Authentic Pakistani Recipes, Made Simple
Arbi never arrived at our house with any ceremony. It came in a string bag from the sabzi wala, dusty and hairy and honestly a little ugly, and my grandmother would tip the whole lot into a steel basin of water. As a child I could not understand the fuss adults made over it — …
The first time this hariyali chicken recipe stopped me in my tracks, the monsoon had just broken over Lahore and everything on our street had turned the colour of wet moss. My uncle had set up his little coal grill under a tin awning, rain hammering above us, and he pulled off a skewer of …
Outside my school in Karachi there was a man with a wooden cart, a block of ice the size of a suitcase, and a hand-cranked shaver that sang against the ice all afternoon. We spent our pocket money on his gola ganda — rainbow ice drowned in syrups the colour of traffic lights. It was …
The bhindi in our house was bought by my father, and it was bought like a man inspecting gemstones. Every Sunday at the sabzi mandi he would pick up each okra pod, bend the tip, and listen for the snap — if it bent without breaking, back it went, and the vendor would sigh the …
The first time I met the dish behind this general tso’s chicken recipe, I was sixteen and far more interested in the general than the chicken. A school friend’s father had taken a carload of us to a Chinese restaurant on Tariq Road in Karachi to celebrate exam results, and there it was on the …
The first time this orange chicken recipe entered my life, it arrived on a steel tray in the food court of a Lahore shopping plaza, squeezed between a burger counter and a stall selling kulfi. I was seventeen, killing time while my mother shopped, and I ordered it mostly because the boy at the Chinese …
There are fancier sabzis in my family’s repertoire, but the one that actually raised us was this aloo shimla mirch recipe. It was my dadi’s answer to the question every Punjabi home asks around noon — what’s quick, what’s in the crisper, and what will the children eat without a negotiation? Potatoes were always in …
Every family has one cautious eater, and in ours it was my younger brother, who treated green chillies like unexploded ordnance. So whenever we went out for Chinese food in Karachi — red tablecloths, a lazy Susan in the middle, soup that arrived before you had fully sat down — he ordered the same plate …
There is a Chinese restaurant off Boat Basin in Karachi where my family has marked every small victory of the last twenty years — my father’s retirement dinner, my sister’s engagement, the evening my niece lost her first tooth into a bowl of hot and sour soup. The menu there runs to four pages, but …
