Memorial Day Celebrations

Yesterday was Memorial Day in America, a day when we celebrate our armed forces, remembering those killed in past wars as well as prisoners of war and those missing in action. It's also a day when a lot of Americans get together with family and friends for cookouts. My whole family, several states away, had a barbeque. And we did too! I write here about my experiences in an intercultural marriage and that's mostly about my adjustment to the Pakistani influence in my life, but my husband and his family could write a blog all about the exact opposite situation - intercultural marriage and dealing with the weird American influence in your otherwise Pakistani life. For heaven's sake, my sister-in-law and mother-in-law tasted a hot dog for the very first time yesterday. Does it get an more American than hot dogs on Memorial Day?

Actually our whole day was an exercise in the American experience. We all started the day with yard work. We're building a planter in our backyard and it's requiring everyone to pitch in. Then we all went for a dip in the inflatable pool - it was 95 degrees outside during all that yard work, after all.

After that we fired up the grill and then came a little. Pakistani influence. Dulhan spiced up half the ground beef with Pakistani spices because ahe thought plain burgers would be too boring. But don't worry, the hot dogs were unadulterated :-) We also had potato chips, pickles, lemonade and watermelon.

Then, as we all munched on our mostly-American fare, I put on a movie for us. What better way to cap off a day of classic Americana - Superman! Truth, justice and the American way!

Hope you all enjoyed your holiday!

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The Care and Storage of Spices

LuckyFatima wrote about how she stores all her spices and invited others to do the same. I meant to do it right away, but I wanted to take some pictures of it and wanted to wait around for good daytime lighting, but the light never came, I guess. Yesterday, though, I just decided to do take the pictures in whatever lighting was available when I got home from work - which means, sorry for the bad lighting :)

So, spices. We have a lot of spices. Pakistani food, which we cook a lot around here, usually calls for a lot of different spices in every dish. We use maybe close to 10-15 very, very commonly, maybe almost every day. Then there are weird spices that we use only in a few dishes, maybe we only use them once or twice a month. I'm not much of a foodie, so I actually never really think about spices going bad and keep them around for probably longer than they need to be kept. We do cook for a lot of people in this house though, so hopefully we're cycling through them so fast they don't have a chance to go bad.

For the regularly used spices, we bought some square jars with glass lids and a plastic-y seal from IKEA back when we first got married. They are not airtight, but they're pretty close.

They're theoretically stackable, and in the first couple of months or years we did stack them but it can be a big pain in the butt to un-stack four jars from on top of the ONE spice you need right then, so we eventually decided to make a shelf for them. Which means I told Mian what I wanted and he built me a shelf.

My spice shelf

Here's where my regularly used spices live in the kitchen. They're on one side of the sink - the oven is on the other side, off to the left of where the picture ends. The spices live right between the cutting boards and the water pitcher. It's a bit further away than I'd like from the stove where all the spices actually get used, but I prefer that over having them right next to the heat of the stove.

For most of the spices, you can tell what the are just by looking at them. Red chili powder on the top, in one of the big jars. Yellow in the middle is tumeric (haldi.) Big and small cardamom (illachi), fennel (saunf), cumin seed (zeera), cilantro and onion seeds (dhuniya and kalonji.) 

From left to right, cardamom, cilantro seed, tumeric and red chili powder.

Some of them are harder to tell - they're all brown powders - so we've labeled the jars. Z is for zeera poweder, D is for dhuniya powder, G is for garam masala powder, C is for chaat masala. We JUST wrote those letters this year, for the past SEVEN years before that we'd either tasted of smelled the different powders to tell the difference. I don't know what took us so long. 

The other, not regularly used or larger quantity spices or ingredients are kept in a pantry off in the opposite corner of the kitchen - on the other side of the oven.

It's usually an unorganized mess, but Dulhan does try to contain my overflow from time to time, so it's only 25% of it's usual messiness here. We keep out atta - whole wheat flour - in the big white metal container on the floor. You can barely see it there because it's covered by a big Costco-sized sleeve of paper cups. The next shelf up from the floor holds lentils (daal) that we use in really big quantities around here. Dulhan and I like to joke that these Bihari men that we married want to eat daal with everything. Sometimes it seems like they can't choke down rice until it's sopping wet under some daal. And strangely, the baby is the same way. He'll struggle with dry-ish rice, but he'll eat daal chaval - rice and lentils together - faster and in much greater quantity. That's the lentils on the next-to-last shelf, the large jars full of small yellow lentils. 

On the other side of that shelf is where we keep pre-mixed spices sold in boxes for special dishes. I like to call them the Hamburger Helper of Indian food, minus the hamburger. We use these to make dishes that are really difficult to get the spices right, or very labor intensive, or whatever other reason. I don't usually like to use these spice mixes, but some of them are actually better than what I can make on my own. That's a whole 'nother post on it's own though, because there is some tension over who uses pre-made spice mixes and who doesn't. Another day we'll tackle that, I promise.

On the next shelf up, we store the spices we use rarely, thinks like anardana - pomegranate seeds, amchur powder - unripe green mango powder, and Ajwain - carom seeds. We also keep the remainders here. That's when we buy the industrial-sized bags of red chili powder, but only 1/4 of it fits in my often-used glass jar by the sink. We store the rest here, then replenish the glass jar after it empties.

Those are my spices! They have changed a bit since Dulhan has moved here because she cooks some different dishes than I used to. I mostly only know how to cook Mian's mother's recipes - mostly pure Bihari north Indian style food. Dulhan is Kutchi and they have some different dishes than I'm used to cooking. Some of the rarely-used spices for me are actually often-used spices for her, so some of the arrangements change from time to time. It's not the best system, it's probably not ensuring the freshness or longevity of my spices, but it works for us. As you can see from my kitchen pictures, we are in need of a major kitchen renovation. It's the original kitchen in our 1975 house and hasn't been changed at all. Maybe when we're able to renovate our kitchen, we'll renovate our spice storage system as well.

Babies With No Gestation Time

One of my Pakistani husband's Pakistani friends from grad school married a Pakistani girl from the same grad school. They just had a baby boy. We never even knew she was pregnant! This is probably only because my husband refuses to use his Facebook page and is woefully uninformed about the goings-on of his friends and family, but it also reminds me of something I thought was weird when I first found out about it: sometimes Pakistanis don't talk about pregnancy until there's a real, live baby on the outside. It's quite a shock when you're not expecting it and you, like me, think of babies as taking some time to appear rather than just magically, one day, showing up.

One of his friends from college back in Pakistan came to America for grad school and told my husband that he should come also. He had already applied to some schools but also applied to the friend's school and ended up going to the friend's school, (mostly because of funding.) About two years after graduating and marrying me, while living in a different state than the friend, my husband got a phone call from the friend; he and his wife had a baby girl! I was like, what? That's a very good friend of yours, how could you not have known his wife was pregnant?

Also, on our first trip to Pakistan, we visited another grad school friend of my husband's. He'd actually graduated the same week I met M, and he'd returned to Pakistan to teach at a university in Lahore. We wanted to travel a bit during our first trip in Pakistan, including seeing Lahore, so he called up his Professor friend and made arrangements to visit. He and his new-ish wife (though they already had one baby) insisted we stay with them for the two nights we'd be in Lahore. They were lovely, wonderfully generous, kind and fun people - the most amazing hosts I've ever had before or since. But his wife was a niqabi - she covered her whole body and even her face in flowing fabric and all you could see were her eyes. I had a headache the first night and we were out until late the next night, so I went straight to bed both evenings and never even got a chance to spend any one-on-one time with her (meaning: I never got to see her uncovered.) So I never saw what she looked like at all, though from what I could see from outside the layers of fabric, she seemed....a bit plump. I am a bit plump myself, so I just thought even nicer of her husband, the Professor friend, for giving the larger ladies of the world some attention :)

You might already know where this is going, but just 7 weeks after returning to America, my husband got an email birth announcement of their second child. She'd been pregnant! We'd stayed with them for three days and two nights, wound through the crazy streets of Lahore together and no one had even mentioned it!

My husband says it's always been that way and that in the circles he runs in in Pakistan, nobody talks about pregnancy. "It's embarrassing," he said. He couldn't say exactly why it's embarrassing, though I think it has something to do with screaming from the rooftops "By the way, in case you didn't already know, I've been HAVING SEX!" He said it was different back then, when you'd still know what was happening. He could see various ladies expanding and hear them asking other ladies to borrow their larger clothes. "Hona walli hai," his mother would say - 'It's going to happen...." though no one ever said exactly what was going to happen. (Or how it happened, actually.) Nowadays we're usually far away from people living in different cities or countries. We can't see bellies expanding or who's wearing borrowed clothes. We just get baby pictures in emails.

(That's not true of M's close family, though. They've gotten advanced in this area in the past decade. So when his sister was pregnant she called to tell us as soon as she knew, and we told them within a few weeks when we were expecting. We've gotten pregnancy announcements even from cousins, so maybe this is changing throughout his entire socio-economic class back in Pakistan - I don't know. I assume different hierarchical levels in Pakistani society treat these sensitive matters differently, also, so it may be the case that the very rich have been speaking openly about pregnancy for decades or something.)

Bad Luck Bride

I'm not sure when I first learned about this particular tidbit of Pakistani culture - it could have been through my Mian, educating me about where he came from, or it could have been in one of the many fiction and nonfiction books I read about Indian and Pakistani culture. In any event, at some point I heard that when someone gets married - let's say a guy - and if, after the marriage and the new bride's arrival into the (presumably multi - generational) family home, bad things start happening in the family, it might be attributed to the new bride. As if SHE is bad luck, and it is her addition to the family that is actually bringing about the tragedy or loss or hardships. She might end up kicked out of the house, divorced, or worse, just because of superstition and poor timing. I had already learned of this before engagement and our wedding.

Then, not two weeks after our wedding, after me, Mian and his parents have moved into a tiny, 700 square foot apartment to live together for several weeks, M got a phone call from Pakistan saying that his Nana, his mother's father, had died. I was suddenly tasked with comforting my mother-in-law while she was terribly upset about the loss of her father while she had - for the first time ever in her life - lwft the country without him. He would be buried wirh a day and she would never get to say goodbye, never get to see him again. Her only closure was that one phone call.

Still though, I didn't think about the bad luckt hing. Not until two weeks later when M got another phone call. This time I wasn't there, I'd returned to college for the beginning of a new semester and wasn't scheduled to return to my new husband for two weeks. The phone call was to inform M and his parents that his uncle Puppa, M's father's brother, had died.

This time I didn't have to console anyone, at least not in person, though I did speak to my FIL on the phone. I was rendered impotent several states away. And this time I had plenty of time to think about the bad luck bride thing.

To my in-laws EXTREME credit, they never not once not ever said anything even hinting at the idea that I might be a bad luck bahu. Not then and never since. And if you think about it, they wouldn't even have had to believe it to have tried to use it as an unscrupulous advantage. Had they viewed their son's marriage with an American as something truly terrible that they needed to prevent by any means, surely after only two weeks the death of the family patriarch would have been used to try and convince their son to back out of it now, before I could cause any more damage. I've heard stories of horrible inlaws - or maybe they're not horrible they're just desperate to keep their family safe from an impending trainwreck of the unknown - who would do just that.

I was reminded of this last night when we were all looking through old pictures from M's first visit back home after coming to the US for graduate school. He went back for three weeks in December 2000 years before I even met him, and Nana and Puppa are in the pictures. I never met them of course, but I've seen so many pictures that I can still point them out, and I pointed them out fot Dulhan who also never met them. She asked when it was that they passed away and the answer for both is "just a few weeks after N and I got married." So I gave her a "Let's move on from this topic" pleading look because even if my inlaws are lovely and its been eight years since then, I still would rather superstitiously prefer not to highlight the connection.

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Date Night

PG-13 my behind! Netflix delivered the movie Date Night to our house the other night and I thought, Hey! It's PG-13, no need to check my beloved Kids In Mind Dot Com! Even little thirteen year olds could see this movie, surely I can watch it with my in-laws without discomfort, right? Right?

NO! It was so uncomfortable within 30 minutes I'd buried myself in my cell phone playing Angry Birds. Then my Mian and I decided to throw in the towel and give up, coming upstairs instead of finishing the movie. Lesson learned. Always ALWAYS check movie reviews if you can't stand the discomfort of sexual ineuendo around your inlaws!