Iradi Food Home

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.

Our street has half and half, a church family, a mosque family, a church family, and everyone dyes eggs in April :) My neighbour Aunt Maria showed me the old way, no paint from the shop. Onion skins, a lot of them, and the eggs go deep red-brown like a chestnut horse.

Boil the skins of 8-10 onions in 1 litre of water, 20 minutes. Put the eggs into the cold coloured water, boil 10 minutes. For the pattern press a leaf of parsley on the egg, hold it with a piece of old stocking, and tie. The leaf stays white.

On the day the children play jumurtka chokush: two eggs knock together, the one that cracks loses and the winner takes the cracked egg. My nephew has a hard egg and he cheats, I am sure, but I do not know how.

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.

Happy New Year everybody! I write it from the kitchen, there are 40 minutes left and the guests are already at the table, so only the short list of what is on my table tonight:

• Olivier salad (potato, carrot, pickle, peas, egg, sausage, mayonnaise, I will not give the recipe, everybody knows)
• Herring under the fur coat
• Beet suzma
• Plov of my grandmother, in the big pot
• Mandarins, walnuts, raisins
• Jasil for the children, something else for the uncles

I promised in March, and now it is November, but here it is. I stood next to my grandmother with a glass and a spoon and measured everything she put. She laughed at me all evening.

This is Irad paloosu, our plov, not the Uzbek one. It is more like risotto. Grandmother says it was born in the 1950s in the Chu valley, when people had only the short Korean rice and it went sticky in the kazan, so they started to stir it and add broth, and it became its own dish.

Ingredients (for 6):

• 3 glasses short rice (Koryo rice from the Chu bazaar)
• 700g beef or mountain mutton
• 2 onions, 2 carrots
• 2 litres hot broth
• 1 spoon wild cumin (from the Talas Alatau, my uncle brings it)
• a handful of barberries
• butter or suzma at the end, salt

Instructions: Fry meat, onion and carrot in fat until brown (this is the zirvak). Put the dry rice and fry it 2 minutes until it is shiny. Then one ladle of broth, stir, when it drinks it, one more ladle. 25 minutes, all the time stirring. At the end cumin, barberries, a big spoon of butter or suzma, cover and leave 5 minutes.

Serve with beet suzma (recipe here). On Sundays and name days in our house.