Wasted Time

When we were planning our wedding, we decided we wanted to have two different ceremonies. The first would be a traditional, white-dress American style wedding , and the second would be a traditional, red-dress Pakistani Nikah in a mosque. At the time, it was really important to me that both ceremonies took place on the same day so that we wouldn't celebrate two different wedding anniversaries for the rest of our lives.

But this isn't about my wedding preparations. That's another story for another day. This is about a woman who helped me out. A woman who offered to do my bridal henna as well as henna for my bridesmaids. You see, because the American wedding was going to be in the late morning, and the Pakistani wedding was going to be in the evening, I decided that I didn't want my hands to be mehndi-fied in the white-wedding-dress pictures, but I DID want them mehndi-fied for the Pakistani wedding pictures. Luckily, this woman - a wife of a friend of M's - was willing to do my mehndi for me in between the wedding functions.

I knew this woman already. Probably better than any of the other women in M's extended circle of friends (not that there were very many women.) I had known her husband before they had married, and I had been invited to their very first post-nuptial dinner party and many others. In fact, the dinner party that I wrote about in an old post was at their house, too. One of my favorite memories is shopping at a Wal-mart with M, running into them, and being invited back (insistently) for improptu tea. This woman and I weren't best friends or anything, but I felt pretty comfortable around her.

Two days before my wedding, my two best friends and I drove an hour to her apartment in the middle of a weekday so that she could do henna for my friend. It took more than two hours for her to do just the hands of one of my friends, and as we sat there in her tiny living room, I realized something;

I had wasted so much time.

Here's what we talked about that afternoon: This woman and her husband had known each other in college in Pakistan. When he'd left for America for his studies, she had fought against her family to go too. Against her parents wishes, she'd come to America - alone - for graduate school. The school that admitted her was thousands of miles away from his, but she came anyway. She lived alone, attending a school with very, very few international students and almost no Pakistanis. When his parents refused to allow them to marry, she persisted. When they arranged an engagement to someone else, she and he found some way to stop it. When she lost her graduate funding, she slept on someone's couch and worked at Taco Bell. She'd even broken her arm, walked to the hospital, checked herself in, and then skipped out on the bill because she was so broke. They fought and fought with their parents - they arranged THREE engagements for him. With the last one, the guy had even flown back to Pakistan for his impending wedding date, only for things to miraculously fall through on the wedding day because of some family argument about dowry. This woman had stayed in America the whole time, knowing that the man she wanted to marry was likely marrying someone else. She found a new school and a new professor and new funding, and finished her graduate degree. When he came back, they married in secret and fought some more. His parents would finally consent to the marriage a year later.

You see, because my friends were there, the conversation had been much more basic than I'd had previously with this woman. Instead of assuming we all already knew about each other, my friends asked her all sorts of questions that opened doors to all sorts of other conversations. In truth, I thought I already knew this woman, I'd already made judgements about her, and I certainly knew that we had little, if anything, in common. I thought I knew what a "typical" Pakistani bride was like, most often brought back from Pakistan, and I hadn't really bothered to get to know this woman at all. In reality, she'd led a much more interesting life than I had.. When I had interacted with her in the past, if I had approach her with an open mind, perhaps I would have learned all this much sooner. Perhaps by wasting so much time, I foreclosed an opportunity to form a true friendship with one of the most interesting women I would ever meet. (Because sadly, we would all move very far away from each other shortly.)

Over time, I've realized that I've wasted time in many situations by not being open-minded enough to just experience the interesting situations I'm often in. Now, I try to come to things - and people - with an open mind. I've met people and done things and been places and I KNOW that I've approached these things differently since seeing the truth with my bridal mehndi artist.

I try not to waste time now, I try to remember that there's plenty I don't know and that if I drop my pre-conceived notions and truly engage in these situations, I can get so much more out of them.

Frozen

I got an email question today and I thought HEY! I can slap that on my bloggity blog and get out of having to actually think of something myself! So you're in for a treat this weekend, y'all! My text editor is going to be so red it'll look like a murder scene up in here. (*definitions for all the Urdu words are buried all the way at the bottom, after the jump.) On to the topic at hand!


Salaam Gori Wife :)

I was wondering, you mentioned a couple of times on your blog that your MIL cooks a bunch of food for you and then freezes it.  I'm going to visit my brother in 2 weeks and wanted to do the same for him.  What kind of stuff does she cook for you?  How about vegetables?  Do different kinds of daal freeze well?  Also how exactly does she freeze the stuff?  Does she use proper containers or Ziploc bags?  Any advice would be helpful...


Thanks so much,
Faiqa 

Can I just bask in the glory of having the great Faiqa  ask ME a question?

I'm going to need a minute.

(....)

Okay.

So, my MIL cooks everything for us when she's here and almost all Pakistani food freezes really well. The only vegetables I can think of that don't freeze well are things like potatoes & shaljam, maybe predominantly starchy things? Potatoes come out of the freezer falling apart - really powdery - it screws up the texture entirely. Carrots are a bit like this too, in fact most vegetables will come out a little mushier, but in general bhaji is supposed to be kind of mushy, so the only ones that I think are so bad that I won't do it anymore are potatoes and shaljam.

Also things like dhunya and hari mirch left on top of the food, sometimes we would put some on top and then freeze it, but the leafy stuff doesn't come back out well unless it's already mixed into the dish. We also always make sure to mix in all the lawazmatt - all those things (hari mirch, ginger, dhuniya, lemon, browned onions, etc.) used as toppings on dishes like Nihari, Haleem, Khichri and stuff because getting all that stuff together can be a real pain later and as long as you know the ratio of toppings that the person likes, it doesn't effect the dish to have it frozen in there.

Daals are really good in the freezer, but they get a little smushier. So like, a really gloppy moong/masoor mix will come out almost the same but a Daal Gosht with channa where the channa is supposed to mostly hold its individual shape will come out a bit smushier. (Also, sometimes my MIL will do a second tarka for daal, not because it thaws out blander, but because she says it makes it smell fresher. I never do that, but then again I generally add a lot of tarka in the first place.)

And ground meats are like that too, like shami kabobs and kofta, will get a little smushier after thawing out.. I find that as long as I freeze it cooked (rather than raw kabobs) and I let it thaw out completely before I start messing with it, it makes the reheat better. Trying to fry up raw, thawed out shami kabobs has always ended in heartache for me, so I always cook them first, then freeze them. And I (try to) let most things thaw out completely before reheating. So with Daal Gosht or Kofta, microwaving it and stirring it before it's totally reheated will result in a lot more broken kofta/daal. Although, if you're in a hurry it still tastes as good, though! And the koftas end up broken anyway, right!

Suprisingly, rice also freezes pretty well. Freezing doesn't seem to affect the texture or flavor of the rice, it just seems to affect the size - the rice will break up a little after thawing. We freeze briyanis and pulaos and even plain white rice. Before I had a kid, I make huge pots full of rice and then froze them into single portions or dinner-for-two size portions so that M could just take some out in the morning along with an entree of his choice and I wouldn't have to make his lunch or our dinner at all while we were dealing with the newborn stage.

Another thing that freezes remarkably well is any kind of naan/roti/paratha, so whenever I make daal ki roti or aloo ki roti (the aloo is mashed so the consistency thing doesn't matter so much) I always layer them on a large plate with a piece of parchment paper or plastic wrap in between, then stick the plate in the freezer for a couple of hours. I've always frozen them raw, but when my MIL was here this time, she halfway-cooked them first and that seemed a lot easier. When it's frozen, I just pop the whole stack into a big ziploc bag and then over the course of several months, I can use the paper layers to just peel off one or two as needed rather than have to go through the whole hassle of making such a difficult dish again. Otherwise we'd probably never eat daal ki roti or paratha.

My MIL always just uses ziploc bags, but be careful to fold the edges down, like how you would fold down the edges of a garbage bag when you put it in the can (<------ sorry if that's not very explanatory) so that as you're putting the salaan in the bag the zip part of the bag doesn't get all messed up. Also, we always make a place in the freezer where the bag can lay completely flat as it freezes so it doesn't turn into some unwieldily thing that takes up all your freezer space. When we're really stocking up the freezer with lots of ziploc bags, we just keep laying them on to of each other so they freeze (relatively) flatly, and then when you just have only a few left you can even store them vertically. We do always use the freezer variety of bags, in both quart and gallon sizes.

Anyone else have any advice to give regarding cooking, storing and especially freezing desi food? Is there something grosser than frozen potato that I'm forgetting about?

More Pictures of Lahore.

Googling for pictures to fill in the gaps of my old Lahore pictures yesterday, I found a British journalist Max Robinson who has some really stunning pictures of all the places I was talking about. If you'd like to see some more picture of Lahore, professional and stunningly beautiful ones - you should check out them out here and scroll down to click on the "Around Pakistan" sets.

(This one's a long one, folks! I've broken it in half so that it doesn't seem to go on and on forever, and so that anyone who's not interested won't have to scroll forever just to get past it.)

When planning our first trip to Pakistan, about a year after we were married, we decided we would do a little traipsing around the country while we were there. I had, after all, spent the last two years reading everything I could about Pakistan. So I had gotten a little curious about all the places and things I had come across. Retrospectively, it was a fantastic idea to do that pre-kids and while we could reasonably call ourselves newlyweds. Now if we were to plan that kind of trip, family members might be offended that we'd rather travel alone than visit with them, and taking a kid with us would have been much more difficult. Our trip was a four night, five day jaunt through Lahore and Islamabad/Rawalpindi in January of 2005. First stop was Lahore.

We were met at the airport by an old friend of M's that I had never met before. He had gone to graduate school with M here in America, and had graduated (and moved back to Pakistan) just one week before M and I met. He'd lived in Lahore since then and had married and had a son. He's a professor at a university there, and when M called him up to say we'd be in Lahore, would he be available to hang out, he had insisted we stay with him and his family. So that's how I ended up sleeping on a Lahori school's campus for two nights.

The Professor and his wife were perhaps the most amazing hosts I have ever met in my life. Every need, want or comfort had already been thought of and provided for us. They planned our entire two day stay and included some of the most fantastic outings. Meals were extraordinary, they never let us pay, and on the first day I realized I would have to stop saying how much I liked things because they just kept buying everything I talked about and gifting it to me, refusing repayment. Books, toys, trinkets, bangles - if I said it was nice, they would find some way to get one and give it to me. Seriously, just thinking about it makes me want to send them a Thank You note five years later.

So what did we do while in Lahore? A lot! And I have old pictures to prove it, but it's a long pic-filled post, so you'll have to read more after the jump.

Read more »

Have You Seen Lahore?

"Jinhe Lahore nahin vekhya, oh jamaya nahin."

There's a saying about Lahore. I've heard it translated two way - "A life without seeing Lahore is not a life" and "One who has not seen Lahore has not been born." I don't know if either or both or none of them are correct, and I was certainly born before I saw Lahore. But it was, and still is, the favorite place I have ever seen in Pakistan, and I hope to see it again some day. For now, though, I think I'll go dig through my old pictures and work on a post about how much I enjoyed Lahore...

Living Apart

As I mention in yesterday's post, my husband and I lived apart for the first six months after we were married. But why get married if you can't live together?

For us, the whole engagement thing kind of came out of the blue. Neither one of us had been thinking about marriage, and we'd certainly never talked about it before. When M decided to take the plunge, his parents were only a few short weeks from their visit to America to see their son graduate. They'd planned the trip at length and already had their US visit visas in hand before he'd even popped the question, and when he did ask me to marry him, he did it by saying he wanted to get married when his parents were visiting.

So really, even before I'd said yes, the wedding date had been set. Or the date range at least. And it wasn't like I was going to drop out of school only one semester away from graduating just to go live the married life. There was no other choice, really, than to get married NOW even though we couldn't be together until later.

I remember that at the time it felt very unnatural. To be a newlywed, to want to talk about wedding details and mention how you'd only gotten married a few months prior - but then to live a thousand miles away from your new husband! I did visit M almost every single weekend after we were married, so it wasn't all sadness and separation. And of course time heals all wounds, so I only remember that time fondly. I have read a theory that having to live apart can actually prolong the infatuation stage that wears out so quickly, so it may have in the long run helped prolong that newlywed stage for us (and that can only be a good things, right!) 

Although there was one negative thing about it; we had to postpone our immigration stuff. M was a student in the US on an F-1 visa when I'd met him, and a few months before he'd graduated he had switch to a year of OPT ("Optional Practical Training") in order to work and stay in the US for a year even though he was no longer a student. He only had a year to change his status to something else or he wouldn't have any work authorization and he'd have to leave the US. His work would have sponsored him on an H-1 visa, but it was supposedly much faster and cheaper to pursue changing his status through his marriage with a citizen. (I am no specialist in immigration law, and this was all a few years ago, so please forgive and inaccuracies...) But because we had all his OPT time left, we thought it would be better to wait until we were living together to file out various paperwork. I just kept imagining two different addresses in our papers would raise plenty of red flags, and since we were only talking six months, it seemed like a better idea to wait and really *look* like a married couple on paper before trying to convince the US government of it.

Perhaps if we hadn't waiting so long, we wouldn't have run into as many problems during our (ongoing, unfortunately) immigration process. But that's a story for another day...

The Freezer Fill of Aught Four

While looking through pictures last night, I found some of The Great Freezer Fill of 2004. When M and I married we were living in different states. I wasn't yet finished with my bachelor's degree and had to leave only 3 weeks into our marriage to return to school. We were going to spend the first six months of our marriage apart. 

Ammi, not wanting to see her son have to live a solitary life (even though he'd been doing just that for more than 4 years by then) decided that at the least she could make sure he would eat well. So she cooked and cooked (and had the recipes written down for me) and in the last week or so of their visit, she completely filled up M's freezer with various home-cooked meals that M would spend the next six months going through. 

By the time I moved into the apartment six months later, there were only 2 things left in there.

Chef and Recipe Transcriber