A Good (and Yummy) Time Was Had by All

Last night seven young men, all clad in jeans and black shirts or sweatshirts (is it an obligatory costume?? :)), took over my kitchen to cook a Pakistani meal. This dinner had been several months in the planning (around the return of an old friend from Pakistan, but that has not happened yet) and finally Al. and I decided that this weekend, when other COW students were enjoying Parents' Weekend, would be the best time. It's also Ramadan, when they fast from sunup to sundown, so this meal had to be timed to be ready by sunset but not before. After a trip to Cleveland to get halal meat and other more humdrum Pakistani spices and mixes, four fellows arrived about 5:45. I gave them a tour of my kitchen and its supplies and they began chopping and mixing etc. Three more arrived later (two of whom, probably wisely, stayed out of the kitchen). While large under normal circumstances, the cooks were bumping into each other in it as they turned from counter to stove to sink. I asked them if their mothers had taught them to cook, but no, it seems that necessity is the mother of invention and the internet the facilitator of learning. Am. had learned from the internet and the others had learned from him. The ingredients were not strange for Americans--chicken (butchered by halal butchers), potatoes, rice, tomatoes, oinons, hot peppers, garlic and ginger paste. But the combinations--now that was special. The fellows filled my Thanksgiving turkey roaster with rice and chicken and some spices (and they nearly cleaned it out!!). Some delicious flat bread accompanied another chicken and hot pepper dish. I don't know how they fried the potatoes, but they were fantastic with a South Asian kick to them. My friends J and R, lovers of everything Arabic-related (Urdu counts!! besides one of the fellows is in J's FYS), brought a salad and I had made a berry cobbler and a British custard to pour over it, designed to make the guys remember their British-style boarding school days. At exactly 7:05, yesterday's sunset time, they helped themselves to dates and offered them to us. That was the signal to begin the feast. When they had taken the edge off their hunger, they asked to be excused to pray--we found a big enough space for all of them to pray as a congregation in our basement. (And yes, many of them are well aware of our Christian convictions.) Only after prayers did they return to the tables--which I had set with the best dishes and silver and fall decorations--for seconds and for dessert. My Pakistani FYS TA from last year, whose company we all missed, had written from his new home that I should make the fellows clean up! But that wasn't hard. It was harder to shoo them out because they didn't want to leave a mess so that I could finish up what they couldn't do. They are super young men and I hope they know that they are always welcome for feasting and conversation at the Hampton home.