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!

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! :)