Holiday Food Memory--by. Anam Mian

Eyes show how much happiness is worth.

Eid ul Fitr just passed a week ago, it marks the end to Ramadan. My mother wakes up early in the morning and literally drags me out of bed so I can get ready for the Eid prayer. By the time we all come back it is time to get ready for the festivities. Moms normally the cook, I swear if it was up to me to make all those dishes well, I think everyone would go home starving. I honestly don’t know how she can cook for so many people. It is quite difficult to look both at the quality of food along with the quantity.

After everyone is together mom makes a dua which is Arabic for prayer. She prays for the acceptance of our fasts to God, and for peace in families, and people. After everyone is done eating it starts getting to you, see the problem is that when you don’t eat for 30 days during the day time it feels really weird when you finally do. The food was definitely amazing this year, but it truly made us one of the laziest people on the planet for a few hours, which is not a good thing when you have more guests coming over that you have to serve.

This Eid was pretty hectic though my sister and I had hair appointments in the afternoon and we literally had to rush back home because my mom would of given us the biggest lecture of our lives if we didn’t. The lecture would consist of not helping her out in preparing the food like we should. Mom’s great at cooking and my sister is like the last person on earth you’d want to eat from so she can be scratched from the list. That leaves me, and I can make a few things here and there but it’s not that easy to stand in the kitchen with a total professional because what ends up happening is that the pro takes the spatula from your hand and starts mixing the boiled eggs with the paprika and shoves it in your face while saying “This is how you really do it”. And that is when I slowly leave the kitchen and pretend my dad is calling, and mom gets so mesmerized with what she’s doing I doubt she remembers I was even there to begin with.

The funniest thing happened this time though, I made mango ice cream and I have made it once before and it was an absolute success so I was like how about I make it for Eid this year and share it will all the friends and family that are going to come and visit. Well, I finished mixing it all together around 4pm and I placed it in the freezer for it to cool down. Now apparently the whole house new that there was mango ice-cream being made and literally every two seconds later there was a kid coming up to me asking if it’s done and if they can finally eat it. The ice-cream was fully made around 2am in the morning and guess who ate it? Me…