Winter
My favourite things to do on a blustery winter day
Last Saturday’s aberrant snowstorm notwithstanding, I love winter. I think it’s because of my predisposition to piping hot sweets and cuddly sweaters – no sooner does the air get that dash of crispness, and the first faded leaf twitters to the ground, that I wake up with a craving for warm apple pie and an urge to order ten new turtle-necks from the Land’s End catalogue.
Here are some of my favourite things to do during a freak snowstorm, or on a particularly chilly winter day, best enjoyed from your apartment window with a steaming mug of tea or coffee, watching the flakes drift down and gather at the pane, like little Kay in the The Snow Queen. What are some of yours?
- Knitting
My goal is to be at least half as good a knitter as Naani, my maternal grandmother was, from whom I learnt my first slip-knot at age 8, and my other grandma, Aunty Z, who re-introduced me to this meditative woolly pleasure at age 25. They were true maestras, these women, with every little sweater knitted for a grandchild a timeless work of art. I’m just a beginner, at the oh-no-I-dropped-a-stitch scarf-mode, but hopefully I’ll get somewhere near them one day!
- Baking / Desserts
I’ve always liked making desserts, and I like to eat them even more. Since coming to America, though, I’ve been spoiled by Keebler pie crusts and Pillsbury and Trader Joe’s baking mixes. But sometimes, you just need to sink your teeth into a crispy, flaky, butter-glazed, hand-kneaded pie crust.
You can’t do the short-cut with halvas. The penultimate Pakistani dessert, rich, velvety, sinfully sweet, synonymous with winter in my hometown Lahore – I can just smell the ghee and milk, the brown sugar, the cardamoms, saffron, almonds, carrots, semolina or chickpeas, depending on what kind of halva my mum was making that day, simmering for hours on the stove…I’ve yet to muster the courage to cook one of these on my own!
- Reading
This is, of course, one of the most enjoyable activities ever at any time of the day, any day of the year, but even more so on a day when you just want to wrap yourself up in a soft hand-me-down blanket and not move. Not move, not think, just lose yourself in some fantastic world, centuries away, meandering and mysterious, rife with kings, queens, heroes, romance, magic…The Arabian Nights, The Lord of the Rings, The Alchemist, and fairytales of any kind rank high on my list. Current favourite is Samarkand by Amin Maalouf, a plum of cocoon-reading if there ever was one!
- Origami
I bought an Origami Suncatchers Kit from Barnes & Noble on an impulse, and spent the next one week bent over a coffee table strewn with colourful glazed paper, glue and fishing string. Z would find me in the exact same position every time he came home from work – the house fell into a state of neglect, dinner was reduced to pita and hummus, episodes of the Colbert Report backed up…and voila! The prettiest things to have come out of a thoroughly home-bound day :)
- Board Games
Maybe my 25+ friends think I’m geeky for still obsessing about board games, but I don’t care! It’s my dream to have a whole store of them one day, and host extravagant board game bashes every weekend. Can there be a better way to pass time with people on a blustery winter day? The blizzard would long be over before someone declared victory in Monopoly or Catan, and you’d look out of the window and say, “Hey, when did it stop snowing?” Such is the beauty of board games.
That’s one thing I miss about living in a dorm – willing game players were never in short supply. And what I miss even more are those nippy evenings in Lahore, when the whole troop of cousins would gather in front of a gas heater at our grandparent’s or eldest aunt’s house every Sunday for a religious contest of Ludo, Carom, Cluedo, PayDay, and as we got older, Pictionary, Tabboo, Cranium…
Well, stay warm, and enjoy your winter, folks! :)
A Lazy Friday Afternoon
Ah, that blissful in-between-jobs limbo! With my three-month HuffPost stint come to an end, an exciting news fellowship starting next week, and a much anticipated trip to the homeland in February, I couldn’t be a happier house elf this bright white new year. I wake up, make myself a cup of coffee on my Black & Decker coffee machine – a gift from my lovable Toronto aunt – butter up a slice of toast, and settle down in front of the laptop to catch up with friends on Skype, alternating between “French Lessons with Michel Thomas” and “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” on iTunes, with an hour of Democracy Now! during lunch, and, some more coffee.
You see, I’ve become somewhat of a coffee addict (that, and The Office). I think it’s since I started popping illachi or green cardammon pods into the water to boil (a cue from the Palestinian landlady) – I just can’t seem to get enough of that aromatic zing. Toss in a spoonful of cocoa and a pinch of ground cinnamon, and you have the most delish mug of coffee you’ll never get from an overpriced cafe.
Today at my afternoon coffee break, I had a sudden craving for apple pie. Warm gooey apple pie. Grandma Ople’s apple pie, with oodles of cinnamon. There was only one Granny Smith apple in the fridge. So, did I swathe on my winter armour and trudge to the grocery store to buy more apples?
No. I’m not mad. I just made myself one slice of pie.
It was rather tricky, scaling down the ingredients from a recipe for 8 (1/4th of an egg, anyone?). But I patched something together, somehow, and it turned out – well, not exactly ravishing, but still quite yummy.
All in all, a perfectly comfy Friday. There is something so comforting about coffee, apple pie, and watching the snow drift down endlessly from the sky. Enough to make you forget about the troubles of the day, and those on a distant shore – if only for the moment.
Warmly Winter
Published in Pakistan’s “Women’s Own” Magazine, December 2010
It’s finally happened.
The knock on the door, and an outstretched palm containing a steaming plate of food.
Chicken-and-veggie rice casserole or Palestinian maqluba, to be specific, on a plastic white flower patterned plate.
Yes, Mama Jama the landlady brought us dinner!
And it couldn’t have been at a more opportune time. In my missionary zeal for bhoono-fying, I had just burnt the aloo gosht. Mama Jama probably smelt the aroma of charred onions drifting down the staircase and took pity on us.
Of course, it’s not that I was expecting her to. It’s not the reason I’d show up at her doorstep every other week with a lovingly-prepared bowl of kheer, zarda or melt-in-your-mouth gulaab jaaman.
I was just being neighbourly.
And testing out my (extremely novice) Pakistani dessert skills.
And skirting the guilt of single-handedly consuming 2 pounds of sugar in one afternoon – an inevitability if said bowl of kheer or gulaab jaman remained in my apartment, thanks to the relentless sweet tooth inherited from my dad.
Yes, I am an epicure (fancy word for greedy). If it were up to me, I’d either be at home baking apple pies and chewy chocolate brownies before proceeding to do justice to their goodness, or I’d be outside in a café or bakery sinking my teeth into the congenial warmth of freshly-baked cinnamon roll, red velvet cupcake, almond croissant, pumpkin pie, strawberry cheesecake, piping hot apple pie or chewy chocolate brownie, with my nose between an equally delicious New York Public Library book.
Luckily, I have a very active and health-conscious husband, who, a) makes sure that I never find more than 50 cents in my wallet at whatever random moment the sweet tooth calls, rendering me helpless in the face of heavenly-smelling street stalls and petite cafés with bothersome minimum-cash policy; and, b), manages to drag me out somewhat regularly for a bit of exercise.
Our current physical activity is rock climbing – on the boulders of Central Park. So, if you ever happen to be strolling near Columbus Circle on a Saturday morning and see two figures attached to a rock – one, strong, athletic, moving swiftly across the rock face like a demo picture from “The Self-Coached Climber”, and the other a ball of play-dough smushed against the wall – you’ll know it’s us.
I have to say though, as much as I was dreading another East Coast winter, there is a charm about it, a crisp-coloured storybook charm.
I don’t know if it’s in my brown BearPaw boots, or the toasty knit cap and woollen mitts that I gleefully don every morning; the feel of a hot Starbucks hazelnut latté between my fingers or the beautiful bareness of Central Park, the crunch of leaves beneath my feet, and the blossoming of Christmas lights on 5th Avenue. Ice skating at Bryant Park, followed by a cup of steaming apple cider and a stroll through the dazzling holiday market, a veritable Santa’s workshop; the pleasant conviviality of huddling with strangers in the 8×8 floor space of Kathi Rolls or Mamoun’s Falafel in the Village, exchanging smiles over a shami kabab roll and shared hearth; or, maybe it’s just the indescribable comfort of home, where you return from the cold with relief and bliss in your heart – given that the heat is working, which you can trust it to be if you’re on food-exchange terms with the landlady.
Of course, slopping through puddles to do your laundry or buy a carton of milk is another matter, as are the thundering hailstorms that sound as if they’ll break straight through your skylight and flood the apartment, the sodden subways and the razor-sharp winds whipping through the labyrinth of high-rises ready to slice off your nose, or having to wear the same inflated down jacket for five months until you are resigned to looking like the Michelin Tyre Man in every photograph.
But no matter how much I complain about it now, winter was always my favourite season in Lahore. I would dream about it the whole year – dream of the day, sometime in November, when the gas heaters were unearthed from the store room and dusted out, when bright chunky sweaters and printed Aurega shawls were unpacked and sunned to get rid of the minty smell of mothballs.
The marvelous halvas my mother would begin to ghot-ofy in the kitchen, gajar, anda, sooji, and my personal weakness, chana daal, the rich smell of ghee and shakkar permeating the entire house in its intoxication; the blood-red pomegranates and succulent oranges we’d eat sitting out on the dewy lawn, the dogs snoozing under the chairs, wrapped up in a brown khaddar shawl that smelt of faded Chanel No. 5.
Even going to LUMS in the morning was fun, dressed in a gigantic sweatshirt and sitting on the sidewalk across the cafeteria after class, watching the steam from the PDC teacup mingle with our cloudy breaths, as the fabled Defence fogs circled in around us from the empty stretches of Phase 5, and we pretended we were in a Sci-Fi movie…
Winter was synonymous with Ramzaan and Eid, with grand tented shaadis, Capri nashtas and apple sheesha at MiniGolf, starry walks, sunny picnics, bonfire dances; lying curled up on a floor cushion in front of the heater in your living room, looking out at the lights of the 600-year old Lahore Fort from the rooftop of Cuckoo’s on your cousin’s December birthday, or blushingly saying “Hello” to your soul mate in the back rows of a Gymkhana concert…life didn’t get any better than a winter in Lahore.
And though I am here now, and New York City beckons with its lights, treats and newfound friends, and I am happy with my new life, I still dream of those magical Lahore winters, old friends, old shawls, ancient forts, and the fresh, pink-cheeked days that hold some of my most precious memories …
And that’s alright. Because time doesn’t flow if you don’t dream.
Windswept Words 