Potter, I give you:

I'm fairly certain that if Harry had just offered Voldemort a mug of this latte, all matters could've been discussed in a much more peaceful manner and Dumbledore would still be alive. (sigh)

And from this point onwards, this latte will be the staple of my winter warmers.... Always!

What's more, I even found the perfect mug to drink this out of, also on Pinterest. Too bad I don't have it. (sigh) It's pale blue, hand-painted and costs $15.00, available at Etsy. This would definitely be a very awesome birthday gift!

This would be a great birthday gift.

So if anyone feels like giving my an early birthday gift, please know that I won't mind.

And if anyone wants to make me a cuppa Butterbeer Latte, I won't mind that either!

Disclaimer: If you don't understand the subtle puns in this post, then you've obviously missed out on the greatest literary experience of the 21st century. Better go and get the Harry Potter series today!

Chocolate Decadence

I've been blogging for quite a while now. But never on a regular basis. I blog consistently for a month or so and then for 6 months I totally forget about it! But for the past few months I've been thinking about this, a food (slash) perception blog. I'm always being asked by friends about where they should go for dinner or where is the best place to take their families for a quiet meal or what's the best item to order at a specific restaurant. I either have great taste or very common taste, either way my love for food and my humanitarian nature demands that I let people know where to go if they want a party in their mouth.

So on a recent stop-in at Karachi for a 24-hour stay before my flight to Dammam, I was stuffed with enough sugar to power a generator (that is IF generators ran on sugar!). There was so much chocolate that at a point I thought I would blow up and you'd find tiny nougats of chocolate instead of chunks of meat!

But the sad part about the mini trip to Karachi was that as soon as I reached at my Uncle's place from the airport and turned on the TV, someone somewhere had been shot at and Karachiites had been informed of a strike. So much for my excitement about the City of Lights!

But me being the brave and ever-resilient person that I am decided to go out the next day and me and Aunt and her tiny-tots ended up at the ever-famous Dolmen Mall - food court, to be exact!

And here's what I ate:

1. Chicken Stromboli from Lazzaro
2. Chocolate Decadence from Del Frio

The first one from the right on the second shelf - YUMM! <3

The stromboli was great, and I'm sure that was partially because it was fresh and I was as hungry as a whale on a plankton diet! But the cherry-on-the-cake was the slice of Del Frio's Chocolate Decadence. I mean, it was absolutely, doubtlessly the most wonderful slice of chocolate decadence I've had in my entire life. It was everything you'd expect a chocolate cake, chocolate cheesecake and Italian mousse bundled together to taste like.

The trip to Karachi would've been a bust considering I didn't get to see what all the fuss is about when people talk about Port Grand and I didn't get to meet all the lovely people I had planned to meet but it was saved by Del Frio's Chocolate Decadence. I just hope they can keep the quality standard maintained!

In case someone needs a recipe, here's one and here's another

Happy eating!