Any New Mexico resident who has traveled outside the U.S. is familiar with the awkward response heard now and then after revealing their home state: "Lucky you! It must be so nice and warm in Mexico right now." (Sadly, it isn't all that hard to find similarly misinformed folks on domestic soil.)

I return to the Arab world every year. Over time, I've grown to appreciate the opportunity to talk about New Mexico, and especially New Mexican food, to people who live in places where salsa is something that's sold in the chips aisle and tacos are something you pick up at a drive-thru.

This year, for the first time, I was accompanied on my trip by my good friend Avery, a native New Mexican who had never been to the Middle East. Together we traveled through Jordan, Lebanon and the UAE. We experienced the Dead Sea, climbed trees I scaled as a child, and ate staggering quantities of kishk — a distinctive mixture of dried yogurt and bulgur wheat that is ubiquitous in Levantine cooking.

I love New Mexico. I choose to live here because it reminds of home in innumerable mysterious, magnetic and occasionally infuriating ways. During my last visit to the Middle East, it dawned on me how tenacious a commitment New Mexicans have maintained to their culinary legacies. What we don't have of in much of the Middle East, and especially in the Gulf, are records of similar culinary traditions. Neither of my grandmothers could read or write. Our folklore and traditions are historically oral. And most of them are long gone.

As kids, my brother and I liked to remove the enormous, dome-shaped, woven-straw apparatus used for keeping flies off food, then run around blindly while it covered our top halves like a giant sombrero. In those days, my dad liked to take us out once in a while to a "Mexican" restaurant in Abu Dhabi called El Sombrero. I remember the gummy burritos, which I loved, and the vague ache in my belly afterward that meant I'd eaten too much, or too fast or both. In the spirit of nostalgia (or was it masochism?), I went back to El Sombrero not long ago. It was terrible; but I loved every nauseating bite.

My first trip to New Mexico in 2001 was similarly revelatory. I remember tearing into a hot sopaipilla and watching the steam billow from its pillowy center toward a perfect, cloudless Santa Fe sky. New to the area, I adopted the sopaipilla, vowing then and there to learn as much as I could about the local dishes I was quickly falling in love with, so that I could replicate them for my family and friends back home.

Time passed, and I got lazy. Decent New Mexican food can be found everywhere, and to this day, I've still never made my own red chile. Even after almost nine years, I've never made enchiladas or posole (though I did once drive down to Silver City for a tamale workshop). I love the fact that in New Mexico, home cooking isn't stigmatized by socioeconomic factors the way it is in parts of the Arab world. So many people in the City Different cook at home: men and women, rich and poor, single and not. Our restaurants may close early, but maybe that's not such a bad thing, considering how many of us would rather be at home anyway, where the real magic happens. Sometimes, there appears to be an inverse relationship between home cooking in my heart and in my mind. I am not proud of this, but it's the truth.

"Think of something calm," I whispered to Avery last month during a white-knuckled taxi ride through dense fog on Jordan's treacherous King's Highway. She squeezed her eyes shut. "What are you thinking about?" I asked, hungry for distraction. "My grandmother's house in Belen. And green chile."

"I'd like to meet your grandmother when we get back," I tell her.

This time, I'm holding myself to it.

Nouf Al-Qasimi is a freelance writer living in Santa Fe. Send e-mail to food@q.com.