Happy 35th Anniversary Mom and Dad!

Mirza Clan 2013, 2 parents 5 daughters 4 son in laws and 10 grand kids. Mash' Allah

My sisters and I threw our parents a surprise 35^th anniversary party earlier this month. The thing with surprises in our family is that all five of us sisters majorly suck at them! We are very close to our mom and speak with her almost daily, which made hiding the whole planning/prep of this party a huge task. We also rely on her immensely to advise us whenever we’re doing a big event, so the lack of her guidance was definitely felt. “How many paper cups do we need? Are two trays of biryani plenty? Should we buy back up naan in case the caterers don’t provide enough? Where is soda on sale?” These are all questions Mama Mirza would have a simple answer to. So, we struggled without her a bit, but in the end we pulled it off and they were both surprised and very proud. Goal Accomplished.

Planning an anniversary party for your parents:

Set a budget and begin brainstorming early

It makes it easy to know what you can and cannot do if you know how much you plan to spend. We had a decent size budget since all 5 of us were pitching in, but still we began planning for the party about 6 months beforehand, simply because four of us are working moms and living in different states so it was a lot of late night group IChat’s where we’d hash out details. Once we were all on the same page about how much each person can contribute we were able to figure out quickly how the costs would be divided up.

 

Book the hall

The most important task to get out of the way for a big event is to set a date and book the hall. We shopped around in our area for nice places. We spoke with fancy banquet halls and also local VFW halls. In the end we decided it was best for our budget to stick with a local VFW hall where we could spend more on décor, cake, food, and entertainment. Make sure to start calling places at least a month in advance, especially if your event is around a holiday because most halls, especially nice ones, are booked up quickly.

Book the Caterer

Again this was tough without mom since she’s always the one to know which caterer makes the best nihari and which now charges too high a rate. It took a few phone calls, but we got a good deal at Nawab Grill and ended up having a great amount of food that our guests really loved too.

Our menu was: Chicken Biryani, beef Nihari, Baghare Bangan, Chicken 65, Naan, Salad, Raita, Ras Malai all for $750 which was more than plenty to feed 100 guests. 

Invite your guests

I’ve used Paperless Post in the past for my son’s birthday party. Read here how I feel about the website. I really love their designs and again, we found one that was elegant yet simple and it went nicely with our theme! 

There was supposed to be another tier of pom poms at the top, I got lazy.

Party Décor 

This is where your budget can go out of hand since it’s all about how extravagant or simplistic you want to be. Nothing a few trips to the dollar store, amazing savings and Costco along with a creative mind can’t solve though. My little sister was in charge of this area for our party and she did a wonderful job. We had an elegant theme of Grey & Coral Pink for the party. We made the centerpieces at home along with the banner found via free download here.  Mariam created these great programs to place at each table with a love quote on the cover. I loved the Mr. & Mrs. sign for their chairs but we just didn't have time to put together the ribbon, so we stuck it on the door where they entered from and it ended up being a cute addition!

 Order the Cake

This was my first time working with Piece of Cake by Saba Mendha. She did a great job bringing my ideas to life. I wanted a simple white cake with a thin grey ribbon on each tier and a big coral colored flower on top with some stylish yet simple piping work one each tier. She did just that. We had one layer vanilla with fresh strawberries and another with chocolate cake with chocolate ganache. Both cakes tasted great! My only critique would be that I imagined the flower being larger than it turned out, since it was the only ‘pop’ part of the cake I wish it was a bit bigger. Also, the piping work wasn’t totally clean, but I understand that she’s still a new cake artist and it wasn’t a big deal to me. Taste and look overall were great. She was on time with delivery and very open to my ideas for the cake design. I loved her professionalism and great taste of the cake! 

Write a Speech

This was tough because I’m a sap. Also, I never have a spare moment to collect my thoughts. I would start thinking of things on my drives to work but usually I’d be a mess of tears by the time I got to my desk. So it took some time, and some Googling of wedding speeches, which I found were all quite useless. So here, use mine and put your own creative liberties on it, I’m glad to help since Google, for once, was inept:

Sab se pehle mein kehna chahoungi ke aap saab humare ammi aur abu ke aziz dost aur rishtedaron mein se hain, aur humme bahaut khushi hai ke aap unki zindagi ke iss ehem din ko celebrate karne mein humare saath shamil hosake. Humari dua hai ke Allah tala ammi abu ko 35 aur khushiyon bhaare saal ata farmein. 

 “Firstly, I would like to say thank you to all our guests. You all are mom and dad’s most dear friends and relatives and we are very happy that you are able to join us in celebrating this special day in their lives where we honor their marriage. We wish that God grants our mom and dad with 35 more years filled with happiness.” 

Abu and Ammi, your marriage has always been an excellent example for us five, in every aspect of life. Every child thinks their parents are the best, but the real truth, sorry to tell the rest of you, is that my parents truly are the best. You two have taught us many lessons through our lives. But the most important one you taught us is that it is your ikhlaq, manner, generosity, your ability to be a good friend and a helpful neighbor that makes one a better person. And you both have shown us that a big part of being a better person means to be an ideal spouse. A spouse who shows respect in public and in private, who cares for not just one another but for each other’s families. Seeing the amount of patience you both have had in the past 35 years with all the situations that life put you through is what inspires me when I know I’m losing my patience! 

Mom, to us you are the ideal woman. We call you a Spartan because you are a warrior. You are the ideal standard by which we measure all our life goals. I cannot imagine the difficulties you went through coming into this new country without your family and very few familiar faces. But you did a great job at everything that came your way. you raised 5 children, worked full time, had numerous house guests and random visitors popping over all the time and never once did I see you struggle. I only saw you open your doors and your heart to others, you always told us that Allah puts barqat (blessing) in a home that has its door open for loved ones and that no situation is difficult if you keep in mind the blessing that come with it.  

Dad, you are our hero. It’s true that every girl’s first love is their father and I can speak for all five of us when I say you are definitely ours. You have an unending amount of patience and love to offer us. You have taught us what it means to be an excellent son, father and husband.  

I have learned from seeing you both that no human and no marriage is perfect, only Allah is perfect. But Allah (SWT) gives us a spouse to complete us so that their strengths make up for our shortcomings, and together we are whole. We pray to always see you two being whole together with a long and healthy life iA. 

we gift wrapped as shoebox and had paper/pens for guests to write down memories for our parents to read later on as a keepsake from the party.

Prepare a Slideshow

Everyone loves looking at old pictures of themselves in the '70s with crazy hairdos and stylish bell bottoms. Just don't go crazy, remember that people can just browse at a lot of these pics on a Facebook album too so keep it short sweet and add some sappy songs to pile on the nostalgia.

My happy child in front of the Slideshow area

Cake cutting

Global 25th-Anniversary Utility Knife, 4 1/2" (Google Affiliate Ad)

Meal Planning - Eating Healthy

At the beginning March I started an initiative to cook more fresh meals at home. With both of us working full time and sometimes working late hours we had gotten in to a rut of having home cooked meals maybe 1-2x a week with dinner for most weeknights being a bowl of cereal, ramen noodles, or chocolate covered pretzels. Further, we never have an organized grocery list, often that meant coming back with things found on sale, like 10 boxes of pasta and sauce. This generally ended in lots of ‘spinach alfredo pastas’ or ‘grilled cheese and tomato’ sandwiches. While there isn’t anything wrong with those meals, I wanted to try something different and less carb loaded. Also, we are still figuring out where we fall on the whole organic vs GMOs debate. We go the organic route on major items like milk, bread, and eggs but will skip on other items. We just knew that eating fresh vegetables and meats with less preservatives where we can control the amount of salt and oil we put into our food was the best route to take.

With a full time job, cooking up daily meals and especially planning them out was not an easy task at 6 pm when the toddler is cranky/clingy and all you want to do is warm up something quick! So I decided to give this whole Meal Planning business seen all over Pinterest a shot. This way we could finally incorporate more vegetables into our diet, lessen the reliance on rice and pasta dishes while also creating a more structured grocery list for specific items only. This month my main focus was soups. Being in last stretch of winter (hoping it’s the last!), making a warm bowl of soup is the perfect way to heat up on a cold night and it’s the best way to incorporate loads of healthy ingredients too. I planned it out so that we would only have chicken (no beef!) with rice once a week, Daal with chapati bread once a week and some form of vegetable soup weekly (the remaining days being for leftovers! Working Mama only cooks hot meals 3 days a week shooooot!). It worked out well because we had enough soup left over most nights for lunch the next day and that meant less money spent eating out at work or less snacking on junk in attempts to skip lunch. Win, Win. 

Halfway through March we have fared well in sticking to the meal plan, here are a few pictures:

 Tomato Basil Cheddar soup 

(using Greek yogurt instead of cream)

 Minestrone soup 

my own spin on it: onions, fava beans, potatoes, cilantro, spinach, carrots, pasta, tomato sauce, chicken broth, topped with parmesan cheese and chopped basil.

I ended up using canned tomatoes in both these recipes even though we had fresh ones at home because 1) we have a million cans of this stuff taking up space in my pantry! 2) I checked if using canned tomatoes was really all that harmful and for these two weeks I decided we’ll take our chances with BPA. 

 In two weeks the only time I’ve veered off the chart was on ‘Leftover night’ when I made a beef burger (ate it so fast no time for a picture!). I tried to keep it somewhat healthy; seasoning the beef with finely chopped green onions/cilantro, salt, pepper, and fresh minced garlic and only using half a teaspoon of olive oil to pan fry it. I topped the burger with fresh avocado slices and had it on an asiago cheese demi roll from Panera. Can I just say this burger was AMAZING. It was SO juicy and just the right amount of flavor to go with a bread that has a bold taste. This was one cheat day I’m glad I took!

Courtesy of Google Images. But it looks pretty similar to mine!

I have to say, this meal plan wasn’t entirely intended to help us lose weight as much as it was to keep us away from snacking on Nutella covered everything and in that respect it was pretty successful. I have felt more full and less tempted to eat sugary, fatty snacks filled with suspicious ingredients. Girl scout cookies arrived in the house FOUR days ago and not a box has been opened, that is MAJOR. It’s a nice change to have a fridge stocked with vegetables, and being a meat lover it was a different experience having beef only once in two weeks! Being a Desi girl I love me some rice so lessening that was a tough choice, and while I could opt for brown rice instead of white, again, I’m a Desi girl and I don’t mess with that. Rice on my plate is white or not at all! But overall, I can feel the difference from the changes already. My stomach is not nearly as bloated by the end of week two as it has been in a while.

This meal plan was only for our 5 day workweek, but we plan to incorporate weekends next month. This was just a test run to see how we do. We slowly wanted to incorporate healthy eating, fresh vegetables and maybe just save chocolate indulgences for the weekend! ;)

Türkiye

So it’s been awhile! After my last post, we went on a absolutely spontaneous week long dream vacation! The afternoon of Valentine’s day I got a Gchat message from the husband asking if I was up for visiting Turkey? My reaction was something like “What the?! You better not be joking with me!!!” Before I knew it I was off getting my passport renewed and 3 days later sitting in Istanbul!!!

 

View of Blue Mosque from the inside courtyard

We visited Istanbul, Antalya and Pamukkale (Hieropolis). Along the way we also drove through parts of Taksim and Denizli. I have nothing but wonderful things to say about my trip. The people I encountered were some of the kindest I have ever met. The food was lovely, we had 7 days of eating kebabs, with only 1 experience that did not taste amazing. As far as travel around the country goes, I quite enjoyed the ease of the metro which traveled around most of Istanbul and allowed us as tourist to easily move through the city without much knowledge of the language/area. We took a bus to the airport for our flight to Antalya, we mistakenly booked the flight out of Sabiha Gökçen airport which is in a far part of Istanbul so our ride on the Havatas bus to the airport was longer than our flight itself!

Suggestion: Get a week long or full day pass for the metro so you can easily hop on or off while sightseeing in Istanbul. And when booking local flights to other regions within the country, make sure to book to/from Ataturk airport because the amount you pay in taxis/bus fare to get to the farther airport will end up costing the same.

Roman Columns in Hieropolis

We flew into Antalya on a 1 hour flight and rented a car to drive 3 hours to Pamukkale. Renting a car was a great decision in Antalya since it is not as walkable as Istanbul. The only advice about renting a car I have is: Get a GPS! We used a map thinking we could figure it out relatively easily. But with no knowledge of the Turkish language and the fact that Turkey doesn’t seem to be big on the use of street signs  as commonly as in the US, we wish we hadn’t chose to be explorers!  It was a fun exploration nonetheless.




Reasons why Turkey is an Ideal vacation spot:

It’s SO romantic! Maybe it’s all the historical architecture around you in Istanbul, or the adorable cobblestone roads and buildings reminiscent of Italy/Greece in Antalya, but everywhere we went we saw people of all ages cuddling up in corners or walking hand in hand with infectious smiles and a twinkle in their eye. Honestly, just the sight of the sun glistening down on the deep cyan Mediterranean sea was enough to set the mood! It’s the perfect place for honeymooning!

In Istanbul, you have thousands of years of history all in a 5 minute radius of each other. We saw the Blue Mosque, Hippodrome, Hagia Sophia, Topkapi Palace and Bascilia Cistern all in 1 day, and we still had time leftover to make a quick trip on the metro down to the Grand Bazaar!

Fresco of Jesus inside Hagia Sophia from the Roman/Byzantine Era

If finding amazing knock offs is your thing, then you have to hit the Grand Bazaar! It’s like going to China Town but no shady back doors or rooms, it’s all right in front of you! Tory Burch, Hermes, Chanel, Celine, LV. Basically, you name it and they had it. And best part was the quality. Everything was all 100% genuine leather, some of the best imitation boot and bags I’ve ever seen. But apart from replicas there is SO much more. Ornate lamps, luxurious hand-woven rugs and tons of small trinket, it’s like candy for the eyes! Expect to spend an entire day shopping and exploring the markets (both Spice and Grand Markets can be done in 1 day) because they are enormous and you can easily get lost in the maze of streets and pathways. Suggestion: Brush up on your bargaining skills and pack an empty duffle bag to bring back tons of goodies!

Assortment of Herbal Teas inside the Spice Bazaar

It’s relatively cheap. We went during off season, towards the end of February. Round trip tickets for 2 adults 1 child came to US$1,200, that’s cheaper than a trip we made out to California! Both of us being nerdy accountants meant we kept a tab on costs. Due to the currency conversion rate hotel stay is cheaper too. You can stay in affordable hostel type hotels for as low as $30/night in Istanbul, we paid $70 at a classy place in Antalya but found the cheaper one just as clean/safe/friendly. Since you’re eating out a lot, food cost does add up. The main thing we noticed was if we ate at Burger King/McDonald’s the prices were about the same, but local food vendors or even nice restaurants were still cheaper than dining out in the US. Adding up museum admissions, meals, lodging, metro fees (we used it more as we had a toddler, young singles can easily walk and save on that expense), shopping (depending on how much/little you buy in souvenirs) a 7 day trip for two + child is easily doable within US$2-3K. That is a steal for a honeymoon trip or a trip to any European country where you get to do sightseeing, relaxing, tons of eating and a good amount of shopping.

Lastly, If you’re Muslim and keep to eating only zabihah halal meats, then obviously dining out in Turkey is a nice change with not having to worry about limiting your choices to seafood only! And if you have not been properly introduced to an Iskender kabab, there is no better place :)

Natural hot springs in Pamukkale, used by ancient roman societies as luxurious baths

Amphitheater in Hieropolis

In deciding how to spend your time in Turkey, I would say 3 days are sufficient for enjoying Istanbul and leaving you with ample time to check out other cities which are definitely worth seeing. Places like Bursa, Cappadocia, Pamukkale and Antalya to name a few, are all full of beautiful landscapes and most of them are ancient Roman or Ottoman historical locations. Local flights aren’t very expensive or even a short ferry trip to do a one day excursion in Bursa is a great idea.
I now believe Italy and Greece, while still beautiful, are totally over hyped. Turkey really is the ideal tourist spot due to: the close proximity of all the historic sites in Istanbul, ancient cities like Pamukkale give view to amphitheaters, columns, hot springs, and ancient Roman lifestyle and you can soak in Mediterranean sunshine in Antalya. Also, since it’s not on the Euro currency it’s relatively cheaper than most other countries in Europe.

The main impression I took away from my trip was that Turkey contained the essential theme I wish to see in other countries (especially Muslim countries) of modesty while remaining moderate yet modern. My husband jokingly remarked that perhaps it’s the ‘Sufi vibes’ of this region that allows everyone to be so tolerate. I think he was on to something. We saw all types of people; Muslims/Non-Muslims who smoke, who drank, who dressed immodestly and they were living peacefully right alongside Muslims who donned hijabs and those who prayed in the mosques. We even saw a hijab clad female smoking a cigarette with no ‘haram police’ on her tail! Now that was a surprise!


Also, you hear of Europe being unsafe or of American tourist being treated poorly in some parts of the world, yet we were treated with so much warmth and kindness! Literally throughout the hustle and bustle of the Grand bazaar I found not a single crabby shopkeeper in a bad mood, they all greeted us with bright smiles. Even when my 2 year old would drop items off their shelves they did not show irritation. A few gave him toys, even when we were not buying anything from their shop. In fact, I was convinced that either my child was the cutest creature on the planet or Turkish people were severely deprived of toddlers, because we had SO many people like physically stop the stroller to reach down and kiss or play with him. Even the residents were so patient and helpful towards tourists, it was a rare sight to see after being used to the behavior found in the New York metropolitan area. Despite all the different types of people around, everyone was respectful of the religious sites, and you can sense a strong value of culture among the people. Turkey had the fashion sense and stunning sights of Europe with taste of Asian flavors and hospitality.

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