A dispatch from Alice in Baghdad
My very dear friend Alice Fordham is currently in Baghdad working for The Times. I am also currently living in her room in Hamra because my sweaty landlord kicked me out (then tried to un-kick me out).
Alice has been updating the blog and running the bureau temporarily, and her most recent blog post is genius:
Baking in Baghdad - Round One-and-a-half
So, I made an apple crumble. A rudimentary apple crumble, it is true, and not fit for consumption by anyone but me (and certainly not by the baking guru who has challenged me to produce cake), but a crumble nonetheless. It took some persuasion of a microwave whose oven setting nearly burned down the hotel, and there's definitely something a bit odd about the consistency of the crumble. And yet, I felt that achieving crumble at all in the circumstances of a kitchen not designed for crumble, limited resources and a general emphasis around here on things that are not crumble (bombs, endemic political corruption and kebabs, for instance) was in some way a triumph of order over chaos.
Read more at the Inside Iraq Blog.
