My Favourite Salad - Granatoviy Braslet

Introduction: Granatoviy Braslet is a salad that is shaped like a thick bracelet, studded with pomegranate kernels (seeds) popular in Nukus and all over the former Soviet Union.

The bracelet “effect” is achieved by placing a glass/cup in the middle of the salad plate and assembling the layers of vegetables, eggs, chicken, and walnuts ect around the outside. The glass is removed once the layers have been assembled and the salad is covered with fresh pomegranate kernels all around.

Recipe for a layered “Pomegranate Bracelet” Salad : Makes 1 large bracelet, enough for 8-10 people.

Using a coarse side of a box grater, grate the carrots, potatoes, beets, and eggs. Place on separate plates.

Put a tall glass in the middle of a large flat serving platter. You will arrange the ingredients in layers on the plate around that glass, and remove the glass once the salad has been assembled.

Begin layering the ingredients evenly on the plate in the following order. Sprinkle the layers with some salt, but take care not to oversalt as mayonnaise is salty already.

Ingedients:

1st Layer - Potatoes (3 medium) boiled in water until tender, and peeled and then Dressing (mayonnaise, or half mayonnaise + half sour cream (about 2 tablespoons, spread evenly)

2nd Layer - Beet (1 medium) boiled in water until tender and peeled (boil separately from carrots and potatoes) and then Dressing about 2 tablespoons, spread evenly.

3rd Layer Carrots (3 medium) boiled in water until tender, and peeled and then Dressing (about 2 tablespoons, spread evenly)and then Walnuts - 1 cup walnuts, coarsely ground.

4th Layer Chicken (1 medium skinless, boneless chicken breast halves) cooked in slightly salted water, drained, and shredded into thin strips and then Dressing (about 2 tablespoons, spread evenly).

5th Layer Eggs (3 hard-boiled eggs, shelled) and then Dressing (about 2 tablespoons, spread evenly).

6th Layer Chicken ( 1 medium skinless, boneless chicken breast halves, cooked in slightly salted water, drained, and shredded into thin strips) and then Dressing(about 2 tablespoons, spread evenly).

7th Layer - Beet (1 medium) boiled in water until tender and peeled (boil separately from carrots and potatoes) again slather some dressing all over the “bracelet”.

Carefully remove the glass from the plate. Generously sprinkle the salad with pomegranate kernels (from 1 large pomegranate) all around. Slightly press to adhere. Chill the salad in the refrigerator for at least 1 hour before serving, to allow the flavours a chance to blend.

Karakalpak (Қарақалпақ тили / Qaraqalpaq tili)

Karakalpak is a Turkic language mainly spoken by Karakalpaks in Karakalpakstan (Uzbekistan) a language that belongs to the Kipchak or north-western category of the Turkic-Altaic family of languages, along with Kazakh, Bashkir, and Nogay.

It is spoken as their first language by about 600,000 people in the Karakalpakstan Autonomous Republic in Uzbekistan, where the language has official status. (Many Aral Uzbeks and Kazakhs in Karakalpakstan also speak the language as well as their own). There are some Karakalpak speakers in Afghanistan, Russia, Kazakhstan and Turkey as well. Ethnic Karakalpaks who live in other parts of Uzbekistan tend to speak local Uzbek dialects.

Karakalpak is a member of the Kypchak Turkic family of languages, which includes Tatar, Kumyk and Kazakh. The Kypchak family is a subgroup of the Turkic languages. Within the Kypchak Turkic family. Karakalpak is most closely related to Kazakh and Nogai, and has absorbed a lot of vocabulary and some grammar from Uzbek as well as some Uzbek and Russian vocabulary (word share). Due to its proximity to the Uzbek language area, much of the vocabulary and grammar has an Uzbek influence. Like Finnish, Hungarian, and Turkish, Karakalpak has vowel harmony, is agglutinative and has no grammatical gender. Word order is usually subject–object–verb.

The Ethnologue identifies two dialects of Karakalpak: Northeastern and Southwestern. Menges mentions a third possible dialect spoken in the Fergana Valley. The Southwestern dialect has č for the Northeastern š.

Karakalpak has 21 native consonant phonemes and regularly uses 4 non-native phonemes in loan words.



Vowel Harmony
Vowel harmony functions in Karakalpak much as it does in other Turkic languages. Words borrowed from Russian or other languages may not observe rules of vowel harmony, but the following rules usually apply:

a may be followed by a, ɯ
æ may be followed by e, i
e may be followed by e, i
i may be followed by e, i
o may be followed by a, o, u, ɯ
œ may be followed by e, i, œ, y
u may be followed by a, o, u
y may be followed by e, œ, y
ɯ may be followed by a, ɯ

Personal Pronouns
men - I
sen - you (singular)
ol - he, she, it, that
biz - we
siz - you (plural)
olar - they

Numbers
bir 1, eki 2, u'sh 3, to'rt 4, bes 5, altı 6, jeti 7, segiz 8, tog'ıs 9, on 10, ju'z 100, mın' 1000

Karakalpak was written in the Arabic and Persian script until 1928, in the Latin script (with additional characters) from 1928 to 1940, after which Cyrillic was introduced. Following Uzbekistan's independence in 1991, the decision was made to drop Cyrillic and revert to the Latin alphabet (1994). Whilst the use of Latin script is now widespread in Tashkent, its introduction into Karakalpakstan remains gradual.

The Latin, Cyrillic and Arabic alphabets are shown below:

Latin

Cyrillic

Arabic

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karakalpak_language

Uzbek Pomegranite and Onion Salad - Anor va Piyoz Salati

Anor va Piyoz Salati - Pomegranate and Onion Salad

Ingredients -
2 onions, peeled and sliced
One large sized pomegranate, pared
Salt to taste
1 tsp of pepper
1 tbsp of vinegar

Place finely chopped onions in a bowl and wash 2–3 times in hot water and drop into a sieve. Take the pared pomegranate and separate half into kernels (arlis) and the other half crush to make sour pomegranate juice. Mix with with the white onion slices and top with an onion rosette, in which a few extra kernels (arlis) are placed and pour on a little sour juice. Edge the dish with onion rings.

If onions are too bitter then put them in cold water for a while, then pour out all the liquid and combine with vinegar and salt. After add in pepper and pomegranate and mix together all ingredients.

Serve and enjoy!

“Anor va piyozli salat” is usually served as a garnish for plov, shashlik and other meat dishes. Very good for digestion.


Editor Note: Pomegranates are one of those special fruits that are stunning to look at, appear in many historical depictions of still lifes going back hundreds of years because of their appearance and color, and by just sprinkling a few pomegranate arils on a dish you make it taste and look a lot better.

Karakalpakstan - New Tourism Website

Karakalpakstan at 165,700 km2 the largest region of Uzbekistan accounting for over a third of its entire land area (447,400 km2)

It has a long and rich history with diverse cultural offerings ranging from, at one extreme, the ruins of Khorezm’s ancient (5th century BC) civilization to, at the other, the Nukus Museum, which houses the Savitsky Collection comprising the world’s second largest collection of 20th century Russian avant garde art as well as the largest folk art collection in Central Asia.

Karakalpakstan’s climate is extreme continental, i.e. very cold in winter and very hot in summer, so the best time to visit is either in the spring or early summer (April through June) or in the fall (September through mid-November), when temperatures range between 15-25C.

Karakalpakstan is not a conventional tourist destination, but as increasing numbers of travelers are experiencing it, Karakalpakstan is one of the most interesting and unique places you will visit on any trip to Central Asia.

See this new tourism website for more information (recommended)
http://karakalpakstan.org/index.html?m=1

A "Plov' is as good as a feast

PLOV, the national dish of Uzbekistan, is relished not only by the citizens of Uzbekistan but by all the peoples living in Central Asia. Fragrant, hot, ready to melt in the mouth, the rice is cooked with carrots, onions, and garlic, and served in white mountains on a huge platter with morsels of mutton or beef. Among the Uzbeks, Kara-Kalpaks, Kazakhs and Tajiks and other peoples of Central Asia, it is the favourite dish for special occasions and holidays.

Rice cultivation is believed to have come into Central Asia originally from the Indus plain. Whilst there is not enough archaeological evidence to give a precise date as to when this development happened, it is believed that the emergence of irrigated rice cultivation coincided with the emergence of technology of how to build large scale and complex irrigation networks, a phenomenon connected with the appearance in the cultivated oases of the first urban trading centres sometime during the 6th millennium B.C.

As with other regions of Antiquity with arid climates the frontiers of the earliest State structures in Central Asia largely corresponded to the limits of irrigated land. By the end of the second and the beginning of the last millennium B.C, these irrigated lands accounted for the territorial outline of many states, including Bactria which developed on the upper course of the Amu Darya and its tributaries, Dagestan on the Terek, Margiana on the Murghab, Parthia in the foothills of the Kopet Dag mountains, Sogdiana in the valley of the Zeravshan, and Khorezm in the ancient delta of the Amu-Darya. The Greek historian Herodotus (c. 484-420 BC) mentions an irrigation installation existing on the river Ak (Akes) which watered the lands on the borders of Khorezm, Hyrcania and Parthia.

Under the Persian Achaeminid dynasty (sixth-fourth centuries BC) which dominated a large part of Central Asia, the development of agriculture was stimulated by the construction of canals, where wheat, barley, millet and many other crops were grown, including both grapes and rice.

When Alexander the Great was treading the path of conquest to India around 327 BC, rice was reportedly already widely grown in Bactria.

In addition various Chinese sources report that rice-growing was widespread in Central Asia by the second century B.C. The traveller and diplomat Zhang Qian tells how in the Ferghana and Parthia that "the way of life is sedentary, agriculture is practiced, rice and wheat are sown; wine is taken from the vine'.

Cooking up Plov (Source: The Australian Newspaper)

Traditionally rice was only grown on land belonging to the wealthy and powerful. This started to change in the second half of the nineteenth century, when most of the region became part of Tsarist Russia and peasants also began to grow rice for the market, on rented land.
Rice and the dishes prepared with it were primarily the food of the richer population up until this time. However at important ceremonial occasions - weddings, funerals, and the new year festival (navruz) dishes prepared from rice have long been a fixture. Today in Uzbekistan Plov is still cooked at the home of the bride and bridgroom to be served at weddings and other important family occasions and is an important ingredient in the ritual food served at funerals.

Plov today is still a popular street food. Prepared in giant saucepans often cooked in the street, it is widely available in cafes, canteens and restaurants.

There are over forty main recipes for plov (ED: hundreds of variants) using meat, carrots, onions and other vegetables, raisins, etc. The art is proudly transmitted from generation to generation. Cooking plov requires plenty of strength and staminal. A saucepan may contain anything from 50 to 300 kilograms of food.

For each kilogram of rice the cook must add an equal quantity of meat, carrots and onions, not forgetting condiments which give plov its distinctive taste. Woe betide the cook who does not know how to boil rice so that the grains don't stick together! .... until the dish is ready for the whole family or at festivals where many hundreds of trenchermen may gather for the feast.

Source: A 'plov' is as good as a feast - national dish of Uzbekistan Boris V. Andrianov UNESCO 1984 and other Plov sites.

Note: A handful of 15,000-year-old burnt rice grains was discovered by archaeologists in 2003.

News Item : Vice Speaker of Uzbek Parliament calls on Kyrgyzstan to abandon project of building Kambarata hydropower stations

Water is the lifeblood of Uzbeekistan and particularly the western areas such as Karakalpakstan. Blocking vital flows for questionable power stations in highly vulnerable areas is as such a critical national issue. I republish a recent commentary by the Vice Speaker of Uzbek Parliament and Chairman of the Executive Committee of the Central Council of the Ecological Movement of Uzbekistan Boriy Alikhanov who has called on Kyrgyzstan to abandon the controversial project of building the Kambarata hydropower stations a long abandoned Soviet scheme. His most pressing concern is that the cascade of Kambarata stations upstream from Uzbekistans populous Ferghana valley is located in a critically dangerous 9-10-point seismic zone.

Key parts of Boriy Alikhanov statement translated into english follows.

"Toktogul water reservoir with capacity of 19.5 billion cubic meters of water is the subject to increased risk, since the breakthrough of a dam can cause flooding and destruction of 50 thousand square kilometers, including the entire eastern and north-eastern part of the Fergana Valley, and the deaths of millions of people. Kambarata hydropower stations are objects that increase the overall risk of catastrophe. The consistent location of these high-pressure facilities significantly increases the risk of disasters, as a breakthrough in the cascade of Kambarata dams is very likely to lead to disaster at the Toktogul hydropower station. It becomes obvious that the construction and operation of water facilities in the seismically dangerous area of Naryn River Valley poses a threat to the appearance of a cascade effect of destruction, when a slight break in one place will cause a chain reaction with the occurrence of uncontrollable flow of water and mud weight. This represents a huge threat to the safety of downstream areas of Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kazakhstan,"

He has also recalled that in accordance with international law, the requirements of the UN Convention "On Protection and Use of Transboundary Watercourses and International Lakes" (1992) and "On the Non-Navigational Uses of International Watercourses" (1997), before implementation of planned measures, which may have significant adverse effects on other countries, a watercourse State must promptly forward a notice to the countries."This notification is accompanied by technical data and information, including environmental impact assessment in order to enable the notified States to evaluate the possible effects of planned measures. The Geneva Convention on the Impact of Hydropower Production to Other States also points out that in case a country wishes to carry out the development of electricity, which can cause serious harm to any Contracting State, the States concerned shall enter into negotiations with a view to concluding an agreement that allows for such development. The position of the Ecological Movement of Uzbekistan in this regard remains unchanged, it proposes to abandon the implementation of projects that threaten life of millions of people in the lower reaches of Transboundary Watercourses and supports options that are not related to risk of negative consequences"

Source: Central Asia News 28 June 2012

Book Review : Ancient Irrigation Systems of the Aral Sea Area: The History, Origin, and Development of Irrigated Agriculture

Ancient Irrigation Systems of the Aral Sea Area: The History, Origin, and Development of Irrigated Agriculture Edited by Simone Mantellini, Oxbow Books, 2012

Ancient Irrigation Systems in the Aral Sea Area is the English translation of Boris Vasilevich Andrianov’s work, Drevnie orositelnye sistemy priaralya, concerning the study of ancient irrigation systems and the settlement pattern in the historical region of Khorezm, south of the Aral Sea (Uzbekistan).

This work holds a special place within the archaeological schools of the C.I.S (former Soviet Union) because of the results obtained through a multidisciplinary approach combining aerial survey, and fieldwork, surveys, and excavations. This translation has been enriched by the addition of introductions written by several eminent scholars from the region regarding the importance of the Khorezm Archaeological-Ethnographic Expedition and the figure of Boris V. Andrianov and his landmark study almost 50 years after the original publication.

Source: https://peabody.harvard.edu/node/536