Iradi Food Home

This winter we eat a lot of what the aid people bring. Big tins of beef, flour in white sacks with letters, beans, tomato paste in a tin. The people from the United Nations are in the city since October, and at the first week everybody laughed about the blue helmets, "kök kaska". Then somebody's aunt made a soup from the aid, and now the soup has the same name.

Ingredients (6 people):

• 1 tin beef (the big one) or 400g any beef
• 2 cups flour for noodles, water, salt
• 1 tin beans
• 2 spoons tomato paste
• 2 onions
• potato if you have
• black pepper, dried tarragon from the cupboard

Instructions: Fry onion, add tomato paste, add the beef from the tin with the jelly. Water. Add potato. Make the noodles with flour, roll thin, cut in squares, throw into the boiling soup. At the end beans. Taste it. It needs more salt and more pepper, always.

It is not good food, but it is warm and everybody's grandmother remembers this winter. My nephew who is 8 asks for kök kaska on his birthday. This is how history becomes a recipe.

Spring is here and in the mountain villages the old women come to the Bazar-i Kalan with big bags of green. Nettles, sorrel, wild garlic. Winter is over, the body wants vitamins. My grandmother calls this soup "the first green".

Boil broth (mutton bones), add a handful of rice, one potato. At the end throw the washed nettles and sorrel for 3 minutes only. A spoon of suzma on top, an egg cut in half. It is sour and green and it tastes like the end of the cold. You can use spinach if you live in Ohio, Jen :)

The summer evening on the porch. Tea for the grown ups, cold soup for the others.

Today is 38 degrees in Talas, the asphalt is soft. Nobody wants hot food. This is the soup my mother makes when we cannot eat anything else.

Ingredients (4 plates):

• 1 litre airan (the sour milk drink, or qatiq with cold water)
• 3 cucumbers, small cubes
• big bunch of dill and green onion
• 2 cloves garlic
• salt, ice cubes

Instructions: Mix all. Put in the refrigerator one hour. Put an ice cube in the plate. Eat with a spoon and with warm non. That's all. It is not cooking, it is surviving.

Nobody asked for this recipe but everybody needs it, after a wedding. My cousin got married last Saturday and Sunday at six in the morning my uncles were at my grandmother door.

Tuyak is the broth of sheep's feet, boiled all night, until the soup is almost jelly. It is also for the night shift men who come home from the oil fields, and for people with cold.

Ingredients:

• 6 sheep's feet, cleaned and singed (the butcher at Bazar-i Kalan does it for you)
• 1 onion, salt, 3 bay leaves, black pepper
• 8 cloves garlic
• kurut dissolved in a bowl of hot water

Instructions: Boil the feet, throw the first water. New water, small fire, 8-9 hours or all night. Take the meat from the bones. Serve in deep bowls with garlic and kurut water on top, and bread. Some uncles take a glass of sygyndy with it. I do not write what for. I say only that it works.