Saba Imtiaz's Blog, page 3

Ready, set, go! Using CoachBot: the language taskmaster

I've been in Amman for a few months now, and my colloquial Arabic skills are still a sore point. I now find myself speaking an odd mix of fusha and colloquial, and I'm hoping that over the next few months I can practice more and switch over, and not ask questions like (true story) "Keef keep up?"

I'm excited about working on Arabic in different ways: I'm going to be doing some work on 'Master Arabic' -Alex Strick van Linschoten's upcoming (available for pre-order now!) hugely useful new book f...

Writing a trend story: the turmeric-infused edition

There's something kind of bizarre about watching one of your stories get onto the content aggregation cycle.

The story I wrote for the Guardian about the turmeric latte trend was one of those pieces: I've now seen all versions and hot takes on the story - outrage, curiosity, more outrage, serious trend pieces.

I spend a lot of time on the internet, all in the name of researching trends. It's not just as easy as searching "turmeric trendy drink how?" Sometimes someone will mention something in...

Anyone can cook (and make cauliflower rice!)

The first time I saw a dish made entirely out of cauliflower - a sad-looking "cauliflower steak" - I felt sort of vindicated that I kind of always avoided eating or cooking the vegetable. There are only a few dishes that feature cauliflower in everyday Pakistani cuisine - aloo gobi (potato with cauliflower) or gobi gosht, meat with cauliflower - and I'm only really familiar with the former. Aloo gobi is a good dish. Heck, cooked well, it can even be quite delicious. (Garam masala sprinkled o...

City of Gold

I watched City of Gold recently. It’s a great profile of Jonathan Gold, which shows how the easy descriptor ‘LA Times food critic’ doesn’t quite fit, because Gold isn’t just critiquing food. He uses food to tell the stories of LA, the stories in the shacks and strip malls, the places where no one goes to look for food or cant quite believe good food exists.

City of Gold didn’t just help me think about food in terms of writing, but also about the impact of where we choose – and choose not to...

The One with the Cereal Diet

A few years ago, I went on one of those diets where you only eat cereal for three meals. To be fair, I actually really liked cereal, having concocted a recipe as a kid that called for adding liberal lashings of honey and sugar to already-sugar-laden Frosties, a recipe I called "honey crunch" and featured in my "cookbook". Everyone refused to eat Frosties honey crunch except my rather patient father, who politely put it down after a bite. Anyway, the diet worked to a degree - as all diets do...

Lipsync your way to learning a language

I offer conversation practice for English, Urdu and Punjabi on iTalki: If you'd like to practice your conversation skills, please hop onto italki to sign upand book a lesson.

One of the language exercises that I learned at Middlebury - thanks to an instructor's great advice at one of the lunchtimes - was the shadowing technique. Essentially what it means is that you listen to an audio and speak along in real time - while recording yourself - trying to get your voice to match and predict the o...

Starting off language coaching!

As of this week, I'm starting off conversation practice for English, Urdu and Punjabi on iTalki: If you'd like to practice your conversation skills, please hop onto italki to sign upand book a lesson.

The idea of studying a new language is difficult. The most common reasons I've heard from people is that it takes too much time, it's too expensive, and that they can't learn another language. More on that later.

But why not build on the skills you do have? In Pakistan's Sindh province, for exampl...

Food on tap, farm to table

What kind of cake did you have for your tenth birthday?

What kind of cake did you have last week with your coffee?

It's quite possible that you can answer the first question from memory, down to the sprinkles. But can you answer the second question with the same kind of vivid recollection? Or can you answer it at all without looking at your Instagram feed from last week?

Of course, there's a lot to be said about the connection of childhood memories with food, and perhaps that's why you might be...

In Amman, staring at the stairs

When I first moved to Jordan in 2007, the long stairs were one of the most daunting things about downtown Amman. They connect streets and neighbourhoods on different levels since the older parts of the city are built on hills. I still remember how difficult it was to climb up the stairs on that first day in May '07 - not helped by the fact that my lungs were in terrible shape and I was toting a ridiculously heavy laptop. (Which would give me a shoulder ache for the rest of the year.)

I'm back...

Walk What Way? (Or why everyone should read Jessica Valenti's memoir Sex Object)

I went out for a walk on Monday evening. I ended up going in the opposite direction to where I'd planned to go, and I only figured it out thirty minutes in. By the time I walked back home, I wished multiple times over that the earth would swallow me up. From the creepy dude who drove around twice to offer me a lift - the euphemism for 'hop in to be raped' - to being leered at by male motorists whose heads do a full 180 degree turn when they see a woman without slowing down their vehicles, it...