It’s the eternal question and it strikes dread into the most hardened soul: “what’s for dinner?”
If you are blessed with teenage boys, as I am, that question gets asked with an urgency usually reserved for emergency surgeries or natural disasters. “You don’t understand,” one of my sons said to me. “It’s like there’s a wolf in my stomach, chewing on me. Please, please, what’s going to be for dinner, and when?”
He asked this question an hour after lunch.
But even if you don’t have teenagers at home, or small children, who become feral between the hours of 4 and 8pm, turning that four-hour span into an eternity, the question of what’s for dinner is an endless bother, especially during the week.
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Do you get a delivery and thus ask some poor devil to risk life and limb on a motorbike to satisfy your shawarma needs? Satiate your hunger with yet another toasted cheese sandwich, or perhaps yesterday’s leftover chicken, or simply give up and plunk down on the couch with a tub of ice cream?
I decided the other day that my answer to the inevitable question would be to make soup. My husband had come home earlier in the week with a sloshing bag of “bone broth,” the new foodie sensation that apparently does just about everything short of cure cancer. Granted, your grandmother probably called bone broth just “broth”, (demonstrating yet again that one should always listen to one’s granny), but now bone broth is a big deal and I had a bagful in my fridge. Thus: soup.
I wandered through the vegetable stalls at Lulu’s, marvelling at the way the entire world comes to roost in the supermarket. I scooped up a few carrots from Lebanon, onions from Spain, potatoes from Egypt, a handful of parsley from a farm in Al Ain, and an orange pepper from Holland. I couldn’t resist the sculptural beauty of a giant cauliflower from Iran so I got that too, although I know that my children, no matter how ravenous, won’t eat it. Little do they know what they’re missing: charred cauliflower florets, tossed with smoked paprika, lime and a little bit of labneh, are about the best thing in the world, equally good for lunch or dinner.
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In New York at this time of the year, soup-making is usually accompanied by crisp autumnal air, leaves turning from green to scarlet, and increasingly shorter days. I get my vegetables in the farmers’ market, where all the veggies come from farms within a 200 kilometre radius of Manhattan: a local soup rather than Abu Dhabi’s international mélange. This fall, it’s been almost as warm in New York as it is here, which must be great for strolling in the city, but terrible for the farmers’ growing seasons.
It's hard to avoid metaphors when you're making soup, whether your ingredients come from a nearby farm or a faraway country. Probably I should think more about my cooking and less about language, but soup makes it difficult: have I made "stone soup", pooling together meagre resources into a nourishing whole? Maybe a cosmopolitan soup in which different things float happily alongside one another suspended in a unifying broth? Is soup a better metaphor for a nation than a "gorgeous mosaic" or a "melting pot"? Or is soup a form of liquid caretaking, as in the end of Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are, when Max in his wolf suit returns from his "wild rumpus" to find a bowl of still-warm soup waiting for him?
This bowl of soup reminds me that the Arabian peninsula has always been a place of exchange, a place where far-flung people came together briefly and then went their separate ways, altered by the exchange.
As if to highlight that fact, consider what I served alongside my soup: tortillas. Hand-made in Ajman. Even the wolves were satisfied.
COMPANY%20PROFILE
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NO OTHER LAND
Director: Basel Adra, Yuval Abraham, Rachel Szor, Hamdan Ballal
Stars: Basel Adra, Yuval Abraham
Rating: 3.5/5
A MINECRAFT MOVIE
Director: Jared Hess
Starring: Jack Black, Jennifer Coolidge, Jason Momoa
Rating: 3/5
MATCH INFO
Jersey 147 (20 overs)
UAE 112 (19.2 overs)
Jersey win by 35 runs
More about Middle East geopolitics
The specs: 2018 Opel Mokka X
Price, as tested: Dh84,000
Engine: 1.4L, four-cylinder turbo
Transmission: Six-speed auto
Power: 142hp at 4,900rpm
Torque: 200Nm at 1,850rpm
Fuel economy, combined: 6.5L / 100km
Crazy Rich Asians
Director: Jon M Chu
Starring: Constance Wu, Henry Golding, Michelle Yeon, Gemma Chan
Four stars
Company%20profile
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The National's picks
4.35pm: Tilal Al Khalediah
5.10pm: Continous
5.45pm: Raging Torrent
6.20pm: West Acre
7pm: Flood Zone
7.40pm: Straight No Chaser
8.15pm: Romantic Warrior
8.50pm: Calandogan
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Mercer, the investment consulting arm of US services company Marsh & McLennan, expects its wealth division to at least double its assets under management (AUM) in the Middle East as wealth in the region continues to grow despite economic headwinds, a company official said.
Mercer Wealth, which globally has $160 billion in AUM, plans to boost its AUM in the region to $2-$3bn in the next 2-3 years from the present $1bn, said Yasir AbuShaban, a Dubai-based principal with Mercer Wealth.
“Within the next two to three years, we are looking at reaching $2 to $3 billion as a conservative estimate and we do see an opportunity to do so,” said Mr AbuShaban.
Mercer does not directly make investments, but allocates clients’ money they have discretion to, to professional asset managers. They also provide advice to clients.
“We have buying power. We can negotiate on their (client’s) behalf with asset managers to provide them lower fees than they otherwise would have to get on their own,” he added.
Mercer Wealth’s clients include sovereign wealth funds, family offices, and insurance companies among others.
From its office in Dubai, Mercer also looks after Africa, India and Turkey, where they also see opportunity for growth.
Wealth creation in Middle East and Africa (MEA) grew 8.5 per cent to $8.1 trillion last year from $7.5tn in 2015, higher than last year’s global average of 6 per cent and the second-highest growth in a region after Asia-Pacific which grew 9.9 per cent, according to consultancy Boston Consulting Group (BCG). In the region, where wealth grew just 1.9 per cent in 2015 compared with 2014, a pickup in oil prices has helped in wealth generation.
BCG is forecasting MEA wealth will rise to $12tn by 2021, growing at an annual average of 8 per cent.
Drivers of wealth generation in the region will be split evenly between new wealth creation and growth of performance of existing assets, according to BCG.
Another general trend in the region is clients’ looking for a comprehensive approach to investing, according to Mr AbuShaban.
“Institutional investors or some of the families are seeing a slowdown in the available capital they have to invest and in that sense they are looking at optimizing the way they manage their portfolios and making sure they are not investing haphazardly and different parts of their investment are working together,” said Mr AbuShaban.
Some clients also have a higher appetite for risk, given the low interest-rate environment that does not provide enough yield for some institutional investors. These clients are keen to invest in illiquid assets, such as private equity and infrastructure.
“What we have seen is a desire for higher returns in what has been a low-return environment specifically in various fixed income or bonds,” he said.
“In this environment, we have seen a de facto increase in the risk that clients are taking in things like illiquid investments, private equity investments, infrastructure and private debt, those kind of investments were higher illiquidity results in incrementally higher returns.”
The Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, one of the largest sovereign wealth funds, said in its 2016 report that has gradually increased its exposure in direct private equity and private credit transactions, mainly in Asian markets and especially in China and India. The authority’s private equity department focused on structured equities owing to “their defensive characteristics.”
COMPANY PROFILE
Name: Qyubic
Started: October 2023
Founder: Namrata Raina
Based: Dubai
Sector: E-commerce
Current number of staff: 10
Investment stage: Pre-seed
Initial investment: Undisclosed
