Globe Corner Blogs

Yemen--by Tim Mackintosh-Smith

This past Monday evening I attended a Harvard-sponsored forum, moderated by acclaimed British travel writer and diplomat Rory Stewart. He is the author of Prince of the Marshes, about his year as a provincial governor in southern Iraq after the US-led invasion in 2003, and The Places In Between, which chronicles Stewart’s walk across Afghanistan shortly after the fall of the Taliban regime. Stewart is currently a professor at the JFK School of Government here in Cambridge and was eager to moderate a talk given by an author he had long admired but never met: Tim Mackintosh-Smith, a Thomas Cook Travel Award-winning author (for his travelogue Yemen-The Unknown Arabia). Mackintosh-Smith spoke about his long obsession with the 14th century Islamic scholar and world traveler Ibn Battutah and how the author’s unique views of the Middle East have been informed by the last quarter-century he has spent living in the Yemeni capital of Sa’na.

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Arabesque Cookbook by Claudia Roden

Coming off my successful macaroni and cheese dinner (see earlier post) and another delicious pesto pasta and sausage meal, I was feeling confident as I began my latest cooking adventure. Sadly, I was quickly humbled by Claudia Roden, author of the seductively beautiful cookbook, Arabesque: A Taste of Morocco, Turkey, and Lebanon. I chose a seemingly easy Turkish-inspired recipe, Chicken with Tomato Pilaf. While I must admit the tomato sauce and chicken breasts were easy to prepare, my attempt at a simple yet scrumptious Arabesque meal was foiled by my cooking of the basmati, or long-grain rice. So as not to bore you with inconsequential details, I will say only this: I began cooking the rice at 7:30 and did not put a spoonful of tomato pilaf (still slightly hard) into my mouth until 9:15…ugh. It should also be noted that the rice should actually take between 30 and 50 minutes to cook (depending on the type of rice) and that I most likely had the tomato sauce to rice ratio way off.

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We recently got in a new history of the establishment of an autonomous Kurdistan (for the fussily precise, the Kurdish Regional Government in northern Iraq), Invisible Nation by Quil Lawrence, which I would recommend to anyone who has an interest in the region’s rapidly changing political terrain. Continue Reading »