Dubai Diaries: Serving up a meal infused with nostalgia

In the past one year, beset by an all-encompassing atmosphere of uncertainty and insecurity coupled with a palpable fear of an invisible virus, I seem to have turned to food for comfort more often than before.

My intrinsic weakness is buoyed by the umpteen accounts I follow on Insta, which has me drooling from the moment I wake up and scroll through my phone. From flour dense doughnuts encased with flavoured custards to confetti-strewn rainbow cookies and millionaire’s shortbread oozing butter, I’m hard pressed not to try and replicate these things of beauty for my own ‘gram.

If the first thing you do as soon as you wake up defines you, then my character is pretty much etched with sugar icing on a dark brown melt-in-your mouth chocolate cake for the whole world to read.

Over a year back when we had to retreat to the sterile safety of our homes as a potent virus slowly took control of our world and mind, I scooted to the nearest supermarket and squirreled away a couple of tins of condensed milk and canned tuna besides the usual hoard of vegetables and fruits.

The days that followed were a blur — from rustling up breakfast, lunch and dinner in tandem with WFH, the enforced eat-what-you-make routine meant we were all consuming home-cooked food days on end with no other recourse and every trip to the supermarket had to be carefully chartered out.

Looking back I developed a whole lot of new skill sets — I got better at kneading flour, quicker at chopping vegetables and agile at keeping my eye on the news feed to ensure we didn’t miss out on anything. If ever there was a crown for the queen of multi-tasking, I surely deserved it, I muttered to myself as I crept into bed bone weary every night.

To escape from the monotony of staying at home and eating my own cooking, Fridays were reserved for a special Zoom call with a couple of close ‘foodie’ friends and we’d embark on a culinary adventure whipping up everything from mac and cheese to biryani and enjoy a peek into each other’s kitchens.

We’d end these sessions with a meal around each other’s respective tables virtually in a feeble attempt to replicate our Friday brunches.

Having landed in Dubai more than a decade ago with no discernible kitchen skills to boast of, over the years, a heavy dose of nostalgia, especially of my mother’s cooking has ensured I can replicate the aroma of my childhood kitchen in my current abode.

So last week after work, there I was cruising around my neighnourhood, in search of a supermarket that sells banana leaves.

On Friday as I sat down for a meal with the family, it once again struck me. That a banana leaf studded with as many as 10 different types of vegetable dishes with a distinct flavour of its own from sweet to tart and bitter is but an excuse to bring people together to share in one of life’s most precious offerings — memories —of the past and for the future.

• Dubai