What's for dinner?

A few words on a favorite topic: food! One of the ways I love to interact with different cultures is to try local and traditional meals and ingredients. The manti (tiny lamb ravioli in a slightly spiced yoghurt sauce) at the Panorama Cafe in Cappadocia, Turkey lives large in my memory of the place. Or the very tender but disturbingly bony guinea pig enjoyed in Cuzco, Peru before hiking the Inca trail! The limoncello of the Amalfi coast, melon from Green River, UT, the polsen (hot dogs) with snappy casings and smart pocket shaped buns bought late at night from street vendors in Copenhagen. Food and place become intimately connected.

So what am I eating here? Subway. Pizza. Quesadillas.

At the culture lunch before everyone dived in

OK, it's not quite so consistently sad as that, but it is actually a bit of a challenge to identify and enjoy the local cuisine. When Andrea visited we went to the Sheik Mohammed Center for Cultural Understanding to a "culture lunch" with traditional foods and the chance to ask questions and have an open dialogue with the staff about all things related to the Emirates. (It was a must-do introduction, very nice experience.) We had dishes of rice and chicken, rice and lamb, a layered veggie dish in what was essentially a bechamel sauce. Rice was introduced to the emirates, possibly from India, certainly the spices and flavors of the rice-meat dishes are reminiscent of Indian biryanis. We had deep fried dough balls in date syrup for dessert. I think every culture has come upon the bright idea of frying dough! At work one of the staff brought a kind of crepe/ pancake that is considered a traditional breakfast food and I've enjoyed a camel meat burger and camel's milk chocolate and a

camel's milk shake

camel's milk shake. But essentially, the UAE, and especially Dubai, is, has been for most of its history, a place of international trade and culture swapping. A large variety of familiar and unfamiliar food is on offer at restaurants and in the grocery store. The international-ness of my diet is determined by my choices.

When I was living in the temp housing, the nearest grocery store was a big French chain called Carrefour. This particular branch always had tubs of moutabal in the deli. Moutabal is what we might call babaganoush, a smoky smashed eggplant dip. Babaganoush is also on menus here but it usually means a chunkier eggplant and tomato dish, more along the lines of a ratatouille. So I developed a slight addiction to moutabal with soft Lebanese bread. That was my dinner a few nights every week. Now the closest grocers don't seem to carry it so I'm at a loss.

I am having some fun trying to incorporate some of the interesting grocery options into my diet. I was planning to make tortilla roll ups for a potluck when I discovered that Philly cream cheese here comes in a sweet Thai chili flavor that is out of this world. I made tomato soup one day but was out of bread or croutons or crackers but I had some Indian snack mix on hand to make bhel puri and so I sprinkled these little crunchy lightly spicy rice puffs and potato crispies in the soup and it was awesome. I wanted to make the Italian sausage and tortellini soup recipe that Andrea gave me but Italian style sausage isn't super easy to find. A friend suggested I try this butcher shop near the bank metro stop (Prime Gourmet) and sure enough, they had Italian beef sausage AND they had a lamb rosemary sausage too so I went with half and half and it was amazing. Plus I found basil and pine nut tortellini which I haven't seen in the US before.

pizza hut delivery not so unusual, but dunkin donuts delivers too!

As for going out to eat, there is every chain restaurant known to man in town and they'll all deliver. I saw a Hardee's delivery guy in the elevator yesterday, a McDonald's delivery motorbike cut me off in traffic last week, there's a Subway at the Dubai campus of ZU and a Starbucks at the Abu Dhabi campus. I've eaten at celebrity chef Jaime Oliver's restaurant and had my birthday dinner at a Cuban/ Mexican place whose flagship location is in NYC. There's a Garrett's of Chicago popcorn shop at the Dubai Mall- I don't think you can get Garrett's outside of Chicago In the US, can you?

I got away from the chains and franchises last night though with a trip to Buq Tair aka the Jumeira fish place. Some guys from Kerala India go fish in the morning, rub the fresh catch with a lightly spicy rub/ sauce and then in the evening, fry up your choice in a converted shipping container and serve it to you on plastic picnic tables in the sand/ dirt outside. It's got quite the following these

we picked from the pile

days so there's a line out the door. You wait for your chance to get up to the counter and look at the tub of spice rubbed fish, heads on, tails on, the works. We went with a hamour and a sherri and half a kilo of shrimp. Then you go sit on some plastic stools and wait for them to call your name. When your fish and prawns are ready, they grab you a table, offer you some paratha (flat bread), some curry sauce, rice, drinks... that's about it for your "sides" options and then you dig in. Using fingers and bread. I

the orders go into a pan

found the shrimp to be especially addictive. We didn't eat the head but apparently the hardcore fans and Kerala locals do. So fresh and tasty! One of my favorite Dubai dining experiences so far.

they lightly fry it up in one of these wok-like things

our dinner- ready to dig in!