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

As we were leaving Makkah, en route to Madinah, we saw some “houses”. There were quite a lot of them in fact, unfinished, roofless, windowless, doorless, abandoned structures.

One of them, about two to three hours into the drive, had BISWAS written on the side, in capital letters! Unfortunately I have no photographic evidence (we were in a bus)!

If you’re interested, check wikipedia or Amazon.com.

I know, I know, some of you Arabs/Arabic speakers (hmm do any read here?) will come and tell me what the actual significance of the phrase BISWAS is but for now…I prefer to imagine!

Home again. We reached our house around 2 pm yesterday and by 2 pm today had already returned from a trip to the doctor and pharmacy.

Travelling for so long makes it hard to distinguish between the days…the passage of night is hard,

All donations of food especially got and home cooked would be highly appreciated.

P.S. We did have a good hajj (hopefully accepted) and i didn’t overpack medicine.

in madinah. Leaving in about a week’s time. Hajj finished about a week ago. Tired and a bit sick. Thinking about shopping. Want anything? ;-)

There is so much I want to say.
There is so much going through my mind right now.

Five years ago when my elder sister made hajj, I was impressed. I never thought I would be ready.

Four years ago when they talked of us making hajj soon…I mentally scoffed (I didn’t think I was ready, neither did I think I was able).

Three years ago when we were planning to make hajj (when Chennette got ill), I didn’t think it would actually happen.

Two years ago, it still wasn’t concrete in my head and we only cancelled some time in October after Chennette’s convalescence.

One year ago…well we intended to make hajj but…we knew about these babies beforehand. You know, they give you about 8 or 9 months notice so we knew although we planned and my brother’s parents-in-law planned to go that we wouldn’t. That would be fun. We all make hajj while our family in Saudi Arabia come back here to empty houses. And my sister in Guyana.

This year, it was still rather…unbelievable but when I left my job last July, I made sure of one thing, that I had my hajj money set aside…waiting…for whenever it would be…waiting…

Well, Insha Allah we are leaving home in three hours to catch a flight in seven hours. We have three flights. We finally have our passports with visas and hopefully everything will go smoothly for us.

I am very excited.

We have Chennette’s sony camera phone, mom and I have motorolas with funky so-so cameras for “snaps” and … elder sister’s point and shoot camera! with only 1GB of storage…so we shall judiciously take pictures because we have no computer!

Don’t expect to see us online…maybe we’ll be able to say hi but who knows…internet cafes? My brother’s phone line is down so no internet…unless he gets it fixed.

We’ll be gone until the end of December…so a whole month!

I’m going to keep a written journal and try to transcribe it when I come home. Wish me luck.

The only sour note is that half our group left Tuesday morning for Caracas on the same flight plan as us and are still in Caracas. The visas were only issued Friday for all of us. And they’re hopefully flying out of Caracas on the same flight as us (hopefully I say because there seems to be penalties for flight changes and I am praying hard we all make it)! We will share our food/snacks/money with them and Insha Allah both halves will make it to Jeddah Hajj terminal on time and able to complete the rites of Hajj this year!

I wish us all who are making Hajj a Hajj Mabrur (I hope I got that right…it means simplistically an accepted Hajj).

I’ll miss you and if your comments go into moderation, I’ll check them when I come back. If you’re not spambots and it goes into the black hole I apologise.

Also published here, Chennette and my hajj blog!

See Chennette’s post on her blog!

Yup
Lots of stuff
And it’s not that this is a food blog so I don’t want to comment
It’s not that I don’t have an opinion
It’s not even that I’m not reading the news

I even have lots of food-related posts in my head that haven’t materialized (the fact that pictures have made it to flickr amazes me).

It’s just I’m swamped, busy, tired, stressed and getting ready for Hajj. we leave in less than a week. And lots of trinis are saying it better. Maybe I should link but am tired…so I’ll just link to the Global Voices Online Trinidad and Tobago category and you can read it or not if you want.

Let’s see, flood, media and the PM, economy.

Oh and Trinidad Express still hasn’t properly responded to me. About what you say? Copyright Theft!

I’ll try to post goodbye before I leave for hajj/pilgrimage!

Maahay Ramzaan, originally uploaded by Lilandra.

I promised ages ago to post a last post on Eid.
And of course I didn’t.
For almost a whole month I stood silent.

Well, a couple weeks ago I went to a Ladies Eid dinner (small group) where they also invited mom and her family to wish us a good hajj. They sang a couple qaseedas and I took the opportunity to leaf through the qaseeda book to find…tada! the song I tried to share with you earlier.

This is the song my grandfather used to sing every eid at every house.
It’s in urdu and if you want the translation, it’s here.

The food from this event can be found here and here.

Now maybe some of you are wondering if we did all the things we planned.
Well mostly.
I got to make my roasted red pepper couscous salad. You can read all about it at Chennette’s blog.

She took most of the pictures.

You can also see the lovely pictures of baklava she took that we timed with the arrival of our cousin and her new groom from the airport, thus delaying their sleep even longer.

It must be stated, our new cousin-in-law seems quite nice and Insha Allah they will be very happy.

And did we make the barfi for them? Yes!
We ordered chinese food for them when they were due back from Tobago and it was waiting and they enjoyed it immensely. It’s great to be back in Trinidad and find halaal food to eat…not just vegetarian and not just run by muslims but completely halaal chinese food.

And then later, we made barfi for my cousin so she could get it nice and warm. It was delicious. She stuffed some in her husband as he lay half-asleep.

Homemade Barfi, for Eid and the Cousin’s Wedding Visit,
originally uploaded by Lilandra.

I took pictures of the complete process and it’s deserving of its own post eventually but you can see the set here.

And I finally uploaded the pictures of my making the Cordon Rose Cream cheese cake.

Most Eid mornings, mom wakes up very early and starts the sawaine, frying stuff and maybe even cooking.

When I say early I mean the un-Godly hour of say 4am or before.
During Ramadan, when we’re fasting, 4am is *very* Godly however…not fasting…take a break please.

Thankfully, we didn’t wake up until Fajr time! (5:15am)

So, she didn’t wake up looooooooooong before me and I was able to come downstairs and help or be sous-chef.

Here follows the extremely dry, minute-by-minute account of my day. Enjoy :-p

Mom instead made accra with 1lb of flour (as opposed to the planned 2lbs). A proper recipe will follow later.

Continue reading ‘Id-ul-Fitr: The Day