An Azeri Culinary Lesson

This week was really busy because of our final language test on Friday. We had 2-3 hour long tutoring sessions every night, in addition to our normal 2-4 hour language classes during the day. But, thankfully, after this week, I do actually feel very comfortable speaking Azeri. I just can't understand when other people speak it back to me...but that's only half the conversation right??

One night when coming home from a tutoring session, I came in through my family's front gate into our yard and smelled the most amazing barbeque. I walked through to my house cursing the family that lives in the smaller house in front of us thinking without a doubt that it had to be there food...and I was super jealous. But then, when I got inside, my sister walked by me and was like "I'm going to go get the food from Dad"...turns out my family has a huge tandir oven (which is a mud oven where they cook special delicious bread and kabobs and lavangi - like the most wonderful fried chicken stuffed with walnuts and other deliciousness) that I had no idea existed!?! That night we had the fantastic chicken kabobs you can see in the picture that I took when my sisters took me out to see the tandir that I knew nothing about, and then last night my father made some pretty great tandir bread. I don't know why he is suddenly cooking out there all the time (especially since it is now winter and so we would be expected to use the tandir less frequently...), but I am certainly not complaining.

In other Azeri food news, I had my first experience helping my mother cook dolma (one of the big Azeri foods, it's ground up meet, spices, butter, salt, pepper, rice, etc all mixed together and then wrapped up in an assortment of things like cabbage, grape leaves, whatever). She had already made the meat mixture, but she let me help her wrap them in the grape leave and let me tell you, I am a pretty fierce grape leave wrapper. My mom was even calling in my sisters from the other room to come see my work. Yes, I have found my calling, I will now leave Peace Corps to be a dolma wrapper.

And my final food note, it was super adorable: after my exam, my family went out to get a surprise, and in my honor we had just cake for dinner.


I must be really hungry or something. This whole post ended up being about food. Haha