In primary school, there was a field, and around that field a wire-fence, and just beyond that fence a lush and forbidden meadow of green grass and happy yellow flowers. And if you could somehow head back to 1984, you’d find there a messy throng of future Maradonas, high-schoolers on monkey bars, girls in pigtails skipping rope to obscure Arabic songs about pigeons and gypsies, and a very serious child sitting near the fence, yanking up the occasional bunch of grass and chewing on it nonchalantly. That one’s me; hello!
And that grass was my favourite thing to eat. Well, you don’t actually eat the grass, you chew on it until the lemony flavour disappears, spit it out and grab a new bunch.
I hung on to my simplistic palate for years. In my early teens I fed on peanuts and not much else, in my college years I favoured ketchup sandwiches – that’s two slices of white bread with ketchup in the middle – and by the time I started working (and travelling) I was a solid cheeseburger aficionado: cheese, meat, bread – hold everything else and thank you. Then somewhere in my late twenties I joined the Time Out family, and within a year I had built a mental database of cheeses, meats, oils, herbs and plenty of things that I’d never before let into my stomach. This is all fine, and part of the process, but half a decade later (some three weeks ago) I caught myself eyeing an oyster and glancing over to my wife to say, ‘I’m not very keen on the coriander in this cream, and these oysters are just a bit too young to be eaten.’
The child at the fence would have ripped out a fence-pole and smacked me upside the head. And while he might not be able do that without some nifty space-time manipulation, my mum has no problem twisting the laws of physics, along with my neck.
We’ve just returned from a weekend with her, and while she’s a phenomenal cook, it’s difficult to compete with the many fine-dining establishments Abu Dhabi has to offer (love you mum). We flew into Beirut too late for dinner, but she’d made a light snack of kufta rolls all the same – that’s minced meat with herbs, rolled in Arabic bread and baked, often with a spicy butter; pretty straightforward stuff. I took one bite and loved it, but five years of criticism doesn’t just vanish on vacation, ‘Pretty good, bit too much butter though.’
Time froze, the temperature dropped and mum’s eyes turned into barren, frozen wastelands of corpses and death; a glare so cold it could stop a raging rhino dead in its tracks, and have it whimpering for its own mother. Thankfully my wife was there, and came swiftly to my rescue, ‘Don’t listen to him Emma, he’s an idiot.’
And just like that, bent between the awesome force of the only two women I’ve ever loved, I regressed into childhood. I ate the kufta rolls in silence, I ate every last one; and that was the best kufta I’d ever tasted.
