Tajik Halloween

31/10/10

Well I didn’t think when I got to KT that my involvement in the preparations for the party would involve designing the menu and cooking, as per my instruction, for between one and two hundred people!

I think I have only ever cooked for 20 at a push before!

This realisation dawned on me on the actual day that Paul hadn’t been joking and that if I didn’t do it, I don’t know who would! So on the menu was pumpkin soup, of course, pasta salad, green salad, chicken skewers, corn on the cob, bread sweets and biscuits.

So after a pumpkin carving workshop in the morning, also led by yours truly, so that we had enough flesh for the soup, we went to the market with about 10 helpers to carry all the bags. There were many things on the menu that I was never going to find in a Tajik market; tins of tuna, green beans I thought I might – olives I knew might be difficult. I didn’t know that corn on the cob would be, as you see it boiled everywhere, but apparently people don’t cook it on a bbq.

So, some of the dishes had to be drastically redesigned while running around the massive bazaar – up and down stairs weaving in and out of other shoppers. Tuna pasta salad turned into an aubergine dish with pasta – which ended up being rather good, and went down fast.

Kilos and kilos of onions, tomatoes, cucumbers, apples for apple bobbing which never happened, parsley, dill and cumin, spring onions and radishes, tins of tomatoes, balloons, glittery hairspray and one red lipstick, shrek drink (!) peppers, chicken legs (not perfect for skewering, until Paul took an axe to them) mayonnaise, carrots, potatoes, pasta, oil, aubergine, 200 paper cups and plates, skewers, lettuce, eggs for the pasta which were turned into egg mayonnaise instead and buns for another game  - limbo donut, that sadly also never got played in all the excitement.

For those of you who don’t know it this is best done with jam donuts which are hung on a string, which party people have to limbo under while taking a bite of said donut. ‘Blood’ dripping down the face!

Oh well, the Tajiks will have to wait for another year, before their introduction to such fun!

A couple of guys followed me and Nizora  around, carrying most of the shopping.  Nizora was haggling and I was handing out the money and checking the item off the list while marking down how much we had spent.

When we got back it was straight to the kitchen while Nizora rustled up an army of helpers. I was soon directing operations, setting people to peeling, chopping and mixing. The kitchen had two hobs and a mound of dirty dishes there, the rest didn’t look too clean either, so it was a big clean before we could start…. The lady who normally cooks there, dishing out plates of greasy chips, was not the best help.

But in four hours or so it was done! The girls were great, squatting on the floor chopping the vegetables, there were about ten to fifteen of us at it, setting out sweets and biscuits on trays. The division of work is clear. No way would any of the boys been seen in the kitchen. They were all hanging around the sound system, messing up the levels once Joe had coaxed both the speakers and the PA system to work.

The barbeque area that Paul and Joe had built this week looked fab, with two large grills either side of a massive cauldron, just the size for the pumpkin soup (which turned into vegetable soup, as there was not as much pumpkin as we hoped). Unfortunately for Tajik tastes, I had not tipped half a litre of oil into it, so they were not so keen. They like their grease, do the Tajiks! But the other food was really popular and once the judges had done their business judging the best of the other food which was brought in, then the hoards of zombies, ghosts and ghouls, as well as  a couple of mummies, count Dracula, a witch and a wizard descended like raiders from the mountains on the rest. There was not much left, which all the cooks took as a complement!

Sadly I missed the burning of the alien Guy Fawkes – as this event has now been subsumed into Halloween in KT. Did see someone leaping the fire (not allowed, obviously) to disappear into the crowd. We might have had another Guy!  I also missed, the young hooligans, so-called by Paul, and he’s maybe not wrong, chucking all our pumpkins done by us and the kids into the fountain. Nizora was upset as well but felt slightly better when I said that the same thing might easily have happened at a party with young people in Britain, if there were 150 of them. It was probably the exciting thing happening in the city that night (that year, Paul added to my comment), and although the guards were not meant to let in anyone not connected with the Centre, in the dark, it was hard for them to keep tabs.

The party was hilariously surreal, from the choice of music, ranging from Celine Dion (please) to Meatloaf via Tajik rap and strange dance tracks to seeing young people aged from about 12 to 20 or so dancing together in a range of costumes. The boys had gone to town more than the girls, but that might have been something to do with many of them involved in the cooking until late. Z and M from the family I am staying with were both there. I had the sweetest dance with the little girl, M who was just beaming away hands moving up and down in the air.

Zombies, Skeletor and Count Dracula loomed out of the night, I had just managed to swap my filthy cooking and pumpkin making clothes for a witch costume with poison ivy. Green plastic leaves which I had lovingly painted earlier in black and purple as part of my costume. Worn with dark eyes and the red lipstick from the bazaar.

After all the kids went home, Joe and I decided it was time to break open the bottle of red wine from the kitchen upstairs. We thought we deserved it!

This is the one after dark party that Sword Teppe does each year, for some of the kids it is their first experience of Halloween.  But all of them seemed to get into the spirit rather well!