Lily’s Blog, Dragon Absconded!
Baking Until I Drop

It’s a rainy day. It’s a rainy day.

It’s raining outside. And I can’t go out and play

Why do we need the rain, anyway?

Water to wash the dishes. Water to clean the streets.

…

If you remember the menu, you might wonder if we made it all. Were we successful?

This is going to be a very picture heavy post so…

Continue reading ‘Id-ul-Fitr 2007

(Okay, I owe you an ‘Id post…I did take more pictures than just dates).

But, every now and again there are a few trini websites I can’t access. It’s very sad. More than sad, it’s FRUSTRATING!

They are
trinigourmet.com
themanicoureport.com
ttblogs.com/patrickmanning

I think they are all hosted by GoDaddy. That’s the only common factor I can find. Now my domain names are hosted by GoDaddy but not my websites…

Yesterday for a couple hours or so I was able to get them. I was happy.

Now, I don’t know.
Is Greendot (my ISP) blocking them? Are my dns servers not working properly? What’s up? What should I do? Complain to Greendot? ARGH

Also it is raining and I think my roof is leaking because there are water droplets on my screen.

Lilandra and Chennette are tired but we had a good day preparing for ‘Id ul Fitr. Which is today. Happy Eid!! We made things with sugar. And spices. And even a special dinner for the true beginning of any ‘Id day, which starts at sunset.

It is a Sunnah (practise of the Prophet) to break the fast with dates. And as we break fast at sunset, technically, we were breaking fast on ‘Id. So we pumped up the dates! :-D From one of our old faithful Middle Eastern cookbooks, Lilandra whipped together ricotta cheese, lime zest and sugar and Chennette piped them into some delicious dates. We then topped them with cashews. Yum. Tasty treats for anybody who has become bored with plain old dates this past month.

Tasty…and photogenic!

Some of us (i.e. Chennette) couldn’t distinguish who took which pictures on her camera because some of us (i.e. Lilandra) didn’t bring her own camera downstairs. And others (i.e. Chennette) were selfish and didn’t bring down her sister’s camera with her.

We have much more food and photos to blog about as we are successfully following the game plan. But that will be for tomorrow as we are dead on our feet (on Lilandra‘s bed) tonight.

EID MUBARAK!!!

Brought to you by Chennette and Lilandra.

Eid is almost upon is. Eid prayers will most likely be Saturday morning (I say most likely since the muslim calendar is determined by the sighting of the new moon).

Our menu went through many revamps.
Mom kept wanting to make this, I didn’t see why we needed to make that and dad told me to do anything in my power to keep the work to a minimum/the menu not too extravagant because there is a member of the family who tends to overwork …
Did I ever tell you about the time in a staff meeting when I was discussing Eid and Divali preparations with a colleague (she was Hindu thus Divali and they were very close to each other that year) and I happened to mention the progress mom and I made; that we’d already planned the menu. She looked up at me stunned and asked, “it doesn’t have to be curry?”

I don’t know if I laughed at her.

But come on, there are muslims from all over and they don’t all come from a curry background!

Anywayz, to us, curry is ordinary food and though we like it and might sometimes want it for Eid, this is rarely the case. My stomach wants food that won’t make it sick and that I can eat for a long time.

My aunt also called yesterday and asked mom if we were cooking curry.
hahaha.
Her husband came with her one year (last?) and was looking forward to our sweets and snacks. So I took out a serving plate and nicely arrayed it all for him.

But noooo….turns out he was looking for the Indian delicacies.
*sigh*
I packed it up in a box and sat down, dog-tired (that was the year Chennette had typhoid and mom and I were … well not so good) and just took pictures of it…different angles, different lightings…it was relaxing in the backporch. Hmm, you mightn’t believe me as I never uploaded these pictures but…(A few pictures I uploaded).

So, the menu…

Food:

• Oven Barbeque chicken
• Lamb Biryani
• Channa Biryani (small dish for vegetarians)
• Lamb Kibbeh
• Fatoush
• Scalloped Potatoes with mushrooms (we keep changing our minds on this…we want it but don’t want to do too much!)

Savoury snacks:

• Felafel
• Beef and Chicken samosas (we not making this ourselves! we ordered it and we will bake them ourselves!)
• Baigani

Sweets:

• Basboosa or Harissa (MADE ALREADY!!!)
• Baklava
• Poppy seed cookies (I want to make cookies so if I up to it I will make them today or tomorrow) or nankatai
• Sawaine
• Rasgullah

Can you believe, I looked through my ‘Id pictures from last year. I took so many but never uploaded them because I wasn’t flickr pro then…!

Well, ‘Id is a celebration for us. We used to invite tonnes of people once upon a time. And mom used to cook curry in addition to the dishes we wanted. We would complain and ask why…because it was soo much work…too much work for us to enjoy our ‘Id properly and we wouldn’t eat it out. Mom would always respond that people would expect curry…we would counter that people would expect whatever we make. As long as we cater for food restrictions of the invitees we’re all good.

*sigh*

Life is tough sometimes. If you keep cooking the curry then of course people will keep expecting it and of course other people will have this misconception that muslims have to cook curry for ‘Id.

Our masjid hasn’t had many Iftars this Ramadan. Ramadan gatherings are much smaller than I remember growing up.

What is an Iftar? When a muslim fasts during the month of Ramadan, one abstains from food and drink from dawn to sunrise. Just before dawn, we eat a morning meal called Suhur (and Sehri is Urdu for the same I think) and at sunset we break our fast with a meal called Iftar (or Aftari). Traditionally, we break our fast with dates and water and then pray the sunset prayer (maghrib) and then eat dinner.

One of our neighbours sponsored an Iftar at our masjid last night and I decided I could take advantage of this food/picture-taking opportunity. Since I didn’t want to freak people out, I took along my little Canon S400.

You can probably see where this story is going…

Anywayz, around 10 minutes before it was time for people to break their fast, I surreptitiously set the white balance on my camera and took a practise shot or two. Then I started snapping pictures. And of course mother dearest says take pictures of so-and-so. I responded that I’m not taking pictures of people! Just the food.

Eventually, after I get the dates, watermelon (which is such a lovely fruit to take pictures of! it’s so red! and gorgeous but I don’t eat it) and pawpaw, I cave and start shooting all the sisters.

It’s time to break the fast and so I shut down the camera…
YEAH RIGHT!

The lens doesn’t retract all the way.

The dreaded E18 error! I quickly mourned the camera and mourned the pictures I wouldn’t get (DINNER!). I tried turning it on and off to no avail. I switched out batteries and memory cards, still no luck.

It was really hot (which struck a chord in my memory). I figured well, if it’s been 3.5 years and I never got this error I must count myself lucky. When it had the problems before and I finally got it back I knew that its end would come quickly.

So I put it back in my bag to deal with when I came home (copious online searching) and then went to pray maghrib.

Then of course, I was starving so I had dinner.

And seconds! (which I don’t usually have, even in Ramadan).

While other people were still eating or socializing I took out my camera and tried turning it off and on again and tada! the lens retracted! Woohooo! I guessed it cooled down.

Of course, this did have to happen *after* I ate and after everybody had eaten and so no more food for pictures…

Wait, did I say no more food?

Thankfully there was the food in the kitchen (the buffet tables were empty and the fresh salad was DONE!) so I figured oh well, you will get pictures of the basins of food! So I went happily to take pictures. The lady sitting next to me asked if I was doing this to torture Chennette and I said, yes and no…I told the sponsor it is also for Sister the Elder’s niece so that she can see we don’t only get curry for Iftar in Trinidad. Alhamdulillah (All praise is due to Allah or… THANK GOD!).

So here is the Iftar tag.

But thankfully for you, they were boxing up food for someone so I took a shot of the food in the box. It’s not super artistic but you get to see the food (stew chicken, fry rice, macaroni and potato salad; as I said before, the green salad was done…).

So, FOOD:

I got some database errors in the upgrade…
Hmm…I wonder if it’s safe to assume that since all of them look like taxonomy related errors that that’s to be expected as I had no taxonomy before?

I don’t know.
I’ll read about it later.

Right now I’m going to sleep and you can look at the default theme.