Delightfully tasty Eid dishes

Owais Mughal
 

The festival of Eid is here. Eid celebrations are not complete without some sweet dishes around . There is a very famous sher about sewayiaN (sweet vermacelli) which I want to share. arz kia hai (here I go):

jaatay hi bazm meiN jo us ne uThaai sewayiaN
jab tak bethay rahay hum na jhukaai sewayiaN

Today we’ve brought recipe’s of 4 sweet dishes from Begum Hafeez Inayatullah‘s book ‘Khana pakaana’. Her language and recipe’s directly seem to come out of Deputy Nazeer Ahmed‘s drama ‘Akbari and Asghari’.

(1) Sheer Khurma:

Sheer Khurma (photo at top left) which some people wrongly pronounce as ‘sheer qorma’ also, means a sweet milky and dried date dish.

When I first read the following recipe’ I mistakenly read it as ‘sher’ khurma, which means a Lion dish and it may still be true because if cooked properly ‘sheer khurma’ is indeed a ‘sher’ (lion) dish. Let us see what Begum Hafeez Inayatullah has to say:

(2) SewayiaN

No Eid is complete without a course of sweet vermacelli dish called ‘sewayiaN’. Do you agree? Well, whether you agree or not, SewayiaN in all forms is so delicious that I am forced to write:

na “IF” kijiyay, na “BUT” kijiyay
jo mil jaaye bus us ko chat kijiyay

Before I go to next recipe, I remember another ‘sher’ related to ‘sewayiaN’ from our Bazm-e-Eid Post of last year:

ye eid ke pakwan kaa kuch aisa asar hai
mahboob ki zulfeN bhi lagti hain sewayiaN

(3) Kheer

Kheer is a sweet mixture of rice and milk. Ofcourse not as simple as mixing these two together. One has to go through the ‘arq rez’ (juice extracting) hardwork of the recipe’ written below otherwise your kheer may turn out to be a teRhi kheer (An Urdu idiom which means a hard to get fruit). I like this recipe’ because it talks about serving kheer in earthen plates (photo:right) and covered with edible ‘silver’ decorations called ‘chandi ka waraq’. Serving kheer in such a way is something that has gone out of fashion decades ago. The last time I had kheer in an earthen plate was in my childhood. In traditional cooking lingo the process of putting ‘kheer’ in earthen plates is called ‘kheer lagaana’ and that reminds me of this famous sher:

ye kheer lag lag ke meri jaan kidhar jaati hai
ye meray qatal ka saamaan kidhar jaati hai

(4) Gajrela
In simplest of terms, the Gajrela recipe’ is same as the kheer recipe’ plus some carrots. Therefore Gajrela is also called gaajar kheer. But please! don’t be so naive as to simply add ‘carrots’ to the above recipe’. No. you won’t get the desired result. You must go through the pleasure of reading following recipe’ to get the desired taste. I also want to point out the unique word ‘gaajar ki guThli’ (seed of a carrot) used by Begum Sahiba below. No where else in Urdu literature can you find this word; ‘gaajar ki guThli’ :) And before I paste this unique recipe’ of gajrela below, a sher comes to mind which also sums up this whole post. ‘arz kia hai’:

sheer-khurma bhi pak raha hai, gajrela bhi pak raha hai
yehaN yooN bhi wah-wa hai, aur wooN bhi wah-wa hai

Dear readers, before we all end up eating too much sweets over the Eid holidays, I want to caution ourselves against an unwanted weight gain by quoting a Zameer Jafri sher:

ye buRhaapa to hai mujh ko khuda ne diya
magar ye moTaapa hai mera khud-saakhta