Shamim Sarif's blog

Yes, it is time to talk food. A lot of people (well, three) have asked for the Sarif-Kattan brownie recipe. Here it is. If Amina had known brownies existed in The World Unseen, she would have dropped these in the cafe to get Miriam’s attention. If Tala had wanted to get Leyla back faster, she could’ve tried whipping these up instead of coming out to her parents in I Can’t Think Straight. I rest my case:

Chocolate Brownies

6 oz chocolate

6 oz butter

9 oz caster sugar

3 eggs

1teaspoon vanilla extract

3 oz flour

Melt the chocolate and butter together in a bowl placed over a pan of simmering water (the bowl shouldn’t be touching the water). Or you can use the shortcut that I inevitably use every time, and put the bowl in the microwave (low heat) for a few minutes.

In a separate bowl whisk the eggs and sugar together until the mixture is light and thick.

Add the vanilla extract to egg mixture. Try to use extract rather than essence – it costs a lot more, but there is a big difference in taste. Then pour in the warm chocolate and mix gently but thoroughly into the egg and sugar mixture.

Fold in the flour. If you like nuts in your brownies, this is the time to throw in a handful of pecans, walnuts or whatever you like best.

Preheat oven to 150 C (300 F) and butter a square tin, about 8 x 8 inches.

Bake brownies for about 25 minutes. The key is to cook it just enough so that the edges are shrinking slightly away from the sides but so that it is still quite soft to the touch or even slightly wobbly in the middle.

That will give the brownie the fudge centre rather than make it into a moist cake.

Let it cool, cut into squares and serve with a big scoop of ice cream!

Amina tempts Miriam with her brownie recipe...

On this anniversary of Charles Dickens, how fitting that I can bring you news of a new book from the Enlightenment camp called ‘Grow Your Profits – Online Marketing Secrets That Really Work’. As Dickens wished he’d said, it was the best of times, it was the worst of times, but this book is written by my talented entrepreneur wife, so it contains only the best of everything to do with online marketing, and indeed, regular marketing.

If you have any interest in building a business, building your own brand, or making your website better and more visible, this is the book for you. If you have no interest in it, please encourage others to buy it, read it and share the excellent benefits. I am super proud of Hanan with her first publication. Help spread the word!

Get the physical book from Amazon here!

Get the Kindle version here!

A breathtaking tale of love and online marketing...

I’ve been in the snow, becoming quite unhinged since my last blog. Munich and the DLD Conference was a source of great satisfaction and not just from the sausages and beer.

I was awestruck by an astronomer from Harvard who gave a talk on how to identify life on other planets. I was somewhat shy to actually meet this genius man at that evening’s party, but Hanan marched up to him to shake hands.

‘You made that movie, didn’t you?’ the astronomer demanded, excited.

I looked around, bemused. Clearly, he had mistaken me for Steven Spielberg – not a common mistake, to be sure, even since I’ve gotten old enough for facial hair and glasses. For what movies would this man possibly be interested in, except for ‘ET’ ?

‘I Can’t Think Straight!’ he declared. ‘I loved that film.’

Reader, he wasn’t even a lesbian astronomer. My ecstasy was complete. We agreed to swap books and signatures when he next came to London.

In the meantime, I headed to Switzerland a day later with my son Ethan and his school ski team.  This little sojourn involved sharing a very small room with a 13 year old whose fingertips are magnetically compelled to download dodgy apps to my beloved Macbook Pro and iPad, and whose knowledge of English is somewhat limited by his lack of understanding of the word ‘No’. I decided that a zen-like, relaxed attitude was the best way to enjoy our quality time together.

As if sensing my slackening attitude, Hanan Skyped me at once.

‘Is Ethan eating vegetables?’ she asked.

I cast my mind back to the mountain of french fries I had noticed on his plate at dinner.

‘Er…yes,’ I said.

‘And are you doing mantras?’ she demanded.

If you counted Ethan saying ‘There’s no way I’m doing mantras’ ten times in a row, then yes, I guessed we were.

I headed down for a meeting with the other parents, where the leader of our group waved a video camera and asked if anyone had any experience whatsoever with making films.

I decided to keep quiet, but a couple of the parents who had attended our charity screening of The World Unseen at the school for the Nelson Mandela Children’s Fund looked at me narrowly.

‘I’ve made a few films,’ I offered weakly.

‘Great!’ the other mother cried. ‘Family videos?’

‘Full length features,’ I muttered.

Well that was that.  I was put on movie duty and reported back to Hanan on Skype. She called me immediately.

‘You have to get outside,’ she said.

‘It’s like, minus 10 degrees, and I’ve been on a mountainside taking shots of 157 distant dots skiing through fog and snow down a mountain and now I have to figure out which ones are our kids,’ I protested.

‘You need establishing shots of the hotel,’ my producer continued, ignoring my whining. ‘Pictures of them putting on boots, helmets and skis. Behind the scenes interviews. The struggle. The drama!’

Well I captured the struggle pretty well  as we all scrambled for seats on Easyjet. The drama I’d already gotten when my child was told off for toasting his fondue bread in the candle flame at dinner.

Back home, I sat down to my first full day in London in a while, ready to tackle my To Do list, when Hanan looked up from her laptop.

‘Can I ask you a favour?’ she said.

The last time she asked that, I ended up pregnant, but I was confident this would be something quick and easy.

‘Can you make me a hot chocolate?’

I looked at my watch. Having another child would possibly be quicker and definitely less hassle. For since we had the hot chocolate to end all others at Berthillon in Paris, a spoon of powder mixed in some milk is no longer acceptable at Chateau Sarif-Kattan.

I subtly tried to sidestep some of the extras.

‘You don’t want whipped cream on top, do you?’

‘Yes please. If it’s not too much trouble.’

I started whipping. With the other hand, I searched for chocolate. It had to be real chocolate and the right chocolate. I found two bars, brought from Paris, one milk, one dark. I offered them for inspection.

‘Perhaps a bit of both?’ Hanan asked politely.

Bien sur. I broke off a little of each and melted them gently in a pan, whisking in a little mik to loosen the pure, thick mixture.

Next, more milk heated to exactly the right temperature and then frothed and gently poured over the chocolate. Then the whipped cream spooned on top.

Exhausted, we sat back to enjoy the results, and pondered a good day. Our younger boy, Luca, had got accepted to Kings College (where Ethan is) and had made it past a three hour examination, a two hour activity morning and a full on interview. After that, I had half expected him to get an offer of a partnership at Goldman Sachs.

‘You know what this means?’ Hanan asked. ‘You can take both of them on the school ski trip next year.’

I swapped my hot chocolate for something stronger…

In Paris, Ethan, Shamim and Luca take lessons to perfect Hanan's hot chocolate requirements...

Well, after the New Year’s Eve fiasco involving lost keys and flat tyres, I had all good intentions of staying home for a while – till, for example, July.

But the very next week we had an invitation to our friend Sarah’s birthday party. Now Sarah is a highly respected neuroscientist, so I prepared with a happy heart and knew this ‘party’ would undoubtedly be a quiet evening of intellectual conversation.  But then we got an email asking guests to wear a mask.

‘Don’t worry,’ said Marina, another friend who was attending.’I've got lots of masks, I’ll bring them for all of us.’

So our band of 5 women arrived and met outside the venue. I don’t know about you, but a masked party suggests to me Venetian velvet eyewear. We waited in anticipation as Marina rummaged in her bag.

‘Who wants to be the Queen?’ she asked, gaily pulling out the face of our esteemed monarch, complete with white elastic and slitty eye holes.

‘Is that the only option?’ I asked grimly.

‘No, of course not,’ returned Marina and I breathed a sigh of relief.  ‘I have Prince Phillip, Charles, Camilla, William and Kate.’

Reader, it was a hard choice. I ended up as Prince Charles, and in we all went as the Royal family. If I tell you that entrance was the most subdued thing about the party, you’ll have a good idea that neuroscientists can have a flying time with the best of them.

So when our next invitation came, to Lisa Tchenguiz’s birthday party, I was more prepared.  If you’re a recent friend of this page, let me explain that Lisa is one of our Executive Producers on The World Unseen and I Can’t Think Straight. She is also no stranger to the joys of animal print home decor, large diamonds and dancing on tables in St Tropez.  She is to parties what I am to the music of Karen Carpenter.  A global ambassador.

‘Where’s the party?’ I asked Hanan.

‘Annabels,’ she replied. One of the most exclusive nightclubs in London.

‘What time?’ I ventured. We were leaving at 5am for Munich and the DLD Conference the following morning.

‘Starts at 10pm.’

‘Can I wear my Prince Charles mask?’

‘I really think it’s best not to.’

‘Then I’m not going.’

I could see Hanan’s eyebrows knitting above her Macbook screen.  ‘Lisa’s like family to us. We have to go.’

I really could not see the correlation between the first sentence and the second. Luckily, Lisa herself knows me better than my wife does, and understood that, unlike everyone else in her life, I would rather be in bed with a book at 11pm than sitting down for dinner, even with my dodgy mask on.

We took her out for lunch instead – and I write this having been to Munich and returned already, from the DLD Conference.

Run by the indomitable Steffi Czerny, we were able to spend time with our friend and chairwoman Maria Furtwangler, who interviewed me at DLDWomen last June, and also heard talks from a host of tech geniuses, as well as Arianna Huffington and Yoko Ono, and you’ll be glad to know that we attended even more parties. Clearly, that’s another blog. For now, I have to go and exchange my party face mask for a nice cup of cocoa…

We are not amused...the Royals rock the house before being analysed by 20 neuroscientists...

So, I had New Year’s Eve all planned out. Our first New Year’s in our new home. Hanan’s dodgy and recently dislocated knee would have a rest, my brain would be gently marinated in champagne, and the last two chickens that had survived Christmas at Waitrose supermarket would be roasted. I had (almost) figured out which wine to drink, and I had in mind an 8pm bedtime for the boys and 9pm for me. Yes, I know the only person that you all know who actually sleeps at 9pm is your grandmother, but I get 3 nights off a year OK? (New Year’s Eve, my birthday and Christmas – and, as a confirmed agnostic and previous Muslim, I had to fight for the latter).

Then our dear friend Katherine called. By the end of the call we had been convinced to abandon the raw chickens and drive to her place with our children for an early dinner. Well, I channelled my own inner socialite and realized that I had been perhaps too hermit-like for my wife and children. Thanks to me, they had all slept through the turn of the millennium, while everyone else had been witnessing a once in a thousand year event, or sitting in a bunker waiting for the world to end, so maybe it was time to re-evaluate. It’s fine to be a reclusive novelist when you’re around 75 and have won a Nobel prize or three, but I was clearly enjoying the fruits of the eccentric artist far too early.

So we jaunted off to Katherine’s, which is always a pleasure, and feasted on crab risotto, prawns, lovely wines and good company.

It all went brilliantly well until we left. Hanan drove home. She had tried out her previously-dislocated knee for five minutes in the car on the way there and had insisted it was fine and that I could have a glass of wine. Like the feckless wife I am, I took her at her word. And the knee held up well throughout the half hour drive home. As we pulled up outside our house, I felt in my pockets for the house keys. Nothing. Frantically, I searched my bag, the car, but I knew it was pointless. They’d been in my pocket.

‘I told you to leave the keys in the car!’ Hanan said, rubbing her knee.

She had.

‘Did you even take them out of the house?’ she asked.

‘Of course I did!’ but my protests were muffled as I scrabbled around the floor of the car feeling for keys but coming up only with lint-covered plasticine, a piece of lego and a toy car. I conveniently ignored the fact that I had forgotten the keys about ten times over the course of our relationship.

Then Ethan piped up from the back, now that he was bored of riling up an exhausted Luca.

‘The other children were playing with your coats,’ he threw in. ‘Because I hid my chocolates underneath it.’

Hanan swung the car around and we headed back to Katherine’s, a good 30 minute drive. The keys were indeed there. We collected them and grimly set off home again. By now it was close to midnight, and my dreams of an early night had evaporated under the fiery glare of my wife, nursing a now painful knee (having driven one and a half hours back and forth in search of our house keys), and two overtired children whinging in the back seat.

It was not quite the romantic, appreciative turn of the New Year I’d imagined. As we drove up the steep hill about 3 miles from home, the fireworks began over the London Eye and the bridges. There is a small area on that hill where you can see back and watch those very fireworks and as Hanan caught them in her rear view mirror, she smiled.

‘We’re here, we might as well watch them,’ she said. Deftly, she swung the car around, drove back down, and promptly hit a kerb stone. The tyre screamed, the car ground to a halt. I got out. The tyre was as flat as a pancake. We tried grinding up the hill but it was no good.

‘Happy New Year!’ I offered.

Before my wife could throw me out of the car, a young man wielding a beer can approached the car and tapped on the window.

‘I’m a mechanic,’ he said. ‘I can sort it out for you. Where’s the spare tyre?’

Naturally, my wife looked at me for clarification, since in our house I am not only tech support but in charge of all things mechanical.

I didn’t have a clue where the tyre could be stored but drifted towards the back of the car and popped open the boot, guided by a something I might have picked up from my dad 30 years ago, or else watched in a TV show only 20 years ago.

‘What is all this stuff?’ Hanan asked, appalled.

The boot was crammed with carrier bags full of books to be donated to the charity shop up the road (but I hadn’t gotten around to it yet) and stuff I had been planning to take to the office (but I hadn’t been there over the holidays). No sign of a tyre. I poked around, knowingly, but by now, Ethan had used the iPhone as a torch and the mechanic had figured out the spare was under the car. 45 minutes later, he was sweating in the zero degree temperature, trying to raise the tyre off the ground with the pitifully small jack.

‘Would a bigger jack help?’ Hanan asked.

‘Yeah, but…’ he shrugged and kept going.

‘Why don’t you find us a bigger jack?’ Hanan asked me. There were so many answers to that question from ‘It’s after midnight on New Year’s and everything’s shut’ to ‘We’re on a quiet road miles from any garage’ that I just shrugged. With the air of one tired of having to explain the obvious, Hanan pointed me in the direction of a magnificent house across the road, with lights blazing at every window. Feeling somewhat sheepish, I sloped off and walked towards it.

Smartly I knocked at the door and tried to look trustworthy and yet nonchalant. A tall blonde twenty-something woman answered my knock. That kind of thing usually happens to Hanan, not me, but I quickly blurted out the highlights of our sorry tale, and her French boyfriend appeared. We all trailed out to the car, where the mechanic was in the first stages of cardiac arrest but the car was still not off the ground.

The Frenchman went straight for the spare tyre and squeezed it.

‘Zees tyre ‘as ‘ad it!’ he said.

Hanan looked to me for translation which is odd, since she speaks fluent French.

‘The tyre’s had it,’ I said.

‘It’s flat also,’ he confirmed.

The mechanic stopped jacking up the car. The blonde went back for her car keys and insisted on driving us all the way home. We staggered into the house at one a.m.

‘I’m hungry!’ Luca said. Well, it had been several hours since his last meal. Hanan made toast, we wrestled them into bed and lay down ourselves around 2.

Hanan nursed her very sore knee and I tried not to count the few hours till I had planned to be up.

‘You know, it was lovely being out, but I think next year we should stay home,’ she said.

‘Really?’ I asked.

‘Yes. We could have a nice roast chicken. And an early night. What do you think?’

I think I wish I’d thought of that myself.

The Sarif-Kattan's toast the New Year shortly before standing in the cold for 2 hours and renouncing any further social interaction till 2046