While my mom was visiting us in Dubai last month, Scotch and I took her to Friday brunch at Hoi An restaurant in the Shangri-La hotel on Sheikh Zayed Road.
It’s an awesome deal because for 145 dhs you get unlimited Vietnamese “tapas” (50 to choose from) which are smaller versions of their best-selling dishes. Or you can upgrade to 265 dhs for the alcohol package.
Best thing?
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I pulled my car into the departure curb of Dubai’s Terminal 3. It was time to say goodbye to my mom. She got out of the passenger seat and headed straight to her granddaughter, Li’L Ginger, in the back seat to say her last farewell and indulge her in little kisses and a hug. The kids call my mom “PoPo”.
“Bub-bye PoPo,” Li’L Ginger says as my mom gives her one more last hug.
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A few weeks ago, I decided I would challenge myself to not make my two kids ham and cheese sandwiches for lunch every day of the week. I have had no incentive to stop because my kids don’t complain and actually love ham and cheese sandwiches. I just can’t believe they can eat it for lunch every school day and even request for it on non-school days.
This challenge started not because of any healthy commitments but um, well, because I actually didn’t have any ham in the fridge on Sunday morning (Sunday is the start of the school/work week in Dubai).
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A few years ago, the only way to dine via Food Truck was to leave Dubai and go somewhere else. Fast forward to 2016 and the food truck craze has finally arrived in Dubai. I don’t know what’s changed (Health and safety restrictions? Start-up costs?) but there are more and more food trucks popping up around the city and most notably at special events.
Last month, there was one weekend that was jam packed with food truck events: Eat the World DXB (organized by the Dubai Food Festival), a Food Truck Brunch and a Food Truck Jam (both organized by Truckers DXB).
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On a short stretch of Jumeirah Beach Road lies five or six well-known burger chains including McDonald’s, Hardee’s, Elevation Burger, Fatburger, Burger Fuel (from New Zealand), and probably more that I’ve missed.
So what caught my eye was the wings joint – Buffalo Wild Wings. Wings ranks right up there for me alongside dumplings and oysters.
I took the kids one afternoon to check it out and was happy that the restaurant had a dedicated parking lot as the kids were tired from walking – not a lot of spaces but there is street parking in the front and back as well as valet.
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This simple side dish was inspired by an abundance of parsley and mint in my garden. Whenever my parsley starts overtaking the pot, I immediately think of quinoa salad.
I hope that the following confession does not come as a surprise to you (and be a reason for you to never visit this blog again) but I am not a hip nor a happening foodie. I don’t keep up with trends, I eat what I like and what I want (in moderation).
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This is my second garden update since moving to our new villa in Dubai in late 2014. Here is the previous post: Dubai Garden Update – February 2016.
As usual, the weeks tend to fly by so fast that March has come and gone before I realize that I hadn’t posted a garden update.
As my parents’ and in-laws’ gardens in New York and Scotland are emerging from the cold and seeds are being sown, I feel that the gardening season here in Dubai is starting to wind down.
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This cheesy crab and jalapeño dip is a huge crowd pleaser, easy to prepare, and can be made ahead of time then baked at the last minute.
Have you ever had the following conversation with your husband or roommate?
Scotch: “Hey! We’ve been invited over to {insert friend’s name here} for drinks.”
Me: “That’s great! But we need to bring our own food.”
Scotch: “What?”
Me: “They never serve any food.
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Discovering THE BIG QUESTION about why we blog, how to reset, start at the very beginning, and JUST WRITE.
The Beginning
In 2007, when I started this blog, it wasn’t a food blog. It wasn’t under the gingerandscotch domain but under my nickname. It wasn’t on WordPress but on Blogger. I chose the cheapest web hosting available (I’m still on it so you may notice that my blog loads really slowly and has lots of downtime).
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I’ve never done a throwback Thursday before but last night I had this crazy idea of posting what crazy things my college roommates and I used to eat in college.
When my roommates and I were in college, there were times we’d have tons of food in the fridge (after a big shop that involved walking quite far to a grocery store, loading our backpacks with as much food as would fit and walking back to the dormitories in sweltering Miami heat and humidity).
And some days (weeks even!) we’d have nothing. Wait, that still sounds like my life now. Hmmm.
But the main difference was that back then, we didn’t have much money at all and tried to buy the cheapest food we could find.
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Looking at our family photos below, could you tell that minutes before, I was chasing my children around the small studio trying to get them to stand still in front of the camera and smile?
I had been toying with the idea of getting some professional photos taken of our family for my About Page.
So it was very timely that the folks at Picture People UAE recently invited a bunch of us UAE mom bloggers to their new studio for a mini photo shoot.
There were quite a few other families there so by the time it was our turn, the kids had been restless after sitting and playing iPad for an hour.
The minute they entered the photo studio, they BOTH started running around like little Tasmanian devils, one feeding off the other’s restless energy.
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The Chinese are taking over Al Barsha. So far this year, two hot pot restaurants and a Chinese grocery store have opened their doors in this bustling Dubai neighborhood.
One of my favorite family dinners was when my mom invited friends and relatives over for hot pot. Perhaps because I was never allowed to cook at home, hot pot really appealed to me as a child because it was one of the few times I was allowed to prepare my own food with something other than a microwave.
The iPad menu was already waiting for me as I sat down at a booth in the newly opened Delicious Fish Fish Restaurant (what a name!) in the Al Barsha neighborhood of Dubai.
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Around this time of year, it gets harder and harder to keep the plants in the garden alive. The temperatures are soaring and preparations need to be made if plants are to survive the summer desert heat.
At the community volunteer garden in Tecom, where I help out with watering and light gardening duties, sun sails have been erected to protect the plants. These protective shades will go a long way in filtering out some of the sun’s powerful rays.
My kids always have so much fun watering this garden and think that it is the coolest thing ever.
That’s because it’s all novel to them. Even though we have a own garden, they don’t get to water it because we pay someone (Mr. Ali) to do that every morning.
On a side note, Mr. Ali has just left to go home to Pakistan for two months for his annual leave.
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For a change from the hustle and bustle of city life, head high up to Jabal Akhdar in the Hajar mountains for outdoor pursuits like nature walks to rock-climbing and to discover local Omani culture and heritage.
We had an amazing three-day stay at the Alila hotel in Jabal Al Akhdar, Oman. This was not our usual beach holiday because it was high up in the mountains! This mountainous area of Oman is know for its rugged nature full of hiking trails.
We flew Dubai to Muscat and then were picked up by a hotel car for the two-hour drive to Alila hotel.
When we reached Jabal al Akhdar, the gradient up the mountain was so steep that only four-wheel drive vehicles were allowed past the checkpoint.
For the downhill drive, there were “emergency lanes” every couple of kilometers in case your brakes failed.
These emergency lanes sloped uphill so that the upward momentum will hopefully slow down a vehicle in trouble.
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One of the most stunning places to visit in the Middle East, Jabal Akhar offers spectacular mountain views, adventure travel, and rich cultural experiences.
The thing that struck me the most when I first visited Scotland, where my husband is from, was how green the hills were. Luscious emerald green thanks to more than abundant rainfall.
The opposite observation struck me about the Hajar mountains, which stretches from Oman to the Western tip of the United Arab Emirates. That it seemed so brown and barren, just full of rocks with the occasional spiky brown plant that looked like it could use some offerings from a water can. It is the desert after all.
But Jabal Akhdar, which means “Green Mountain” in Arabic, is situated in a unique location 2,000 meters (6,560 feet) above sea level where it receives enough rainfall to support local agriculture – crops of pomegranates, apples, apricots, figs, pears, plums, almonds, walnuts, and olive trees.
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In a travel guide about the United Arab Emirates, two travel bloggers posted that “If we knew what we know now” they “would have spent more time in neighboring Oman.”
It’s taken me seven years to realize that.
Seven years ago (after a year and a half of living in Dubai) Scotch and I took our first trip to Oman. I knew nothing about the country at the time and what spurred us to visit Muscat was that some friends of ours from London wanted to check out this hotel called The Chedi. We didn’t have children at the time, and being a hotelier, my husband was also very keen on seeing this property.
We were completely wowed by the beauty and serenity of the The Chedi and could have spent our entire trip in Muscat lazy-abouting on their beach. But on our last full day in Muscat, we begrudgingly left the hotel to embark on an obligatory tour of Muscat.
We followed the usual tourist trail to visit the Sultan’s Palace, the Grand Mosque, the waterfront promenade known as Al Mutrah Corniche and snaked our way through Al Mutrah souk with vendors selling…what seemed like very similar items to those in the Dubai souks.
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If you need to change your WordPress permalinks for any reason, this post will walk you through the steps of changing the URLs, options to set up redirection so that you retain SEO rankings, and recover lost social share counts.
Earlier this year, I changed the permalinks of my WordPress blog to remove the year and the month such that:
this post’s URL http://gingerandscotch.com/2011/02/chinese-grocery-stores-2.html/
would become http://gingerandscotch.com/chinese-grocery-stores-2/
That was the easy part. Just a simple change in WordPress settings.
Next came setting up redirects so that anyone who clicked on or typed the old URLs would automatically get redirected to the new URLs and any “google juice” associated with the old URL would get passed to the new ones. That was also fairly easy to setup with the help of a plugin.
I could have just left things at that but I wanted to preserve all my social share counts so that my posts weren’t showing a BIG FAT ZERO in the number of Facebook shares, Pinterest saves, and Stumbles. I found a plugin (paid) that claimed it could recover lost share counts: Social Warfare.
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My struggles, failures, and successes with raising multi-lingual kids and teaching them a minority language.
My two-year-old daughter recently stopped talking to me.
My six-year-old son stopped talking to me years ago.
In Chinese, that is.
When my daughter stopped speaking to me in Chinese, I felt like I had failed again as a mother and an educator. I had failed with my son when I let English slip into our daily conversations. I failed him when I spoke English in front of other English-speaking friends. I failed him when I spoke English with him at home when we were around my husband. I failed him by not giving him enough Chinese language exposure.
As a result of these failures, my son, who was speaking more Chinese than English until he started nursery at age 3, stopped speaking in Chinese and switched to English before I realized it was happening. I continued to speak to him in Chinese but he would always respond in English.
I had a second child when my son was four. I swore that I would do things differently with her.
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Last July 4th, my friend Nic and I spent the evening on the Manhattan side of the East River, stuffing and drinking ourselves silly at Zum Schneider’s outdoor Biergarten. The grill was sizzling and smoking with bratwurst, frankfurters, whole fish, and corn on the cob. All accompanied by free-flowing kegs of German beer and soft pretzels. The place was packed, we had to be creative with our seating arrangements, and made new friends in the process.
When the fireworks started, everyone stood on the picnic benches, some danced on the tables, and we all enjoyed one of the best fireworks in memory. The after-party continued at another German establishment that was a small trek downtown and that’s all I can remember of the evening other than our crowd being a mix of random nationalities including one American who then claimed to be German pretending to be American. He talked a lot about football and David Hasselhoff. Go figure.
This year, fourth of July was a family-oriented affair with my kids Wee Scotch and Li’L Ginger joining Nic, myself, and some friends on the East River to watch the fireworks. This time on the Queens side.
Instead of German sausages we had Hillshire farm Italian ones cooked on a stove top, no grilled fish but we baked up some chicken legs that were elevated to awesome-tasting status thanks to a blackening spice by Whole Foods which imparted a smokey spicy flavor to the meat.
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Whenever I’m back in New York visiting friends and family, the first order of business is almost always to go for Yum Cha (the second order of business is Vietnamese food).
“Yum Cha” is the Chinese tradition of brunching by eating dim sum and drinking tea.
Looking back over the last two decades of Yum Cha brunches in New York’s Chinatowns, not much has changed. The best restaurants still have hour-long waits on the weekends; you may have to share a table if your party isn’t big enough to commandeer an entire table of 10; as you sit down you are given a small sheet of paper to record the number of dishes you will order. If you are lucky to know one of the managers on duty, you can make small talk with him/her and save yourself a few bucks on the tea costs. And there is always gossip about which restaurant has the best dim sum in town.
Most dim sum is served out of bamboo steamers and as each pushcart stacked full of steamer baskets roll by, you will find yourself craning your neck to see if it has the dishes you like.
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