Food, Glorious Food

Yesterday I made plov with Jamilya Aya! It was super fun, I got a blister from cutting carrots with a broken knife though, ouch. We made it with chicken because there was no meat at the GOOD meat place when she stopped by on her way from home, and I liked it so much more! We all ate it off the same plate, yum. We all used spoons, except Jamilya, who prefers eating it with her hands. They all usually eat stuff off a communal plate. At first they used to bring me a plate of my own (I’m sure because the Program warned them about the strange American eating habits that require washing a lot more dishes) but lately even if they did bring me a plate I would eat off the community platter, I just think its more fun that way, I like being part of the family. And so now they don’t bring me a plate anymore, success! Mealtime integration completed. You just kind of choose a region of the platter and dig in, and then its funny because you get little rows of food in between sections – the in-between, no-man’s-land that no one wants to claim at the risk of stealing their neighbor’s food. Either that part eventually gets eaten by a brave soul, or it becomes left-overs. They all do the custom of making the motion of washing their face at the conclusion of a meal, a very Tajik (and I believe Muslim) tradition. I want to do it, but don’t.

Plov for dinner, apparently it’s a Thursday night tradition. Also, Ikrom sang a beautiful prayer while wearing a little white hat, alone in the living room. It was a song in remembrance of the dead. Yep, so on Thursdays you’re supposed to sing that prayer, and then eat plov, it’s kind of a Friday eve preparation I guess, preparation for the holy day.

Yesterday I watched Dilya and Jamilya make Tafir, a flaky layered flat bread like lepyoshka or nan. It’s quite the process, and requires a lot of rolling the dough out really thin, and then folding it up and cutting it, and rolling it up again. I’ve basically learned how, now I just need to try it myself, at the risk of ruining their dough! When it came out of the oven, all piping hot and delicious, they offered me some. Yum! Then they started breaking it into a wooden bowl, and then they mixed up some chaka with water to make a sour, kind of gross-tasting thin yogurt, and poured it all over the delicious bread! Nooooo…! was my internal cry! Then they topped THAT off with sautéed onions, and topped the whole thing off with cucumber/tomato/onion salad. And mixed it all together in the wooden bowl til it was nice and gloppy, and that is how you make a dish called ShakarAb.
I was also internally hesitant about eating it, but dipped my hand in just like the rest of them (they offered me a spoon, but said it’s tastier when you eat it with your hands, and so I did!), and… it was pretty delicious! And it definitely grew on me as I kept eating it. Yum, ShakarAb.