The World in My Kitchen (21 page)

While in California, we dined at Jeremiah Tower’s and Wolfgang Puck’s new restaurants whose menus starred all these new vegetables now available in all the farmer’s markets.

Back in New York, Lee and I drove to visit farms that grew small zucchini with their flowers still attached, miniature patty pans, and white and purple beets that they would sell at the Greenmarket. We visited Chinese farms to see the two-foot long string beans, the purple and green spinach, and the sweet potato leaves that they grew for Chinese restaurants but increasingly also for chefs of American Nouvelle Cuisine.

Our next trip was to Florida, which now, because of Cuban and South American immigrants, had become an innovative agricultural center. Growers introduced clementines, the small tangerine from Spain and Morocco; star fruit, mangoes which were becoming very popular; several kinds of Mexican peppers: jicama, taro, and mameys, a sweet pear like fruit; and miniature sweet white corn that chefs around the country were using to garnish their dishes.

My piece became the cover story of
Connoisseur,
and I was delighted by the accompanying photographs that made the vegetables look like precious jewels. The success of the story led to other plumb assignments. I wrote about the new farmer’s markets that had sprung up all over the country, and I did another story for
Connoisseur
on the century old Baltimore Lexington Market. For
Metropolitan Home,
I wrote on San Miguel de Allende in Mexico and about Chinatown’s nouvelle cuisine for
Elle
magazine.

Later, I worked for two years for
McCall’s
magazine as their food and design editor. Working for a magazine as an editor was a new experience and very exciting. This led to being asked to create a new magazine aimed at the Midwest. Like almost all new ventures in the publishing world, this was short-lived. Once again I turned to freelance work, never really finding a niche that made me happy.

My oldest daughter Marianne, expecting her first child, was searching for something to do. She suggested that together we could write a vegetable cookbook. It would be a dialogue between mother and daughter. So began a close collaboration between Marianne and me. Together we traveled to farmer’s markets; invented recipes, hired a photographer, Greg Sclight, and did the food styling ourselves. The book,
Vegetables,
was published in 1991. It was wild and fun, Craig Claiborne loved it, and so did the rest of the food press. We traveled around the country together as a mother and daughter team. We appeared together on TV and radio.

But Marianne wanted to go back to school, and so our collaboration ended. I felt restless, nervous, and even bored.
What was happening to me?
I was always on the go. Most of the time, I wanted to get out of the house. In reality, I wanted to leave Jimmy for a little while. I needed to get away. I loved him, but I could not stand hearing every night about his office problems and his money worries. Jimmy needed to think about his own future. Architecture, planning cities, or painting? Which one to choose? I thought that, if I went away, he could manage better and see his future more clearly.

One day I read a short article in one of the French magazines I subscribed to. The story was about an Australian who had saved a group of camels roaming the desert of Australia. Apparently in the 1990s, the Australian government had the camels brought in from Afghanistan so that a surveying party could be sent out to map the vast desert. Once the mapping was done, the camels were abandoned. They multiplied and multiplied. The government was about to exterminate the camels as a nuisance when Peter S. decided to save some of them. He went to Afghanistan to learn all about camels. Now, it seemed, he was trying to start a tourist camel-trekking expedition through the desert. His idea was that trekkers would ride across the desert on camels, visit watering holes and Aborigine villages. This sounded very exciting and an answer to my problems. I thought I should pursue the story.

I called the travel editor of
The New York Times
and suggested a story idea: a middle-aged woman on a camel trek across the desert of Australia. She agreed, and for the next three weeks, I planned the trip.

I visited the Australian Tourist bureau, talked with their representative, and made an itinerary that would take me to Cairns in the north to Alice Springs where I would meet the young man and go on a camel trek, then go on to Sydney and Melbourne.

Cairns surprised me. It was an ugly town except for two resort hotels. Cairns was where tourists came to explore Australia’s magnificent Barrier Reef. As I had to wait for my contact from the Ministry of Tourism, I decided to go snorkeling like any other tourist. It took me a whole morning to learn how to breathe underwater, but the snorkeling was incredible. Anemones of all colors, incredible living corals, and fish of different sizes and patterns, colors, shapes that blew my mind. The whole adventure was exhilarating.

A day or two later, I was still waiting for my official contact. I walked through the town, which had little to offer a tourist beyond the Great Barrier Reef. No bookstores, no boutiques, and only XXX rated movies. By the second day, I was bored out my mind. When finally my contact arrived, I learned to my utter dismay that the Australian domestic airline was on strike and that we would have to wait another few days.

Finally, three days later we flew off for Alice Springs.

Alice Springs is located in the heart of the Australian desert. It is the home of the famous Ayers Rock, or the
Uluru
in the Aborigines’ language. Ayers Rock is an enormous pinkish gray monolith that dominates thirty-six other domed rocks. These rocks are a very important part of the Aborigines’ religious beliefs. I wanted to visit the Ayers Rock, but after a quick look, I had to leave for the camel ranch. Because of the strike, we had lost too many days in Cairns.

Peter S., the young camel trainer, had built a very primitive ranch in the desert. The ranch had a few bedrooms with crude showers, a bar, and a simple restaurant for the locals.

I looked for Peter in the bar, which was filled with men in blue jeans and boots drinking beer. As I looked around, a man of about thirty-five, tall, blond, wearing heavy boots, approached me and asked what I wanted.

“I am here to meet someone called Peter S.”

“I’m Peter.”

Staring at me, a short, middle-aged lady, he suddenly blurted out: “I was really expecting a young woman.”

I did not know how to answer, but said, “Don’t worry. I grew up in Egypt; I know all about camels.”

Relieved, Peter explained that he had expected me a week ago, but that every thing was ready, and we could leave at dawn the next morning. We were going to travel on camels for five days, ending up in an Aborigine village where the head of the council had agreed to house me for a night. During the camel trek, we would sleep in the open air and wash and swim in water holes. Peter would do the cooking.

That morning I followed Peter to the Camel Corral. Peter brought out five camels: one for me; one for him; and one for a helper, who he introduced as John, no last name. John was a scrawny fellow with long, dirty blond sideburns. The two other camels were going to be laden with sleeping bags, cooking utensils, and food and water for the next four days.

Once on the camel’s back, I realized that in Egypt I had really never traveled very far. Faced with five uncomfortable hours on a camel’s back, I regretted my boast. The camels followed one another in a single file. There was really no good way to talk. This would be a silent trip. I looked around me. The sand was the color of ochre. From time to time, I saw a colorful bird flying away as we approached. The flora and the fauna were very different than in France, or the United States, or East Africa. There were some Acacia trees, smaller than the ones I knew at home; there were also eucalyptus trees, whose smell reminded me of our Cairo garden.

At noon, Peter halted the camels and announced that it was time for lunch. I was relieved as I had to go to the bathroom. Where does one go in the desert? I had not thought of that. I looked around: nothing, not even a tree to hide behind.

“Peter, I need to go to the bathroom.”

“To the bathroom? Oh, you mean you have to pee. Go straight ahead; we will look the other way.”

And so I had my first experience of public facilities in the Australian desert.

Lunch was ham sandwiches drowned with the local beer. Slightly tipsy, I went back on my camel for another five-hour ride. The sun had come out; the color of the sand was changing. I saw wild flowers that I hadn’t noticed before, red flowers with dark black centers, pink ones with white edges, and a strange spiky plant that Peter told me later would bloom after the first rain.

During those five hours, I daydreamed. I thought of work, home, my children, and Jimmy. I felt totally at peace with myself and very content.

When we finally stopped riding, Peter and John made a fire and cooked. They broiled some steaks, made bread, and served some salad. For dessert, we had fruit and cookies. We drank lots of beer, sang songs, and told stories. They asked about New York, my family, and women. Around nine, Peter announced that we had to sleep as we would ride tomorrow to the first water hole. He lay down a sleeping bag and told me to slide into it and cover myself because it would become cooler and cooler. I slipped into the sleeping bag and tried to cover myself with the cover laying next to me. It was a leather blanket so heavy I could not lift it. I decided that I was warm enough and went to sleep. An hour later, I woke up freezing. Swallowing my pride, I called Peter and admitted I could not adequately cover myself. Peter laughed, made me promise that I would not be afraid to ask next time, and gently covered me. We all went back to sleep.

The next day we rode to the water hole. In the middle of the desert was an enormous hole filled with clear blue water. Peter said to undress and swim. It would refresh me; he added that for the next hour, he and John would go for a walk. And so I bathed in the coolest and most refreshing water I had ever felt.

Then it was my turn to go for a walk while they bathed. I walked toward a baobab tree. I hadn’t seen one since Tanzania. The hole of its trunk was full of water. There were multicolored birds drinking from its trunk. I saw lizards at least twenty inches long, gliding on the sand and small rodents running around. The color of the sand was continually changing from a light pink to dark ochre. The desert was varied and incredibly beautiful, nothing like the desert outside of Cairo, where for miles you saw nothing but yellow sand.

For the next two days, we went from water hole to water hole, finally reaching our goal, the Aborigine village. The head or chief of the village was a woman, a tall giant of a woman with black hair and large black eyes. She wore a skirt and a wool sweater torn at the elbows. The village was formed of austere square concrete houses with a central communal building and a school near the edge of the settlement. The village looked and was very poor.

Peter explained that one of the reasons he wanted to build up this camel-trekking enterprise was to help the Aborigines of this particular and very special village.

“Why special?”

“They were the only ones willing to work with me. The only ones to promise to open up their village.”

That night, dinner was served under the baobab tree. The women and children sat in a circle around a fire that an elder had built. A woman was roasting what looked liked very large corn kernels.

“Peter, what are these?”

“These are grubs, large silk worms that grow in the roots of trees around here. They are really delicious. Babies and young children are fed raw ones, and the adults eat them cooked over charcoal.”

And picking one up with a metal fork, he handed it over to me. It did taste like roasted corn and was very good. I asked for more; the women laughed and seemed pleased that I liked their food. We ate Peter’s bread with dark red berries, drank beer, and listened to an Aborigine man blowing on a long, wooden flute. It’s a didgeridoo, explained Peter, the oldest instrument on Earth.

The sound was in a low pitch, something like the soft moan of a bird. While he played, the women and children sang. Their song told the story of the desert, of hunting, and of animals. It was just beautiful and very sad.

We left the next morning. This time we took a short cut and took only a day and half to reach the camel ranch. Exhausted but pleased that I had survived, I flew to Sydney. I was going to be in Sydney for another three days, then on to Melbourne, then back to New York. The next two weeks went like a dream. I felt energized by my trekking trip. I had thought a lot about what I wanted to do. I was going to write about my trip and then write about the Aborigine village and the courageous woman who ran it.

For the next few days, I explored Sydney, met with young chefs, visited markets, and drank a lot of beer. Then I traveled to Melbourne to meet with young Australian artists. I had a new idea every five minutes. I felt excited and eager to return home. During the camel trek, I had often thought of Jimmy. I realized then how much I loved him and how lonely I was without him. He was not only my husband and lover but also my best friend. I longed to see him. I felt that from now on we should share everything, work and play. On the fifteenth, Jimmy picked me up at the airport, and we drove home.