- A month-long break from sadik.
- (In connection with the former:) Visits to the many new indoor play centers that have opened recently in our fair city, replete with those pools filled with small plastic balls, jungle gyms, climbing apparatuses, rides, little huts to play peekaboo in, etc.
- Rides in just about the only elevator in town -- and humorously quaint views out the window. (Elevator conveniently located in the same shopping center as one of our favorite play centers.)
- New nightgowns -- we love Hello Kitty.
- Hot sun. And a new bit of shade in our formerly burning hot, shadeless yard (see below -- the white canopy, just a corner of which is visible).
- Pools, small and large. With and without views of the mountains. At home and away.
Watermelons!- Qurutob* (I'm ashamed to admit that this summer I have had only my first taste of this salad, despite its widespread popularity here. I've been very tempted to order it out, but both years we've lived here, by the time I've gotten around to really wanting it, the warm season has already arrived and with it a serious increased danger of getting food poisoning from something like that. This taste was much better: homemade by our housekeeper in a home-based Tajik cooking lesson.)
* Qurutob, a south Tajik bread salad
serves 4
3 medium ripe tomatoes
3 medium cucumbers
4 small onions
5 green onions
2 bunches of cilantro
1/2 liter of plain yogurt
1 loaf of fatir (crispy Central Asian flatbread made with oil -- fairly different from Middle Eastern or Arabian fatir, as far as I can tell)
1/4 - 1/2 cup of vegetable oil or butter
- Seed and finely chop tomatoes and cucumbers, and mix in a bowl. Set aside.
- Cut onions into small, thin moon-shaped slices, or simple half-circle slices. Divide in half. Set aside.
- Chop the green onions and cilantro finely, mix, and set aside.
- Warm the fatir in the oven on low heat, if it isn't already warm from having been homemade. (Yeah, right. Although where exactly are you going to get the fatir in the US if you don't make it at home?) Remove from the oven and rip into bite sized pieces, placing the pieces into a large bowl. (If you have a flat-ish wooden turned bowl made out of walnut from the mountains of Tajikistan, all the better.)
- Pour the yogurt (it works best if it has a moderately liquid consistency; if the yogurt is pretty thick, add some water and stir well) over the fatir pieces and mix so that all the bread gets some yogurt and soaks in a bit of liquid.
- Arrange in layers on top of the fatir-yogurt mixture: first the cucumber-tomato mixture, then the onions, then the greens/green-onion mixture.
- Put about 1/2 cup of butter or vegetable oil in a small skillet, and warm on medium-high heat. Add onions when oil or butter is fully warmed and/or melted, and stir and fry for about 5 minutes, until translucent. (At this point you can add salt and pepper to taste.) Pour the onions and the oil all together over the salad mixture, so that the oil can evenly trickle down throughout as a kind of warm dressing, and so that the fried onion is evenly distributed on top.
- Serve immediately -- especially when made with butter or butter-like ghee, the oil will congeal and make it less appealing if you don't. (If you really want to get Tajik, eat out of the common large bowl in the middle of the table, using your hands to take a little bit from your edge, mixing the layers together, and lifting up carefully to your mouth. Repeat until you're full of qurutob!)
