Eid Mubarak!

The day after Ramadan is called Eid, and it was on Sunday. It's pronounced like "eed". Eid-al-Fitr, to be exact - one of two Islamic holidays during the year. It lasts three days, although most of the celebration is front-loaded and lessens in intensity after the first day.

The Eid day always starts out with an early morning congregational prayer. Usually this would mean going to the mosque very early in the morning, but where we live our Mosque is located in a residential neighborhood and it's not large enough to accommodate all the people who come for Eid prayers. The crowd is exponentially larger at Eid prayers than at any other prayer during the year - much like Christmas and Easter in churches. So our Eid prayers are held in local convention centers. Our prayer was especially nice this year because while our Mosque offered 20 different Eid prayer sessions in 5 different locations in the area, we managed to pick the one where my absolute favorite speaker was giving the lecture and leading the prayers. AND he talked about the importance of gratitude and said one of my favorite quotes.

Almost as soon as we left the prayer, the phone started ringing. Eid is the time to call, and be called, by every long-lost and distance relative and friend that you know. So M fielded call after call after call and still only made a dent in his address book. It was too early to call the Pacific Coast contigent but there were a few hours of prime Pakistan calling time, so he got a lot of calls from there. I should say WE got a lot of calls from there, because many people specifically asked to talk to me as well. 

Every person I talked to asked what I was wearing - which is a weird question to ask of the phone according to most Americans! Not so with Pakistanis - especially on Eid. All Pakistanis muslims I know celebrate Eid with new clothes. The Eid outfits are a big deal and are usually picked out way in advance. Ammi usually ships ours to us, but since she was here she just brought them with her back in June. Actually, the baby and M wore matching red waistcoats with lots of little mirrors sewn into them - we'd bought those back in 2007 during our trip to Pakistan. 

The boys in their matching coatees, getting ready to leave for prayers.

After new clothes and early morning prayers, the next step in the Eid plans is FOOD! In M's family, they don't eat any breakfast before the Eid prayer, just some dates cut into slices and floating in milk. Ammi uses dried dates, but I think there must be some difference between what "dried dates" means in Pakistan and what it means here, because here they never soften up in the milk or are appetizing AT ALL on Eid morning. So this year I used regular dates and they were fantastic. 

We'd also prepared a lot of food the night before because we were hosting an Eid celebration - a backyard barbeque - for all our friends. We usually hold some kind of Eid brunch (or dinner, when it's been on a workday in years past) but this one was especially nice. Friends from far away attended, and some even stopped by for just a few minutes in between all their other social commitments. It really had a nice, Eid-ish feeling to it. Plus, barbeque was a fantastic choice because on the invitation I was able to write that people should show up early to help man the grill, and I wasn't expected to do all or even most of the work! Everyone who came was extremely helpful with food prep, set-up, outdoor furniture cleaning and arrangement - even clean up! It was really a fun day.

One of my favorite things about Eid is the Eidi. In M's family, kids run around all the various family functions on the day of Eid demanding money from their parents, uncles, grandparents, and even elder cousins. Every gives kids a little bit of money as an Eid gift. I know a couple of American born muslims who consider Eidi to be any kind of Eid gift, not just money. In our house, it's still money, and up until this year, I got Eidi too! I think I STILL should be getting Eidi because this is only my 6th year celebrating Eid and M surely got Eidi well past 6 years old. Am I right! Come on! Where's my Eidi?!?! (Well, actually I get to take the baby's Eidi until he's old enough to know the difference. This year he only got Eidi from US, and all he did was ask who was the guy on it. M didn't know and just called him the Eidi walla admi, or The Eidi Man. Then the baby put the $5 bill in my back pocket. What a sweet boy!)

Anyway, even without the Eidi is was a fantastic Eid. In the evening we played games and watched movies, all while snacking a nibbling on all the various sweet things in the house. The baby ran around almost unsupervised all day long and had a lunch consisting of no less than 9 slices of watermelon - and nothing else. M spent a solid hour running in a triangle of two different barbeque grills and his own plate of quickly-getting-cold food. We served Bihari kabob, some chicken curry my MIL calls Khushk Murgi, or "Dry Chicken" and some potato bhaji with traditional Pakistani pickling spices as well as an appetizer of cholay chaat. Some friends brought boneless chicken kabobs, dahi barray (veggie fritters floating in yogurt-ish kind of snack food).

And it wouldn't be Eid without the sweets and dessert, so we made some Kheer and Sawaiya - rice pudding and a similar kind of thing made with roasted fine rice noodles. My mother in law is well know for her cooking, and I think her sawaiya is one of the BEST things she makes, so as an Eid gift to you, here's her recipe. (It's not the easiest recipe, because she never gives me firm quantity measures, but it doesn't have to be exact anyway and you can always add more spices or sugar later if you think it needs more.)

1. Heat some ghee, oil or butter in a pan. (I prefer butter because it will start to turn a light brown color, helping the dish to be brownish in the end. I use about a half a stick.) 

2. Add 3-4 whole little ilaechi and little bit of cinnamon stick, about an inch, broken into a few pieces. (I usually double the spices because more is always better!) 

3. Add vermicelli (It has to be the roasted stuff from a Desi store) and cook 1/4 of the packet, stirring and coating all the pieces in the oil/butter/ghee and roasting it until it's "fragrant" whatever that means?

4. Add enough water to cover the vermicelli. 

5. Add a lot of sugar (a whole tea cup full) 

6. Add some raisins and chopped coconut (optional) and cook for about an hour 

7. Stir occasionally and dry water until it becomes the thickness you like (it's supposed to be like a really thick soup, but it will absorb more water as it cools so make sure there's enough or it will absorb ALL the water and turn into a solid brick. Trust me, I speak from experience.) 

8. Garnish with pistachio and almond (let them sit in water for an hour to make them easy to chop, then cut into long pieces, removing any peel. make sure you're not using salted pistachio/almond.)