Sugar Beans, two hours late

21 October 2004, 6 Ramadan 1425

I got home last night about two hours after iftaar, having taught a class from 5:00pm to 8:00pm. I expected, not unreasonably, that my kids would have just had some very rudimentary iftaar and were waiting for me to cook something substantial. I was ready for the task.

I walked in to the house, greeted them and asked, not unreasonably, what they had had for iftaar. They had cooked, Shir’a told me. Uh huh. ‘Cooking’ could mean making the pasta-out-of-a-packet (which, by the way, Minhaj makes much better than I do) or throwing burger patties into a frying pan (chicken, of course; no red meat in our home).

‘What did you cook,’ I asked, wondering whether there was any left-over pasta-from-a-packet for me.

'Sugar beans,’ Shir’a replied, VERY unreasonably.

‘Sugar beans?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did you find the recipe?’ I asked. Dumb question. Of course they found the recipe, else how would they do it. I asked the dumb question because I was so surprised that they would try to be this adventurous.

‘No,’ he replied. ‘We tried to find the recipe but couldn’t. So we just put onions and tomato and some salt and chillies and jeera and those other spices in the pot. And some sugar. Do you add sugar? How much of sugar do you add? And some vinegar.’

I was shocked! (I didn’t dare ask what ‘other spices’, of course.) My babies cooked a real meal – without a recipe! Ok, now, of course, I had to taste it. Partly because I was really curious to know what it was like, this recipe-less sugar beans. And partly because I was hungry and too tired to cook anything just for myself. If I were cooking for the three of us it would have been fine. But to cook for just one person?

So I dished out and… it was wonderful. Great. Tasty. Lovely. Everything was just right.

I told them that that’s what I thought. And that it was as good as the sugar beans that I cook (and I’ve been told that my sugar beans are very good!).

‘Naah,’ Shir’a said without turning his head. ‘It’s not very nice.’ And he went back to doing his homework.

‘Hmph!’ I said to myself, and dished out a second helping. Mean kids. Can’t even take a compliment. But I was beaming. My kids cooked a real meal!