Day Three….
After about 3-1/2 hours of sleep, we headed back to the airport to retrieve the missing luggage (they don’t deliver here – you have to retrieve it yourself). It was a beautiful morning (70-ish) to drive with the windows down and this was our first glimpse of Tashkent during the day. What a beautiful, green and clean City!
Jay’s suitcase was indeed there, and it was actually very easy and quick to pick it up. With said luggage safely in our hands, it was a quick trip back to the hotel where we readied ourselves for the day’s activity.
Jay had found a private master class in cooking Plov (Uzbekistan’s national dish) which she thought we needed to attend. While we thought it was to be a personal instruction/experience at a local restaurant, it was an even more amazing experience in that the master class was held at someone’s home.
Part of the experience was that they picked us up at the hotel and drove us to the class. Our host was a very young and energetic gentleman (who looked like Mike Nolan for any of Tim’s co-workers reading this) which was a little surprising. He was an excellent guide, giving us much history and information on both Uzbekistan and Tashkent both as we drove. It got a little more surprising as we kept driving to what was feeling like out of town. And then it (at least for Tim) morphed from surprising to “maybe a little concerning” as we left the main road and started going down areas even more remote and rural feeling. As we hit the gravel portions of the road with large “better-dodge-that” potholes with less and less of an urban feel, at least one of us began to really worry even more, with thoughts of “did we tell anyone what we were doing today”.
Buuutttt we actually ended up at a very nice family’s home, with a beautiful open garden courtyard in the center of the home, that also had a covered outdoor kitchen next to the garden. Our original host had one other gentleman already on-site, his Shifu (or teacher / the master Plov maker).
The pair of them walked us through the history of making Plov, what kind of fire you needed, etc. giving us great detail and demonstrating on each step, and then handing it over to us to do. We spent time in the outdoor kitchen cutting vegetables, stirring (and stirring and stirring), adding ingredients, stirring (and stirring and stirring), until after nearly two hours our beautiful Plov was ready to eat. Oh yeah….forgot to tell the funny thing about this. Jay enrolled us in the class because she thought it would be a fun couple’s activity. Our guides explained to us that in Uzbekistan, the men make Plov. It’s a rite of passage – you become a man, you learn to cook the Plov. So, Tim ended up cooking 90% of the meal. Jay would step up to stir, but once the spatula was laid down someone would hand it to Tim. (Insert every laughing, snickering emoji here!!)
At the end, we sat down with both of them and had a meal of the Plov we had just made. The meal was very good (onion, carrots, beef, rice, cumin, garlic) and very filling. It was a really cool experience and very nice to be able to say we’ve spent an afternoon hanging out in someone’s backyard in Tashkent, Uzbekistan cooking dinner with them!
They called a car (basically like an Uber) and it was back to the hotel where we met up with our travel group. Only FOURTEEN people are on this trip. (We say that in capital letters because we’re used to being squished on a bus with 40 people.) Hopefully most of the headaches that come with larger group are gone, mainly people who don’t respect time and are always late.