Last year (2021) I fulfilled a long-awaited dream – my own cookbook!

I have had a special love for cookbooks for as long as I can remember. I was always automatically drawn to the cookbook section in bookshops. I would spend hours leafing through the recipes there, reading through many of them or simply being inspired by the many beautiful pictures. Every time I looked for Pakistani cookbooks, but unfortunately I never found anything. There are many cookbooks on Indian cuisine, but none that introduce Pakistani cuisine. That’s how the first idea of my dream came about: one day I want to write a cookbook about Pakistani cuisine!

I’ve always secretly carried this dream around with me all these years. Through my school years, through my math studies and during my first job. When I married my husband with Palestinian roots and met my family-in-law, I also got to know a whole new world of oriental delicacies.

On our first vacation in Palestine, we were served so many traditional dishes from Arab cuisine: Stuffed vine leaves, flatbread with sumac onions, hummus with za’atar, manakish, halloumi for breakfast, malfouf, musakhan, rice with pine nuts and delicious homemade sweet pastries – I was more than enthusiastic about all these dishes and flavors. The idea of immortalizing all these recipes grew stronger and stronger in my mind.

After the birth of my son (now 6 years old) and my daughter (3 years old), I had a lot of time to cook and try things out due to my parental leave. So in 2020 I started taking photos of my dishes on my phone and uploading them to Instagram to share with other amateur cooks. More and more people showed interest in my recipes and dared to try oriental cuisine. Slowly, there was no longer enough space on Instagram for me to describe the recipes. I felt the need to provide more information about the dishes, including special tips and notes so that even the more elaborate dishes would be a success for everyone. So, with the help of my husband, I created my own homepage with enough space to write down recipes in detail!

Through Instagram, I got to know many other food bloggers who had already written cookbooks. That really motivated me to finally take the plunge and write my own cookbook. The title of the book had been clear to me for a long time: Recipes from Pakistan and Palestine!

Without knowing how much work I would have to do, I just got started. Both children were at nursery school in the mornings, so I started cooking and taking photos early in the morning. In the evening, when the children were in bed, I wrote down the recipes in more detail and made a plan for the next day. I was very lucky that my husband stood by my side and encouraged me to keep going every day. He did the layout of the book and that was a great help to me. All in all, it was one of the most intense times of my life. This project took exactly 5 months. I was often not satisfied with the pictures and cooked many dishes several times in order to photograph them again! By then I was so engrossed in my work to realize my dream that I didn’t think about the next step!

When the PDF file was ready, the next big issue was printing. I must honestly admit that I was shocked when I heard the prices for a printed book. I immediately had doubts: Should I really invest such a large sum for so many books? What if no one buys them? What will I do with the books then?

But there was no turning back for me, I had already put so much time, love and energy into it. Besides, it was still my dream, just like before. My own cookbook! After a lot of research, I found a small regional print shop that was also willing to print books from smaller food bloggers like me! The path to my dream became shorter and shorter!

Last year in November my cookbook was published: Einfach oriental – Rezepte aus Pakistan und Palästina! I made it! The feedback from my Instagram community was overwhelming! To this day, I still receive wonderful messages and pictures of dishes from the recipes in my cookbook and I am always very happy to receive them.

The book contains over 40 recipes. Many of them are only included in this book and not on my blog or social media channels. It includes many traditional vegan, vegetarian and meat dishes.