Potato and Spinach Pakoray

Pakoray are a staple during Ramadan for us. We eat them for iftaar, the small meal served after sunset when you break the day's fast. I often describe pakoray as deep fried vegetable fritters, but they are so much more than that. I heart pakoray in a big way, and I make 'em darn good too! They are not an easy thing to make, though, especially because before starting this particular batch of pakoray, I had never measured the ingredients called for in my mother-in-law's recipe. It just lists "a spoon" of red chili, and the measurement means "one of those small spoons from that ugly set of silverware your husband bought that one time." A cup = our yellow teacups with the blue rim. Now some of you may have yellow teacups with blue rims, probably not all of you do - so that meant I had to measure first with my ugly spoons and yellow teacups, then pour into actual measuring cups, and then write it all down for you, lovely reader. And then, since I think making pakora can be a bit tricky, I took pictures of (almost) every single step in the process! That means your in for a treat - FORTY ONE PICTURES of the ins and outs of deep fried Pakistani appetizer.

Not to toot my own horn, but my pakoras are pretty darn good. They're my MIL recipes, so it's not even tooting my horn, I'm tooting hers. I'm not being conceited, I'm being gratuitous! They're so good that when a good friend invited us for an iftaar party yesterday, and I asked if I could bring anything, she asked me to bring my famous pakoray. So while I was making them, I documented the whole process in case any of you wanted to make them too, or wanted to try a new recipe. This recipe made enough for a dinner party for about 15 really hungry, fasting adults. If you're making them for fewer people, you can divide all the measurements by half, but some of them would be difficult to divide more than that. If you make too much of the batter, though, it can be put in the fridge and re-used the next day too.

If you're making pakoray, these are the things you'll need:

Flour made from dried, ground chickpea (garbanzo beans.) It can also be called "besan" or "gram flour." Any brand is fine, this is just the one we had in the cabinets. You'll need 3 cups.

It will be a bit lumpy. I use a wisk to break up the lumps and turn it into a fine powder before adding the water.

Next I added 2 cups + 2 Tablespoon of water and whisked it into a smooth batter. I would start with just the 2 cups first, and see if you need any more water. The batter should be slightly thick, but should still stream off your spoon or whisk in a steady stream. I tried to get a picture of that too, but my camera is not that good.

Next we add seven spices to the batter; red chili powder, tumeric powder, cumin seeds, salt, garlic, ginger and baking powder.

I make my own paste of equal parts garlic and ginger, run through the blender with a little water and frozen in month-sized jars because almost every Pakistani recipe seems to start with garlic and ginger paste. They do sell pre-made jars of garlic and/or ginger paste in international markets, but they are really, really not good. You need fresh. If you don't make your own paste, I would buy some fresh garlic and cut off maybe an inch or two of fresh ginger and chop or crush them up as finely as you can.

I used 1.5 teaspoons of red chili powder, 1/3 teaspoon of tumeric powder, 1 Tablespoon of cumin seeds, 1.5 teaspoons of salt, 1.5 Tablesoons of garlic/ginger paste (or a scant Tablespoon of each if you're grating it yourself) and just 1/8 of a teaspoon of baking powder. My mother in law also uses baking soda sometimes, I'm not really sure which is preferable, but I just used that if I'm out of baking powder and they still come out great. Use whatever you have on hand. I didn't have a 1/8 measuring spoon so I just eyeballed it with my 1/4 teaspoon.

Add all the spices to the batter and mix it all up.

Next, in the batter, I add chopped green chilis and chopped cilantro. I think this is uncommon - most of the other pakoray I've seen being made do not have green stuff in the batter, but I am convinced this is one of the secrets of why these pakoray are so delicious. Definitely try it if you recipe is different!

Which green chilis to use can be a mystery. At my international grocery store, they are at least a dozen varieties of green chilis and peppers - none of which I knew about before I began cooking Pakistani food. M's family uses two main types of green chilis. They're both pretty small, right around the diameter of a pencil or pen. One is longer than the other and it's generally slightly less spicy that the short one. The short ones are generally between one and two inches, and they are fiery hot. If I cut them and then brush my lips, my lips will tingle and burn. M's so crazy that he eats a few of them raw with most dinners.

Two types of Indian/Pakistani green chilis on the right - jalapeno on the left for comparison purposes only.

In this large-quanitiy recipe, I used one long one and two small ones. Two long ones would have been fine too, but one of them looked wrinkly and less than fresh, so I moved on to the small ones instead.

My MIL slices the chilis impossibly finely, almost see-through fine. I can't get them that small without great difficulty and a much higher likelihood of rubbing my eyes and being blinded for 10 minutes. So instead I just chop them up as small as I can and then go back over them Yan Can Cook style to chop them into tiny pieces.

My pile of mangled green chilis. I forgot to measure them, though.

Next, take out a big handful of springs of cilantro from a bunch.

I used to pick off each leaf and discard all the stems. Recently my mother-in-law told me that this is unnecessary, just picking the last part of the stem is enough.

Stem on....stem off!

Take your de-stemmed cilantri and gather it all up under one hand, then slice it finely, skooching your fingers back a bit at a time until the whole thing has been sliced. Then pick up any large-ish pieces still hanging out around the side, pile them in the middle of the cilantro, turn your plate and slice it all again going in the other direction. The point is just to chop it up pretty finely.

Bunching it all up

Some big pieces around the edges always seem to escape my knife. Pile them up on top and give it another try!

Add your chopped chilis and cilantro to your besan batter and mix it up. Now you're ready to move on to the veggies. You can coat just about any vegetable in this batter and fry it up. There are even chicken and bread pakoras too. I used to chop up equal parts onion and potato cubes and spoon lumps into the oil. I often cut onions into rings and fry those. My favorite and most often used combonation, though, is potato and spinach. Not mixed though - I do the potatos first with half the batter, then dump in chopped spinach into the remaining half and make spinach pakoray.

First, though, heat up about 3/4 of an inch of oil in a pot. The heat of the oil is the most important part to making sure you have crispy pakoras. The crispiness is how I judge a good pakora from a bad one - it's all in the crispiness and they can not be TOO crispy! You want these things to shatter in your mouth like glass when you bite into them. The way to get them crispy is to fry them on relatively low heat for a long time. You DON'T want these things frying on high heat for less than a minute because 1) your besan won't cook enough and neither will your veggies, so your potato might be crunchy too and that's not good and 2) the besan will end up doughy or spongey, which is what most pakoras in restaurants tend to be. I think the frying technique is probably the most important part of making pakoray, but we'll talk more about that in a minute. Right not you just want to pre-heat your oil. My oven dials have numbers, and I set it at 6. Otherwise, I would put it judge a smidge above medium, but not quite to the middle of medium-high. It's like my father would say - the arguable Barbeque King of central Florida - "low and slow."

Next, find a good potato. I've been using these Green Giant Idaho russets, and they've been working out for me these days - not to gluey or starchy.

My mother-in-law peels them, but I've always liked potato skin so I don't. The peel ends up being not very noticable anyway, because of how you slice them.
 

 You want to slice them into pretty small potato-chip like disks. But a little thicker than potato chips. My mother-in-law cuts them even thinner than this, but I prefer a little more potato taste, and I fry them longer too so the potato cooks all the way through anyway, even though it's thicker than hers.  I prefer about this thickness:

 
I know people who cut all their potatoes in advance and then put them in water so they don't turn red or brown (which is what happens when you cut a potato and leave it out in the open air.) I think that makes the batter too watery later, so I just smush it all back up into potato form after I cut it, so that none of the cut edges are exposed to air until I'm ready to fry them:
 

 
I used three medium sized potatoes for this recipe. When you're done cutting your potatoes, you take each slice and dredge it through the batter. You don't want a whole lot of batter on the potato slice or else it won't cook well and won't get crispy. And crispiness is probably the more important element of these pakoray. Even though the recipe is quite good, remember that it's the frying technique that makes them stand out. You want these babies so crispy that they shatter like glass in your mouth. LIKE GLASS!
 
Sorry. Next you'll want to chop up your spinach, which I do the same way as the cilantro. Gather up all the spinach under one hand, then slice across the whole bunch, moving your hands back a centimeter at a time so you don't chop up your fingers too. Then pile up on top any of the big pieces that your knife missed the first go-round and chop in the other direction too.

Spinch, washed and dried (or more acurately, spinned)

Gather it all up under one hand, then use the knife with your other hand to chop all the way across the bunch, making sure to move your fingers back a little each chop so you don't end up with finger pakoras.

Add the large pieces to the top of the pile, then rotate the cutting board 1/2 a turn and chop again, going in the other direction.

Finished pile of chopped spinach

Next we start frying. Hopefully your oil has been pre-heating at medium-ish heat for at least 10 minutes or so since before you started chopping your vegetables.
 
So you'll want a fairly thin layer of batter on the potato. I do this by submerging the potato in the batter, then slowly taking it out and wiggling it a litter as it's pulled out of the batter. Or you can dip it in the batter and then kind of hold onto a tiny edge and wipe both flat sides across the top of the batter, which helps to take off any excess.
 

 
Now hopefully your oil is good and hot. When you drop your potato into the oil, you want it to rise fairly quickly to the top of the oil. Settling on the bottom of the pan for more than a second means your oil isn't quite hot enough. I probably woundn't increase the heat, though, I'd just wait five more minutes. If it rises instantly to the top in a bubbling cascade of oil, though, that means your oil is too hot - they'll brown too quickly and won't get to spend enough time frying to make them truly crispy. Once your oil is to the right temperature, don't overcrowd your pan with pakoray. Put enough in that they still have a little bit of room to roam.
 
I turn them early and often. If you don't turn them over pretty quickly, the batter on the top of the pakora can start to cook in the heat rather than fry in the oil, and it becomes puffy on the top. (Puffiness on the top can also mean your batter is too thick or you're coating them in too much batter, or maybe that you've put a little too much baking powder in the batter. This is actually something I haven't quite figured out myself yet.)
 
For the potatoes, I turn them early and often. You want them to fry and brown on both sides equally. I generally put 2-3 in the oil, then turn them over, put 2-3 more, turn, 2-3 more, turn. For large batches like this one, I enlist a helper (it used to be M, not it's often my sister-in-law) so that I'm putting them into the oil, and she turns then a few seconds later.
 

 
For a recipe of this quantity, I used three potatoes. This is the result, around 60 pakoras. Let's look at some individual pakora to see how important the frying technique is:
 

 

Here are our three test subjects. The one on the left is a perfect pakora. Deep brown, flat, and very crispy. The one in the middle is too brown - burnt, really, and puffy on the top. The oil was too hot for the middle one, so it's browned unevenly and it browned too much. If I had taken it out of the oil when it was the right color brown, the potato inside would have been not fully cooked. The pakora on the right has too much batter on it. As you can see below, the batter is so thick that it builds up inside and becomes doughy. It's so thick that not all of it is exposed to the oil, so not all of it becomes crispy. These kinds of thick pakoras are not very good to eat even straight from the oil, and then become a soggy, chewy mess after only a few minutes. It's a struggle to get it down, even. Don't do this!

This is too much batter!

This is good. It's just a thin amount of batter, all of which was able to fry until it was crispy. Another problem is the batter puffing up. This means that you should have turned them earlier, and also that maybe your oil is a bit too hot.

Perfect pakora on the left, puffy pakora on the right.

This will probably sound very wierd, but the way I check to make sure they're done is not entirely how brown they are, but also how they sound. Wait, wait! Trust me! When they've fried enough so that they'll be glass-shatteringly crisp, you'll be able to hear the difference. When you move them around in the pan and they knock into each other, or when you tap it with your spatula, it will begin to sound different, like they're developing harder shells. Once they make that knocking-around noise for a minute, they're done. That's why you have to fry them on such a medium setting, they have to sit in the oil long enough to develop this hard shell.

After you've fried as many potato pakoray that you want, you can dump the spinach into the remaining batter.

I forgot to measure the quantity of spinach also, maybe it was about two cups chopped? Basically you just want the remaining mixture to be about half spinach, half batter. Another option would be to take individual leaves of spinach - intact, not chopped - and dip then in a thin coating of batter just like the potatoes and fry them like that. I've seen that a lot too, perhaps more often that the chopped spinach ones, but I like the chopped ones a little bit better.

After you mix up your batter/spinach mixture, take a spoon and spoon a dallop of the mixture into your oil. It will be jaggedy-edged, don't worry - they don't have to look good because they taste so good! You don't want much more than a small spoonful because they puff up a bit in the oil, and they're supposed to be bite-sized snack food anyway. I used this amout of batter and spinach to spoon out about 70 spinach pakoras.

The frying technique for these is a little bit different than the potato ones because here, you DON'T turn them until they have a chance to cook and puff up a bit. You still want them to rise to the top of the pan pretty quickly - not in a raging, bubbling oil inferno, though, just sizzling. And don't crowd the pan, either. But here, you want the interior of the pakora to have a chance to cook a bit and let that baking powder have a chance to make little air pockets. Here's how you can tell when it's time to turn over the chopped spinach pakoray:

See the one on the left? The top is still pretty flat looking, and wet. The one on the right has rounded out just a bit and looks pretty dry - he's ready to be flipped over. Another sign is when they start to bubble a bit on the top - kind of like pancakes bubble up. When you see a bubble, they're ready to be turned over.

You'll want to turn these a couple of times too, to make sure they brown and crisp up even on all sides. Fry these just a little bit browner than the potato ones, and again - make sure your oil is not too hot! You don't want these cooking quickly, because otherwise your middle won't cook all the way through and they won't be crisy. It's sitting in sizzling oil for several minutes that makes these so crispy. Again, listen to see if they're crispy enough.

After the pakoras have become a deep brown and crispy, lay them on a paper towel or newspaper lined plate to shed excess oil. I was transporting mine to a party. Because they're so well fried and crispy, you can make them up to two hours in advance and they shouldn't lose too much of their crispiness (although nothing compares to having one cooked fresh! We've even frozen leftover and popped them in the oven for a while and they turn out good. If you have a need to transport or store them, first let them cool in the open air first. Don't put them in ziplock bags or cover them with anything because that will trap moisture in the container and make them soggy. Once they're cooled, you can store them. I think they are revived better if you put them in a dish and re-heat them on a low-ish setting, maybe around 300 degrees or so, for maybe 10 minutes? I just keep checking on them after that, flicking a few with my finger to see if they sound crispy yet.

I find that the potato ones re-heat better if you can stuff them in a pan on their ends. If one side touches the pan, it browns too much. I use another dish or my hands to stuff them in a baking dish sideways. When I make two different varieties, adding the spinach ones into the other side helps keeps the potato ones standing up too.

Once they're mostly arranged, you can slide in any extra stragglers between the rest:

And that's it! More than 100 aloo and palak pakoray to take with you to your next iftaar party! Most people will take at least 2-3 of each variety - maybe more if they've been fasting! These are usually dipped in a chutney sauce, so you might also want to take some dipping sauces for them. I can post the recipes for those tomorrow (not with so many accompanying pictures, though!) Tell your host or hostess that they could use about 10 minutes in the oven to heat up again, and enjoy!

Finished product

Ramadan, Ramadan, Once Again...

Ramadan is upon us once again, dear readers. The month where Muslims must fast from dawn until sunset every day - no eating or drinking. We've talked a bit about it before (here and here.) It's been so long and I haven't talked about it at all, but we're already more than halfway through the month of Ramadan. Eid - the big celebration that comes the day after the month of Ramadan ends - is September 10th this year.

These day, Ramadan means that we wake up before dawn to have breakfast. We have to finish eating by around 5am. Then we don't eat again until sunset, which is around 8pm. The timings are determined by the sun & moon, so each day the breakfast times creeps later and later by a minute or two while the sunset meal creeps earlier and earlier in the same fashion.

Refraining from food all day is difficult; it's meant to be. It's even more difficult after you have kids and all three of their meals plus any snacks must be prepared by you while you can't have any of it. Today the smell of strawberries at lunch time was my own personal jihad.

The most difficult thing, though, is Tarawih prayers. During the month of Ramadan, we also go to the mosque or other local gathering place to perform extra night-time prayers. At these prayers, people standing in long, orderly rows (well, sometimes orderly) and listen to the prayer leader recite the Qu'ran, verse by verse, until it's finished by the end of the month. These days, that means leaving the house by 9:00 at night and not getting home until 11:30, and standing (and kneeling and then bending all the way to the ground so that only your toes, knees, hands and forehead are touching the ground) for more than two hours, and doing the stand-bend-faceplant cycle at least 29 times. It's a complicated and physically tiring process. Luckily our local Islamic center has a guy to lead prayers whose voice is indescribeably beautiful, so it's also very spiritually uplifting and totally worth it even though it's so taxing. Some days, though, one or more of us is just not able to make it. 11:30 pm is too late to take the baby out anyway, so someone has to stay home with him anyway. We live close enough to the center that sometimes M goes for the first half and I go for the second half. Sometimes my sister-in-law stays home and then I'm able to go and leave the baby in good hands. (Well, leave the baby monitor in good hands at least - his bedtime is way before that!) Many days I just stay at home and listen to it online. M volunteers a bit at our local Islamic Center and he's helped set up a webcam and streaming video system so that community members who can't attend can still see the congregation and listen to the recitation.

One of the other aspects of Ramadan has nothing to do with religion. It's also a very social month. I actually have no idea what this means in Pakistan - I've never experienced Ramadan there. I only know what it's like in the American expat community that we're a part of. For us, it means that we invite people to our house a few times during the month for an Iftar party. Iftar is the name of the appetizer-y meal eaten at sunset, and we invite our friends and/or family over to share it with us. We also used to invite our non-Muslim friends for an Iftar party, but since the sunset time is getting later and later every year, we stopped doing that last year. I can't imagine many Americans wanting to come to my house and not start eating dinner until after 8 o'clock at night! Most of my American friends eat dinner at 6pm, 7 at the latest, and some even earlier than that! Unfortunately, with the Ramadan timings changing every year, it will be more than 15 years before the sunset is earlier than 8pm during the month of Ramadan.

This year has been especially social for us. We've hosted two iftar parties for two separate groups of our friends, and we've been invited to so many others that we've not been home for iftar any night during the weekends except last night. Last weekend we were invited at a coworker of M's on Friday night, then drove two hours to a nearby cousin's house for Saturday's evening iftar. We stayed overnight, playing games and chatting and eating some more (after Tarawih prayers, of course) until dawn and then drove back home. It was a great plan! This upcoming weekend we're invited at a  another friend's house on Friday and then we're going to the mosque for an iftar they provide on Saturday. Next weekend, we're hosting an iftar for Chachoo's school friends. It will be his wife's first large dinner party thrown by her. I'll just be backup cook/cleaner, like she usually is for me.

And you all know I'll be roaming around with my camera too!

Lives Washed Away - Please Help Pakistan's Flood Victims

Edited to add: I'm changing the post date on this so that it appears at the top of the page - things are just getting worse and these people need your help more than ever.

As I hope you've heard on the news, Pakistan is being plauged by the aftereffects of such serious flooding that UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said "In the past I have witnessed many natural disasters around the world, but nothing like this." (Sky News) This is a guy who has personally witnessed some of the worst disasters in human history. I've recently read that more that 20 million people are now homeless because of the floods. I've read the number of people whose lives are devasted by this flooding is worse than the 2004 tsunami AND the 2005 Pakistan earthquake AND this year's earthquake in Haiti - COMBINED. There have been no telethons though. This natural disaster has found no celebrities begging the American people to donate to the worthiest cause - saving human life.

Please, I beg you, please. Look at the pictures. Look at the people suffering. They need your help - anything you can offer. Others I know are persuing other methods of helping, including utilizing facebook and gathering goods to be shipped to Pakistan. M decided to donate to Imran Khan's charity, Tehreek-e-Insaf. For a list of reputable and global organizations you can contribute to, Huffington Post has compiled some great information here.

To those who have asked if my family is okay, I cannot thank you enough for your concern. My family is fine, they're all in Karachi which has not been affected by the flooding. Thier hearts, though - my heart - is breaking for all the good, honest, hardworking people whose entire lives have been wiped clean with water. They urgently need help.  Whatever you can give - your money, your time, your prayers.

Please, please do what you can.

Gold and Pasta

I have some gold jewelry, but in Pakistani culture, it's not just gold jewelry - it's GOLD jewelry. Yellow, sparkly twenty-two or twenty-four karat gold. The 14k I grew up with in suburban American looks positively transparent in comparison. Unfortunately for me, with what my grandmother calls "cheap Irish skin," this extra-yellow gold doesn't look too great. (Heck, I never even wore the lighter, 14k gold jewelry before marriage because it was too yellow for my pinky-pink skin.) But it's just so ubiquitous in Pakistan - and so very SPARKLY - that I've never been able to resist the pull, and I do wear Pakistani gold it if I have it!

I don't have a lot of pieces, though. I have my wedding set, given to me by my in-laws on our wedding, and a small simple bracelet and simple string necklace that were wedding gifts also. (The necklace was a gift from my three brothers- and sister-in-law, the bracelet was a wedding gift from my husband. His moo dekhai for me.) I have a similar wedding set that we bought in Karachi when we threw ourselves a Valima there in 2004, and I have one medium-sized round pendant that hangs lower than the rest, bought with the money given as wedding presents at that very same Valima. That and a few very small pieces given to me (at that Valima) by close family members (I think two rings and maybe three sets of earings) make up a very small collection for the typical Pakistani woman. But I'm neither Pakistani nor typical, so I've always been fine with my small collection. Except for one thing that I really wanted: a gold bangle bracelet. 

All the older women in M's family wear at least one gold bracelet on each arm. I've seen a lot of Pakistani women who weat gold bangle bracelets, but I have almost never seen my MIL without hers, and other women in the family are similarly braceleted. I haven't asked my MIL about it, but I think it has to do with his family being from Bihar, originally part of a Bengali state, and lived for some time in Bangladesh. So some Begali things show up in their family's cultural practices. It's just a not-all-that-educated guess by me, but I think it's from growing up where the giving and wearing of bracelets is part of the wedding traditions, which I know about only by reading about Gori Girl's wedding and seeing the picture of her bracelets. Well anyway, that's getting away from my point, which was only that I wanted some bracelets! When we all dress up in our party outfits and I line up next to all these women - my family - I had a big gaping hole in my jewelry library in the form of two missing matching gold bracelets. So we decided to go shopping.

Well, that's not true really. I was pretty against it. Buying gold right now is about the stupidest way to spend your money - or it was eight months ago, I don't know if that's changed. But back in December, gold prices were at an all time high. In 2009, gold cost three times as much as it did in 2004 when I went to Pakistan for the first time. I thought we should have waited to buy the bracelets. But Mian thought we should buy now because you never know, maybe prices are never going to get better and anyway, he wanted me to have those bracelets. He was the one that brought it up because he'd planned to get them as a anniversay and/or birthday present. We compromised and bought only one bracelet, because after all I still really like to wear glass bracelets on the other arm!

Mian and Aapi, in the gold store

First, though, we had to go pick up our secret weapon - Aapi. Mian's cousin, Farhat Aapi, whom M has always called Aapi - one of the respectful endearing terms for an older sisters and cousins. Aapi is a ruthless bargainer. She is so good at haggling that we can bring her shopping and get the best price, even if I'm sitting right there dressed in jeans. Usually prices are directly related to how visible I am, how much pasty white foreigner skin I'm showing. They assume that a foreigner must be making a lot of money to afford to visit Pakistan and they also know that we are unlikely to know the accurate price for most things, so shopkeepers try to charge double and triple the price. If I'm a visible foreigner, we get jacked up prices. If I stay home or dress up head to toe in black, cover my face and hands and keep quiet except to point to whatever I want to buy, we get regular prices. But shopping that way is quite a burden, and not much fun. Aapi levels the playing field. She knows what an outlandish price sounds like, and she's able to cut through any bargaining crap so that I can look, touch, feel and discuss all my options before deciding what to buy. Plus I can go shopping wearing regular clothes rather than having to dress up like a poor villager woman to try and fake out the shopkeepers. We always coordinate shopping trips with Aapi whenever we're shopping for big ticket items, and she came with us to go gold shopping.

Sizing rings for bracelets

At the gold shop, they first brought out the sizing rings. Most Pakistani women I know are impossibly tiny, with thin, delicate wrists. I am not any of those things. We'd assumed that we'd be buying the absolute largest size of bracelet, but lucked out - the second largest fit too. A small but welcome relief in both my ego and the price of the bracelet! The next step was to trade in all the old stuff I'd brought.

The stuff I'd brought with me to trade.

Trading old or out-of-fashion gold is common in Pakistan, I think.  My mother in law does it  and she insisted I do it too even though that meant I was trading in gold that she had given me. Just a few days prior, she'd given me one her bangles. She actually had a set of four bracelets and she gave each of her "daughters" (1 daughter, 3 daughters-in-law) a bracelet. For me, the biggest-wristed, she knew that meant I'd be trading it in to have it made into another bracelet. When you trade in old gold, sometimes they melt it down into new stuff. For me, they just weighed the gold I'd brought and credited it against the price of the bracelet I picked out.

     

I brought other pieces to trade in as well. Some of it was rings, given to me as gifts but that wouldn't fit my fingers and were too delicate to have sized. One extremely delicate and intricate ring that did fit my fingers had broken. One earing had lost its pairing. Two pendants for necklaces just weren't my style, and one pair of earings had insanely large studs that I was only able to force through my earlobes once. On their way back out, I realized that for some strange and painful reason, the studs had ribbed, screw-like ridges on them. It was like pulling a tiny saw through a hole in my ear, and they made my ears bleed. I traded those suckers in, all right!

Bangles on display for you to pick from

My two favorites

There were two bracelets that I couldn't decide between. I liked the little beaded detail on the one on the left, but I liked the more scroll-y, flower-y decorative etching on the one on the right. The jeweler said he could combine the styles when he made mine. I had to have it custom made anyway, because of that wrist-size thing. They just don't carry my size bangles ready-to-wear, unfortch.

After that, since we were in the Hyderi market anyway and that's where I generally buy the fabric to make my clothes, Aapi asked if I wanted to look around for clothes. Aapi is a busy wife and mother, and I'm always worried we're usurping too much of her time, but she likes shopping (and she likes me!) and she insisted, so we took a stroll and bought a few outfits.

The fabric stalls in these meandering markets never cease to amaze me. Countless rows and stacks of alarmingly bright and beautiful prints, each display stage packed with bearded and/or mustachioed Pakistani men shopkeepers. Strange men who call to you "Sister, sister! What can I get for you" and throwing their orangest, most geometric print in your path to catch your attention. Men who wouldn't usually talk to an unknown woman except that they do it all day, every day. It's just such a lesson in separation and contradiction. These markets are filled primarily with women, in a country that frowns upon the mixing of genders. Men's space and women's space. Men's things and women's things. Yet for these very girliest of products, Pakistani women squeeze tight into this smallest of spaces with the most manly of Pakistani men who tell them how beautiful this fabric would look, what great quality that bra is. And no one cares or perhaps even notices this contradiction. Maybe it isn't even a contradiction except to those who would see it through western eyes and biases.

I love how they'll model the clothes for you. Though I did not buy this one. Orange and pink Irish skin just don't go together in my mind, and I've never been one who could rock a leopard print. Or whatever print that is, I think it may be more than one animal!

I think we bought six outfits here, enough that they quickly realized they could convince me into buying just about anything they threw in front of me that didn't include animal print, geometric shapes, or the color orange - and enough to send their errand boy to bring us ice cold glass bottles of soda (or as Pakistanis call it "cold drink.") You just can't pass up the chance to go shopping with Aapi. These suits probably cost us half what they would have if we'd gone shopping the next day.

We had an evening outing that day too. For several days we'd been trying to decide what to do with all that money we'd extorted out of Chachoo on his wedding night. Since it was a big group of cousins who'd done the haggling (though I take all the credit for the amount - they were all willing to cave in way before I was) it was decided that all the cousins should split the money and instead of dolling out a few ruppees per person, we should all go to a nice place to eat together. One set of cousins knew of a nice, new place that had a "Hi Tea" service (I swear, it was spelled that way on the menu.) It's served between lunch and dinner times and included lots of different appetizer-ish food items, sweets and tea for a relatively cheap price, so that's the place we went to - Rangoli.

Rangoli turned out to be the nicest restaurant we would go to on our trip. We liked it so much that we came back again so that we could bring Ammi and Abbu with us - they had not been there before either. It was impecably clean and the service was excellent. No waiting around for drinks at all. The food was also really good and they had a couple of things that made me feel happy to eat - especially the pasta with marinara sauce. It was nice to eat something other than Pakistani food! There seemed to be a lot of "high-class" or even expatriate clientele there too, as uneducatedly guessed by me based on clothing alone - but it meant that I got stared barely at all while we were there.

The buffet

The decor

The food

Murals painted on the walls

The waiters presenting the bill - the final total for 17 cousins to eat was about 7000 rupees (or about $80.)

Rangoli is just a part of a larger entertainment complex in Karachi. They also have a bowling alley, an ice rink and an aracde - I think this part is called "Arena" - and I also saw a huge gym there, and they're right next door to the Maritime Museum. I don't know if there's more or not, but it's definitely worth a visit if you find yourself in Karachi.