I'm back, again!

I know its been more than 8 months since my disappearance but with all the sleep deprivation that comes with raising a baby it feels like my last post was only yesterday. For all my faithful readers who keep visiting and checking in-- thank you. Your support is probably why I'm slowly picking up the remnant pieces of this blog and good news, I have lots of plans. I hope to start a new series-- not quite culinary related (although I anticipate there to be a lot of that as well), but lots of personal stories. I think having a baby made me realize how important it is to catalogue life's incidences. I mean, I want my son to know his grandparents' story, how they moved to the middle east-- completely foreign land with a completely foreign language, how they adapted, how they brought up two girls while still in their early twenties, how in their very early thirties they smuggled their family to safety during a war-- how they survived it. For most of my high school class mates and friends our experiences were nothing extraordinary, yeah we experienced and made it through the Persian Gulf war (what we call the invasion) but life moves on. But I look at the people around me here and its incredible how insular their life is. Many east coasters have never even been to the other side of the country let alone travel foreign. And although to most, the invasion may seem a joke of a war, the fright was real, the danger was constant and death painful. Statistically speaking the death toll of the entire war was negligible but not for a child who heard her neighbors being shot to death and who heard of uncles being killed by misfired missles. Our nationality and maybe even luck saved our family back then. But I want my son to know where he came from and that life is a gift, that homework and school are not really the worst things on the face of the earth, that that girl who breaks his heart in high school is not fortunate enough and that there is so much to the world that exploring it will take an entire lifetime. And hopefully in doing so, it makes for good enough reading that others (like you :) ) will also enjoy.