Starving in Dubai

Now that comes as a surprise.

Is it possible for someone in that filthy-rich, oil-laden country to be starving?

Yes, it’s possible especially if that someone doesn’t know how to cook.

Just last week, I received an email from my sister, Wheng, who is currently based in Dubai working at the Dubai Duty Free (locate the OFW story here). Impossible as it may sound, she said she is starving in Dubai mainly because she isn’t able to eat well. While food may be plentiful and bountiful in Dubai, and Wheng has the money to buy all the food stuff she needs and yes, wants, her lack of culinary skills has left her mainly craving for food that she has been familiar with – the type my mother or father cook up at home in Laguna.

In her email she professed that she has lost pounds. Now unlike her kuya, who sports a body good enough for two people, Wheng is slim. Now that she has lost pounds, she might be bone-slim. Her diet, she confessed, consisted of hotdog, pork, fish, cold cuts – all fried. Frying, alongside boiling an egg, is the only culinary talent my sister has had enough interest to learn while she was still living at home. Anything beyond frying is too complicated for her.

Fried food everyday, along probably with the usual instant stuff – those that come in tetra-pack or foil or a plastic wrapper that you pop up in a microwave – can get to be a drag, so to speak. Your taste buds lose interest when you continually expose it to food cooked in oil.

Wheng further narrates that she only gets to taste real food when one of her room-mates cooks or when the office orders for catered food. Other than those two instances, cold cuts, cooking oil and the frying pan are the gastronomical fulfillment of my poor sister in Dubai.

So how does she solve the problem? Simple, ask the cook of the house – my dear old father.

On her next email, she listed down food – viands, actually – that she wants (and misses, for sure) and asked that Papa make for her a set of instructions – a personalized set of recipes. She explicitly instructs that the recipes should include the order of how to put the ingredients into the wok or the pot or the pan or the skillet.

Wondering what the food were? Pork sinigang, adobo (pork, chicken, kangkong), lumo (beef strips with pechay), are just a few in the list.

So, to help my sister with her starvation in Dubai, I call up my father and tell him what Wheng had emailed to me. He happily jots down the food recipes that Wheng enumerated and tells me that he’ll work on it as soon as he can.

He then proceeds to tell me that if Wheng wants, maybe she can pay for Papa’s fare to Dubai so that he can personally cook for my sister there.