When Hamad moved to Manchester to study engineering, he he had a big problem: he couldn't cook. At home in Kuwait, his mother had always prepared the meals. For the first month, he lived on pizza and .
After a while, he started to feel , and he was spending far too much money. So he decided to learn. He watched cooking videos online and called his mother almost every evening to ask for her .
His first attempts were a . He the rice, added too much salt to the soup and once in his building. His laughed, but they also encouraged him to keep trying.
Slowly, he improved. By the end of the year, he could make his mother's famous chicken machboos. One weekend, he invited all his friends from university to dinner. They loved it. "Cooking taught me patience," Hamad says. "And now I never feel when I can taste home."