The biggest holiday of the year in Tajikistan is the Persian New Year, or Navruz (in Tajik, Наврӯз, meaning 'new day'). The holiday is coming up soon, and that means everyone is making party food! As you walk down the street, you can see that doors to peoples' houses are thrown open, and dozens of family members are cooking delicious food for the week-long celebration. People are baking sambusa (pockets of dough filled with meat, spinach, or pumpkin), grilling shashlik (meat cooked on sticks), and rolling out fresh noodles for laghman (noodle soup). They are also making the food I like the best: osh.
Osh (in Tajik, ош) is a savory-sweet dish made with rice, carrots, chickpeas, spices and meat -- either beef or lamb. It's the national food of both Tajikistan and its neighbor, Uzbekistan, but people eat it all over Central Asia, Russia, Iran and Afghanistan. Everywhere you go in this part of the world, people have come up with their own style of osh, and now, people say that over 200 kinds of osh exist.
