it's minutes past midnight, barely into the new year, and my two babies are sleeping. after tucking my slumbering husband in on the sofa, I silently step to the side of the crib where my almost 5 month old is peacefully (for now) sleeping. as I take in his angelic face, I find myself smiling & falling in love all over again with my precious baby, who is no longer the newborn who came home with me from the hospital. he laughs & smiles & makes sounds & sticks out his bottom lip in defiance or before he scrunches up his face & cries. he has chubby cheeks & arms & legs & hands & little fingers that grasp & pinch. he is like a miracle, this little soul, who is the center of my universe & makes me smile with joy every day since his arrival into my life.
and as I sit and contemplate how insanely lucky I am at this moment, I realize that 2010 will be sure to bring even more joy as we learn & grow together.
Thursday, December 31, 2009
Saturday, October 10, 2009
sleep grins
i had wanted to post a photo for this but i haven't been able to catch this fleeting moment with my camera yet-
so far motherhood has been an amazingly rewarding & magical experience. as everyone tells you, nothing can truly prepare you for it, and this is true not only because each child is unique and that you need to learn a lot of things by actually doing them, but also because some things are indescribably beautiful to experience. and even reading about them in a book before hand didn't prepare me for when these magical moments catch me off-guard, making the sheer exhaustion & endless sleepless nights well worth it.
so far, one of my favorite newborn things are 'sleep grins'. it makes me smile ear-to-ear every time i see it & i don't get to see it nearly as much as i wish i could. my son will be nursing & drifting off to sleep, and the corners of his little mouth will turn up in a smile that melts my heart. and like the quivering of his tiny chin when he cries or when his tight little fist unfurls & grasps my finger, i know that i need to relish these moments for as long as they last, because they won't last forever. but they will be replaced by new ones, and i will collect them as they come like little gifts from my son, who is the greatest gift i have ever received.
so far motherhood has been an amazingly rewarding & magical experience. as everyone tells you, nothing can truly prepare you for it, and this is true not only because each child is unique and that you need to learn a lot of things by actually doing them, but also because some things are indescribably beautiful to experience. and even reading about them in a book before hand didn't prepare me for when these magical moments catch me off-guard, making the sheer exhaustion & endless sleepless nights well worth it.
so far, one of my favorite newborn things are 'sleep grins'. it makes me smile ear-to-ear every time i see it & i don't get to see it nearly as much as i wish i could. my son will be nursing & drifting off to sleep, and the corners of his little mouth will turn up in a smile that melts my heart. and like the quivering of his tiny chin when he cries or when his tight little fist unfurls & grasps my finger, i know that i need to relish these moments for as long as they last, because they won't last forever. but they will be replaced by new ones, and i will collect them as they come like little gifts from my son, who is the greatest gift i have ever received.
Wednesday, August 19, 2009
my zen baby
There is nothing like a newborn to bring you right into the moment. my first days with Deniz James have been a natural adjustment after a quick, but intense labor, and the resulting exhaustion and recovery. my days & nights are filled with caring for him, from feeding and changing and just staring at him with wonder, watching his face change from a deep blissful slumber to a red faced angry grimace and all the subtleties in between. everything is new, so i address his needs as they arise - hunger or comfort in its many forms. i lose track of time and place and exist only in a heightened state of sleep deprived bliss, at one with my little baby, still in disbelief that i had created & carried & nurtured this little soul, and now he is in my arms, on the other side.Day gives way to night as i sit in the stillness of twilight nursing him while the world sleeps, filled with a complete sense of peace & purpose and overcome with awe at the precious life i have created and am now responsible for. the days string together like pearls on a necklace, as i learn through repetition to master the skills to care for my little zen baby. like my zen master, he teaches me the joy of motherhood, not through words, but by being, as i move through my living meditation with him, feeling that much closer to nirvana as i gaze into his eyes. eyes that are filled with an eternal & indescribable wisdom, that slowly gives way to consciousness with each passing day.
Sunday, July 19, 2009
in the homestretch
so, i am 35 weeks pregnant now, and in the home stretch. i've decided to write a little about my pregnancy today because as i was sitting at my computer, i had my feet up because i noticed when i had gotten home from grocery shopping, that they were covered with a scary network of bulging veins that i had never seen before. my feet and legs get tired when i walk too much, but it never bothered me enough to warrant a closer inspection, and i can't really see my feet when i am standing anyway. so with my feet up, i noticed a pulsing vein (or artery) in my foot!
now i can't really complain, because my pregnancy has up until this point been pretty normal with no complications. i had morning sickness and my sense of smell was more sensitive in the first trimester, but then i felt great & had my energy back all the way until my mid third trimester. it wasn't until the past couple of weeks that i have been feeling a bit nauseous after i eat, especially if i eat too much, which isn't much these days since the baby has taken over and pushed all my organs up. i have to eat small frequent meals, which was not really a problem, but now i get tired after i eat and have to take a nap! which makes me feel incredibly lazy and i wonder how all those women i know have worked until their water breaks. aside from a little backache now & then, i don't have much else to complain about.
i actually feel incredibly lucky to be able to rest & take it relatively easy throughout my pregnancy. although it is pretty normal for women not to work here, even if they are not pregnant.
but back to my veins. so i have noticed for the past few weeks that the veins in my hands have gotten enlarged and are popping out, which is really distressing. i guess due to my age and the increased blood volume, it makes sense, but it is totally unsightly and i am really worried that they will not go back to normal after the baby is born. most things don't stretch out & shrink back later (except your uterus i guess). i'm not an overly vain person (ha!) but i now have the hands and feet of a 70 yr old. since i can't spend 24 hours with my hands and feet elevated, i worry that it will get worse than it already is. and since it is about 30C, i can't really wear support hose, and i don't even think they make support gloves, so i'm not sure what i can do, aside from having some kind of surgery later, and although i need to research it more, i'm not really sure how they can remove the bulging veins (don't you need them?) by injecting them with some solution that makes them shrivel up.
well, i'm going to do a little research online - unfortunately, i haven't been able to find anyone else with the same problem on the pregnancy websites. these women complain about absolutely everything else + things i have never even imagined. i'm not sure which is worse, bulging veins or stretch marks - i think i would have to say, i'd opt for the stretch marks!
now i can't really complain, because my pregnancy has up until this point been pretty normal with no complications. i had morning sickness and my sense of smell was more sensitive in the first trimester, but then i felt great & had my energy back all the way until my mid third trimester. it wasn't until the past couple of weeks that i have been feeling a bit nauseous after i eat, especially if i eat too much, which isn't much these days since the baby has taken over and pushed all my organs up. i have to eat small frequent meals, which was not really a problem, but now i get tired after i eat and have to take a nap! which makes me feel incredibly lazy and i wonder how all those women i know have worked until their water breaks. aside from a little backache now & then, i don't have much else to complain about.
i actually feel incredibly lucky to be able to rest & take it relatively easy throughout my pregnancy. although it is pretty normal for women not to work here, even if they are not pregnant.
but back to my veins. so i have noticed for the past few weeks that the veins in my hands have gotten enlarged and are popping out, which is really distressing. i guess due to my age and the increased blood volume, it makes sense, but it is totally unsightly and i am really worried that they will not go back to normal after the baby is born. most things don't stretch out & shrink back later (except your uterus i guess). i'm not an overly vain person (ha!) but i now have the hands and feet of a 70 yr old. since i can't spend 24 hours with my hands and feet elevated, i worry that it will get worse than it already is. and since it is about 30C, i can't really wear support hose, and i don't even think they make support gloves, so i'm not sure what i can do, aside from having some kind of surgery later, and although i need to research it more, i'm not really sure how they can remove the bulging veins (don't you need them?) by injecting them with some solution that makes them shrivel up.
well, i'm going to do a little research online - unfortunately, i haven't been able to find anyone else with the same problem on the pregnancy websites. these women complain about absolutely everything else + things i have never even imagined. i'm not sure which is worse, bulging veins or stretch marks - i think i would have to say, i'd opt for the stretch marks!
Sunday, June 14, 2009
contemplating apricots
i've always had a tendency towards overextending myself, and so i've spent the last 6 months diligently searching for work plus tending to all my new Turkish housewife duties (cooking dinner every night, cleaning, washing & hanging & ironing laundry, etc.), preparing, researching & gathering stuff for the baby, and attending a professional women's group meetings. but now that i am 7.5 months pregnant and fatigue is setting in, i have realized that even though i sincerely want to work, it will have to be shelved until a year after the baby arrives. of course, if i have the time & energy, i will try to do some stuff on the side, but realistically, who knows if i will feel up to it, given the information i've gathered about newborns. my time will no longer be my own, and i will have to fully dedicate my attention to our soon-to-be new member of the family.
so as the days grow warmer, and i spend lazy days at home, trying to eat healthfully, exercising (although not as much as i should), reading all the baby books that i ordered on amazon, and keeping up with my housework, plus turning my existing summer pants into maternity pants, meeting up with friends, as well as organizing & cleaning out the apt & catching up on stuff i've been saying for years i would do, but never had time to address (i'm sure you all know what kind of stuff i am referring to) i came to realize that i am actually keeping myself busy (although i often have a hard time articulating this when friends & family ask me what i do all day). somehow my list of stuff seems to escape me and i end up lamely saying, "gee, i don't know."
but today as i sit reading some great food blogs and planning dinner, the intoxicating, sweet perfume of the perfectly ripe apricots i bought the other day wafts up from my fruit bowl and like a powerful dose of serotonin, it makes me feel fortunate that i don't have to work until my water breaks and that i can spend the afternoons feeling my baby kick inside my belly and rest up for the big event. i know these leisurely days are numbered, and i am reminded to relish them as i stop and smell the apricots.
Monday, June 8, 2009
ethnic eats in Istanbul
in my efforts to recreate some of my past life here in Istanbul and to stave off bouts of homesickness, i often find myself searching out ethnic food for solace. unfortunately, foreign food in Istanbul is expensive and not usually very authentic, probably due to less of a concentration of foreigners compared to other major cities, a lack of authentic ingredients and a lack of competition.
Curiously, foreign chain restaurants show up here as franchises whose steep prices are difficult to swallow, considering the prices back home are cheap compared to their Istanbul cousins.
I also admit i have a hard time paying high prices for certain ethnic cuisines, most of which are cheap, excellent & plentiful at home - namely, Chinese, Mexican, Indian, Thai, Vietnamese, Malaysian, etc. unless they are prepared by a celebrity chef like Jean Georges Vongrichten - no complaints with Spice Market at the W Hotel Istanbul.
so my latest culinary adventure was to find good Indian in Istanbul. my search came up with 3 restaurants: Dubb in Sultanahmet, Taj Mahal in Cihangir, & Musafir in Beyoglu. Based on the menus and reviews, i voted for Dubb, although it is expensive which goes against my rule of having to pay a lot for Indian, it has a beautiful terrace which is always a draw for me. plus i have resigned myself to the fact that here it is a necessary evil to pay a lot if you want to eat anything other than Turkish. After having paid exorbitant prices for Italian, Thai & Mexican, I have begrudgingly given in, as a trade off to fuel my ethnic food cravings. After having lived in NYC eating a different country's cuisine for each meal and with a never ending supply of new, fabulous restaurants to sample, I understandably get frustrated at mealtimes.
So June 7th was my 1 year anniversary here in Istanbul, more than reason enough to celebrate, and so, against my husband's aversion to everything Indian, despite his never having eaten Indian food, he gave in to my request. He did protest against my choice of Dubb, due to his opinion that all restaurants in Sultanahmet are tourist traps, do, against my reluctance to have Indian food prepared by a chef from Pakistan, we decided on Taj Mahal, which my husband chose because the Musafir's website was not working.
In my review on tripadvisor of the restaurant, i titled it, "not bad for Istanbul, but not very good." enough said. at least it was not expensive and the mango lassi was actually much better than the ones i had in India, but the naan was outright wrong -sort of a cross between a simit and naan - very disappointing and strangely very different from the photo on the website. maybe the food is better at their Tunel location? or the food photos are actually from a stock photo company? and sadly we were alone in the dining room at prime time dinner hour on a Sunday evening.
2 weeks ago, we made a trip to El Torito in Etlier, which does not warrant a repeat trip. The restaurant seemed like it could feed about 300 people but had about 6 customers total that evening. I also read that the dishes were adjusted to Turkish tastes, which explained the fried outer tortilla of my burrito (durum style). the chips were going a bit rancid and the sour cream tasted like the UHT cream they have here that was turning bad - a literal translation of "sour cream" and no cilantro in sight! when i complained to a friend, she suggested Chilis, just down the street, which she promised had real sour cream - so i'll try that next time i jones for Mexican.
I think i will make my own ethnic food the next time a craving strikes - even though it will be just as expensive if i am able to find the ingredients, and time consuming, at least it will be a bit closer to the real thing.
Curiously, foreign chain restaurants show up here as franchises whose steep prices are difficult to swallow, considering the prices back home are cheap compared to their Istanbul cousins.
I also admit i have a hard time paying high prices for certain ethnic cuisines, most of which are cheap, excellent & plentiful at home - namely, Chinese, Mexican, Indian, Thai, Vietnamese, Malaysian, etc. unless they are prepared by a celebrity chef like Jean Georges Vongrichten - no complaints with Spice Market at the W Hotel Istanbul.
so my latest culinary adventure was to find good Indian in Istanbul. my search came up with 3 restaurants: Dubb in Sultanahmet, Taj Mahal in Cihangir, & Musafir in Beyoglu. Based on the menus and reviews, i voted for Dubb, although it is expensive which goes against my rule of having to pay a lot for Indian, it has a beautiful terrace which is always a draw for me. plus i have resigned myself to the fact that here it is a necessary evil to pay a lot if you want to eat anything other than Turkish. After having paid exorbitant prices for Italian, Thai & Mexican, I have begrudgingly given in, as a trade off to fuel my ethnic food cravings. After having lived in NYC eating a different country's cuisine for each meal and with a never ending supply of new, fabulous restaurants to sample, I understandably get frustrated at mealtimes.
So June 7th was my 1 year anniversary here in Istanbul, more than reason enough to celebrate, and so, against my husband's aversion to everything Indian, despite his never having eaten Indian food, he gave in to my request. He did protest against my choice of Dubb, due to his opinion that all restaurants in Sultanahmet are tourist traps, do, against my reluctance to have Indian food prepared by a chef from Pakistan, we decided on Taj Mahal, which my husband chose because the Musafir's website was not working.
In my review on tripadvisor of the restaurant, i titled it, "not bad for Istanbul, but not very good." enough said. at least it was not expensive and the mango lassi was actually much better than the ones i had in India, but the naan was outright wrong -sort of a cross between a simit and naan - very disappointing and strangely very different from the photo on the website. maybe the food is better at their Tunel location? or the food photos are actually from a stock photo company? and sadly we were alone in the dining room at prime time dinner hour on a Sunday evening.
2 weeks ago, we made a trip to El Torito in Etlier, which does not warrant a repeat trip. The restaurant seemed like it could feed about 300 people but had about 6 customers total that evening. I also read that the dishes were adjusted to Turkish tastes, which explained the fried outer tortilla of my burrito (durum style). the chips were going a bit rancid and the sour cream tasted like the UHT cream they have here that was turning bad - a literal translation of "sour cream" and no cilantro in sight! when i complained to a friend, she suggested Chilis, just down the street, which she promised had real sour cream - so i'll try that next time i jones for Mexican.
I think i will make my own ethnic food the next time a craving strikes - even though it will be just as expensive if i am able to find the ingredients, and time consuming, at least it will be a bit closer to the real thing.
Wednesday, May 6, 2009
food for the soul
I've been feeling a bit depressed lately, for personal reasons that i won't get into on this blog, but with the warm days and nice weather, i've been inclined to get up early and enjoy the morning light. i've just finished preparing my tax info (whew!) and had a breakfast that reminded me of a cherished nyc sunday morning. instead of my usual fruit yogurt smoothie or bowl of muesli, i was inspired to take a few extra minutes and prepare a pot of moroccan mint tea sweetened with organic agave nectar and a fresh omega3 (free range?) poached egg on top of a toasted slice of bread and sauteed spinach leftover from last night's dinner (my husband won't touch spinach - but i'm pregnant, so i need my veggies!). i made a quick lemon butter pan sauce (no patience to make hollandaise at 8:30am) and a couple of grindings of black pepper & sea salt & it was heaven!
with a slice of cool melon on the side, it was a healthy breakfast and one that nourished my soul and lifted my spirits. i've been trying follow a super healthy pregnancy diet, but sometimes I need to eat things that I truly enjoy or else i will end up binging in revenge on sugary desserts or simits to satisfy my carb cravings (which i did yesterday) and never had until i moved here.
usually we have Turkish breakfast on my husband's weekly day off, and i will prepare sigara boregi and the usual beyaz peynir, cucumber, tomato, etc. and last week i finally convinced him i could make menemen - which turned out wonderful & he loved (the trick was to have him help, since there are a myriad of ways to prepare it, and i needed to know how he likes it made). when i did a search on the internet, i saw pictures ranging from big slices of peppers & onions or chunky tomatoes to finely minced ingredients, or scrambled/shirred eggs to whole sunny side up ones mixed in. so i knew i needed to find out what his "version" was to get him to enjoy it.
my husband is so funny - i guess since he has no interest in the kitchen, he thinks Turkish cuisine is so difficult. he told me once, "oh, Turkish food is very difficult to make." where he got this opinion, i have no idea, because outside of some very special and arcane Ottoman dishes and maybe baklava, Turkish food is simple to prepare, having its roots firmly entrenched in the home kitchens of this country, with a base of onions, salca (tomato paste) & olive or sunflower oil, dry grilled meats, pilav and yogurt. the dolmas or stuffed rice dishes can be a bit labor intensive, and borek is a bit tricky at first, but none of it is as difficult to master as a french souffle nor require any exotic ingredients. the zeytinyagli vegetable dishes can be delicious, but i prefer my vegetables less cooked to retain their nutrients. i've also noticed that the vegetable varieties here need to be cooked long & slow with the trilogy of onions, salca & oil, because frankly, then just don't taste good fresh. i tried at first to slightly undercook fasulye (Turkish green beans) and the were inedible.
which is one of the reasons that make me homesick. i try to savor the amazing strawberries and fresh apricots when they are in season during the summer, but it just doesn't make up for the rest of the year.
I've heard American expats praising the wonderful fresh vegetables of Turkey, and I'm sorry, but i have to disagree. Unless they are comparing it to Russia or a small town in the middle of the US, I miss the greenmarket in NYC and farm stands on LI with tiny berries, ramps, fingerling potatoes, sweet baby corn you can eat straight off the cobb, and the amazing variety of vegetables you can find in chinatown, such as long beans, all varieties of bok choi, fresh lychee and rambutan, etc.
my soul yearns for broccoli raab, sweet potatoes, butternut squash, halibut, skatefish, blueberries and haricot verts. I also miss good ethnic food, like thai, vietnamese, malaysian, even good italian & mexican.
i have to stop now, or else i will undue the euphoria that my western breakfast created. back to my mint tea & melon!
with a slice of cool melon on the side, it was a healthy breakfast and one that nourished my soul and lifted my spirits. i've been trying follow a super healthy pregnancy diet, but sometimes I need to eat things that I truly enjoy or else i will end up binging in revenge on sugary desserts or simits to satisfy my carb cravings (which i did yesterday) and never had until i moved here.
usually we have Turkish breakfast on my husband's weekly day off, and i will prepare sigara boregi and the usual beyaz peynir, cucumber, tomato, etc. and last week i finally convinced him i could make menemen - which turned out wonderful & he loved (the trick was to have him help, since there are a myriad of ways to prepare it, and i needed to know how he likes it made). when i did a search on the internet, i saw pictures ranging from big slices of peppers & onions or chunky tomatoes to finely minced ingredients, or scrambled/shirred eggs to whole sunny side up ones mixed in. so i knew i needed to find out what his "version" was to get him to enjoy it.
my husband is so funny - i guess since he has no interest in the kitchen, he thinks Turkish cuisine is so difficult. he told me once, "oh, Turkish food is very difficult to make." where he got this opinion, i have no idea, because outside of some very special and arcane Ottoman dishes and maybe baklava, Turkish food is simple to prepare, having its roots firmly entrenched in the home kitchens of this country, with a base of onions, salca (tomato paste) & olive or sunflower oil, dry grilled meats, pilav and yogurt. the dolmas or stuffed rice dishes can be a bit labor intensive, and borek is a bit tricky at first, but none of it is as difficult to master as a french souffle nor require any exotic ingredients. the zeytinyagli vegetable dishes can be delicious, but i prefer my vegetables less cooked to retain their nutrients. i've also noticed that the vegetable varieties here need to be cooked long & slow with the trilogy of onions, salca & oil, because frankly, then just don't taste good fresh. i tried at first to slightly undercook fasulye (Turkish green beans) and the were inedible.
which is one of the reasons that make me homesick. i try to savor the amazing strawberries and fresh apricots when they are in season during the summer, but it just doesn't make up for the rest of the year.
I've heard American expats praising the wonderful fresh vegetables of Turkey, and I'm sorry, but i have to disagree. Unless they are comparing it to Russia or a small town in the middle of the US, I miss the greenmarket in NYC and farm stands on LI with tiny berries, ramps, fingerling potatoes, sweet baby corn you can eat straight off the cobb, and the amazing variety of vegetables you can find in chinatown, such as long beans, all varieties of bok choi, fresh lychee and rambutan, etc.
my soul yearns for broccoli raab, sweet potatoes, butternut squash, halibut, skatefish, blueberries and haricot verts. I also miss good ethnic food, like thai, vietnamese, malaysian, even good italian & mexican.
i have to stop now, or else i will undue the euphoria that my western breakfast created. back to my mint tea & melon!
Friday, April 3, 2009
my secret joy of being pregnant
besides the obvious joy of creative a new life with the person i love, something i never considered before i met my husband - being indoctrinated from early childhood to eschew making babies in lieu of a successful career (wanting to have children was too conventional of a goal, so 1950's), there are a lot of changes that occur that women can justifiably complain about.
morning sickness, bloating, nausea, breast tenderness, incontinence, headaches, exhaustion, skin pigmentation changes, etc. the list is endless. before i had even confirmed my pregnancy with an over the counter test, i was feeling nauseous, and knew something was up. as the weeks progressed, my nausea was almost constant, and made me dread the thought of having to prepare dinner, but once i started eating i was fine. my sense of smell went into overdrive, and everything was offending it, and my breasts were swelling & tender, but after the first trimester was on the wane, i was feeling more energetic and back to my old self again.
this is when i discovered for the first time in my life, the joys of being a C cup and also that my butt was filling out. now this is probably not a happy prospect if you are already well endowed in either or both areas, but for me, who has always been between an A/B cup and has a naturally flat butt, i am in heaven with my new voluptuous (or voluptuous compared to my normal state) figure. and especially before i started to show, i was fully enjoying feeling more feminine and curvy in all the right places. and don't think that my husband hasn't noticed ; ) being pregnant is great!
now i've never complained about my slight figure, and being blessed with a high metabolism and healthy eating habits in the latter part of my life, i have been able to stay thin up until now after my metabolism slowed down. but in the age of breast implants and even brazilian butt implants, airbrushing, gel bras, and cleavage revealing clothing, i've always felt a bit inadequate.
but now i am reveling in my new pregnant figure, and my only worry is that i know it will all end and my bubble will burst after the breastfeeding is over. But my husband told me not to worry, because we are planning on trying for a 2nd child ; )
morning sickness, bloating, nausea, breast tenderness, incontinence, headaches, exhaustion, skin pigmentation changes, etc. the list is endless. before i had even confirmed my pregnancy with an over the counter test, i was feeling nauseous, and knew something was up. as the weeks progressed, my nausea was almost constant, and made me dread the thought of having to prepare dinner, but once i started eating i was fine. my sense of smell went into overdrive, and everything was offending it, and my breasts were swelling & tender, but after the first trimester was on the wane, i was feeling more energetic and back to my old self again.
this is when i discovered for the first time in my life, the joys of being a C cup and also that my butt was filling out. now this is probably not a happy prospect if you are already well endowed in either or both areas, but for me, who has always been between an A/B cup and has a naturally flat butt, i am in heaven with my new voluptuous (or voluptuous compared to my normal state) figure. and especially before i started to show, i was fully enjoying feeling more feminine and curvy in all the right places. and don't think that my husband hasn't noticed ; ) being pregnant is great!
now i've never complained about my slight figure, and being blessed with a high metabolism and healthy eating habits in the latter part of my life, i have been able to stay thin up until now after my metabolism slowed down. but in the age of breast implants and even brazilian butt implants, airbrushing, gel bras, and cleavage revealing clothing, i've always felt a bit inadequate.
but now i am reveling in my new pregnant figure, and my only worry is that i know it will all end and my bubble will burst after the breastfeeding is over. But my husband told me not to worry, because we are planning on trying for a 2nd child ; )
Tuesday, March 31, 2009
giving thanks
today i'd like to stop a moment and depart from my usual venting and instead, give thanks for everything i have in my life right now. it's not that i'm not grateful for my life or appreciate what i have - you have to understand that from years of living in nyc, life is so fast paced, you don't have time to sit and contemplate what you have or what you have achieved - instead your mind is racing ahead thinking about your next day, your next year, your next achievement, your next step up the ladder or strategy for your next success. you are constantly pulled away from the moment by distractions like your blackberry or dinner plans or planning your month's agenda as well as your upcoming deadlines and presentations or client meetings. you exist in the future, not the past or present, and if you take a moment to rest, you feel the whoosh of life leaving you behind, and you feel an irresistible urge to catch up before you become obsolete.
but i no longer exist in that environment, which is part of what i struggle with each day. it's like when you are driving on the highway for hours, and you pull off onto the next exit and as you slow down to make that turn, your body and senses are so velocitized that you don't even realize that you are going much faster than you think.
i am still velocitized from my nyc lifestyle and am slowly trying to acclimate myself to my new slower life here in Istanbul so that i don't get the "bends".
so after months of painfully fighting my new environment, comparing it to my old life, and venting at every chance to make myself feel better, my new strategy is to really take advantage the free time i have - something i have never had before. so to honor this new stage in my assimilation, i am taking time to take stock of what i have, recognize all the good things in my life thus far and be thankful for it all.
and i have a lot to be thankful for. when i contemplate my painful start in life, being orphaned and malnutritioned as an infant, i am overcome with gratitude at being adopted and brought to the US and given the opportunity to make my life what it is today. i can hardly imagine what my life would have been like growing up an orphaned girl in Korea.
I am thankful for the education i was given and the success of my career.
I am thankful for my family and friends and the joy & richness they have brought & continue to bring to my life.
I am thankful for all my life experiences, all of which have made me the person I am today.
I am thankful for finally finding the love of my life and the opportunity to fulfill my late in life wish to create a new, precious life with the person i love and respect and to build a new life together.
I am thankful for the kindness i have been shown by strangers, as well as those i know.
I am thankful for the good health, comfort & security i have.
I am thankful for the ability to achieve the goals i continue to make and my ability to make my life what i want it to be.
but i no longer exist in that environment, which is part of what i struggle with each day. it's like when you are driving on the highway for hours, and you pull off onto the next exit and as you slow down to make that turn, your body and senses are so velocitized that you don't even realize that you are going much faster than you think.
i am still velocitized from my nyc lifestyle and am slowly trying to acclimate myself to my new slower life here in Istanbul so that i don't get the "bends".
so after months of painfully fighting my new environment, comparing it to my old life, and venting at every chance to make myself feel better, my new strategy is to really take advantage the free time i have - something i have never had before. so to honor this new stage in my assimilation, i am taking time to take stock of what i have, recognize all the good things in my life thus far and be thankful for it all.
and i have a lot to be thankful for. when i contemplate my painful start in life, being orphaned and malnutritioned as an infant, i am overcome with gratitude at being adopted and brought to the US and given the opportunity to make my life what it is today. i can hardly imagine what my life would have been like growing up an orphaned girl in Korea.
I am thankful for the education i was given and the success of my career.
I am thankful for my family and friends and the joy & richness they have brought & continue to bring to my life.
I am thankful for all my life experiences, all of which have made me the person I am today.
I am thankful for finally finding the love of my life and the opportunity to fulfill my late in life wish to create a new, precious life with the person i love and respect and to build a new life together.
I am thankful for the kindness i have been shown by strangers, as well as those i know.
I am thankful for the good health, comfort & security i have.
I am thankful for the ability to achieve the goals i continue to make and my ability to make my life what i want it to be.
Friday, February 27, 2009
my culinary woes
February 2009
Ever since I took an interest in cooking 15 yrs ago, I was never at a loss of what to cook. Maybe it was being in NYC and having access to world class restaurants for inspiration, ingredients from all over the world, and a eager circle of friends willing to come to & host dinner parties which made cooking seem easy & fun & natural, and provided a safe, non-judgmental environment for experimentation. No one cared if we ate at 11pm or if the appetizer didn't work out. It was a party and there was a lot of food around to snack on & free flowing wine.
Never really having received any cooking lessons from my mother, and after muddling my own way through various cookbooks and cooking shows, not realizing that there were different measuring cups for liquid & dry measurements, I decided about 15 years ago, that it was time to get some formal training. So I enrolled in the Institute of Culinary Education on 23rd St. which held night classes for busy working professionals. Using generally accepted professional methods grounded in French technique, I learned the basic principles, theories & techniques to cook all kinds of dishes from hot & cold hors d'oeuvres, soups, salads, fish, poultry, meat, and dessert, including sauces, and knife skills.
This was a revelation to me, because it basically freed me from having to use recipes. Once i had mastered the basic techniques and proportions, the rest was just flavorings. At the end of class we shared the meal that we had prepared & critiqued it, accompanied by a few bottles of wine. I loved the class so much that I took a Spa Cooking course, to marry my new love for cooking with my interest in health & nutrition. But I knew that these courses were for laymen and were more of an introduction to cooking for curious beginners. I became so enamored with cooking that I seriously considered switching careers, and enrolled in a course at the French Culinary Institute on Broome St on lower Broadway. It was there that I learned in more depth & detail the classic French techniques (the French codified cooking in Europe) and basic recipes to make all kinds of dishes, all in a professional kitchen setting, along with standards on hygiene and food safety. We had our own chef uniforms, with our names embroidered on the white double breasted jackets and wore tocques and aprons. During the 22 sessions, we made stocks & sauces (including the mother sauces) and pastry doughs, including pate feuilletee, mousses, souffles, all the different cuts of meat, de-boning a chicken, cleaning fish & shellfish, even genoise, bavarian & butter cream, creme anglaise, and syrups.
In the end, with the prospect of starting over again at the bottom of a new career, and the long & physically demanding restaurant work hours while standing on your feet, I decided that cooking would remain a passion, but not a profession for me.
But in all the years that I have enjoyed the pleasure of cooking, I have never been at a loss for what to cook...until now.
Arriving in Turkey, newly wed and excited by the prospect of learning a whole new cuisine first hand with all its own exotic ingredients and spices filled me with anticipation. I had never had Turkish food, or maybe once, but had Greek food, especially from the islands, and middle eastern food, and although they were not my favorite cuisines, I embarked with an open mind, knowing that i could fall back on my Western cuisine whenever I wanted.
So after having shared several restaurant meals with my husband, most of which were meat-centric - doner, kebabs, kofte, pirsola, and also a fish restaurant, I have to admit that I was not very enchanted with Turkish cuisine. I found the meat overcooked, and the fish I had although fresh, was nothing to write home about. I could have broiled it myself at home for 1/4 the price. Where was the artful presentation? Where was the preparation, skill and variety?
I chalked this up to the mediocre touristy restaurants we had been to in and around Sultanahmet, where my husband worked, during our short but sweet courtship. But now after living here, and sampling the cuisine at a range of restaurants from low to high, I still feel the same disappointment. Even the prized Bursa Iskender which most Turks rave about alongside Ottoman palace cuisine, left me unfazed. Of course I can appreciate the freshness & simplicity of Turkish cooking. But it wasn't until I had dinner at his parent's house that I really started to enjoy and appreciate Turkish cuisine. There i was served vegetable dishes, like the zeytinyagli ones, but expertly made and seasoned, vegetables prepared in ways i had never tasted. I have also been on a low carb diet for years, which is difficult to do in Turkey, where they think it is normal to eat potatoes, rice, makarna (pasta) and bread all in one meal. And they call whole wheat bread "diet bread" like you need to have a health problem to want to eat it. And I never liked borek, the ubiquitous multi-layered or stuffed pastry found at every corner. Until I had his mother's borek which is wonderful and has even converted a die hard carbo-phobic into eating several squares. I now even enjoy her dolmas, biber (green pepper) and yaprak (grape leaves) which are vegetable carb bombs, stuffed with seasoned rice. people here even stuff potatoes with rice! she makes very little meat, but her kofte are excellent and her ground beef stuffed eggplant is divine.
So I give credit to my husband's mother for showing me what there is to love about Turkish cuisine, and proving that the best Turkish food is served at home, not at the restaurants, because like most food, the most memorable & satisfying meals are made with love and attention and not at the hands of short order cooks.
But back to my dilemma. Having lived here now for 9 months, and having to cook dinner almost every night since i arrived in June, I am at a total loss for what to cook. I can attribute this to several reasons, one being the fact that I have never had to cook dinner every night, and find it tedious. In NYC even if you are married, you eat out at restaurants and order amazing take out, and maybe cook once a week, because you have the creative urge. You cook for dinner parties, not for dinner every night - this is a whole different ballgame. Secondly, I also need to cook mostly Turkish food for my loving husband, who's exposure to foreign cuisine it limited to dominoes pizza and pasta with ketchup & mayonnaise. When i first witnessed this distressing behavior (in Turkey, ketchup & mayonnaise are liberally used to smother french fries, plain pasta, AND pizza), I was in shock, and all I could say was that it was lucky that I am not Italian, or I would divorce him on the spot. That is how offensive I find it. I won't even try to figure out why or how this horrible custom came about.
Even though there is ethnic food available at restaurants, they are for the most part, very overpriced, not impressive, and sadly not very authentic. Leaving very little incentive to try new cuisines. So I don't blame my husband for thinking that his favorite restaurant, Me Gusto is Italian, instead of greasy, glorified bar food - since when are cheesy potato skins Italian? - How can you fully appreciate Italian cuisine, when you can't even eat pork?
Thirdly, I am pregnant, and just getting over my 1st trimester morning sickness, which is a bit of a misnomer, since it actually lasted the whole day, and left me nauseous at the thought of cooking dinner. And lastly, when you are used to having a different cuisine every day, and you marry someone who grew up eating the same rotation of dishes on a weekly basis, and is not even familiar with regional Turkish cuisine, and when you are afraid of shocking this person's system with all your foreign food, you get so bored with making dinner that you want to shoot yourself.
But I have to give my husband credit for being very supportive on my culinary mishaps in Turkish cuisine and for trying all of my foreign dishes and even liking some of them (I think). He has come a LONG way since the early days of our marriage, when I dutifully tried to make Turkish dishes from my cookbook, only to watch him refuse to eat because it wasn't the same as his mother made it. I once made yaprak dolma or sarma and he refused to eat them merely because they were too large, even though i had followed the recipe from my Turkish cookbook and they were smaller than i had seen at nearby cafes. But I had hunger on my side, and so as my Turkish cooking improved, with the help of a couple of lessons from his mother, his mind & palate expanded, to be more forgiving & willing to try slightly different preparations of the dishes he grew up eating, especially when he was hungry. I've learned all of his likes & dislikes, and insist on trying new dishes to push the envelope & satisfy my own homesickness.
But with dinner parties for relatives looming in the horizon, I am again struck by a loss of what to make. Normally planning a dinner party menu was an exciting prospect for me, one that i relished and would map out like I was catering an event for royalty.
But when you are faced with feeding a group of picky Turkish people, who don't even agree on the same way to prepare the same dish, and are not interested in trying foreign cuisine, my safety net is taken away, and I am left with my not yet mastered Turkish dishes, that I have been served by these same guests.
And I think that I have been discouraged by my Christmas dinner that I made for his parents and grandmother. I tried so hard to make something that I thought they would like, yet I could tell that they appreciated my efforts, but not the food. I have never had anyone not rave about my dinners, so this was a heavy blow. I served spiced roasted nuts, plain mixed nuts, dried apricots & plums, and fresh mandarin oranges. I served mulled cider & sparkling cider (none of them drink alcohol) which i had to scour the high end supermarkets in far away neighborhoods to find. I made a red lentil soup, braised beef with mashed potato & celery root, roasted brussel sprouts, sunchokes, carrots, onions & chestnuts, plus roasted beets with garlic & thyme & balsamic vinegar. i made a cauliflower gratin with a shallot bechamel sauce that went untouched, and a mesclun salad with feta and walnuts and a shallot vinaigrette. I baked hazelnut cookies and pistachio shortbread, and a pear frangipane tart that was just beautiful.
Now this would be a much easier feat at home, but here, i had to figure out the correct cut of beef i needed for braising & try to communicate this, in Turkish, to the butcher, and stop him from slicing it up into "biftek" and then pounding it into schnitzel. Then I had to figure out how to come up with beef stock (which they only sell in msg laden cubes here). And at that point i had not yet mastered the fahrenheit to celsius conversion, and so the roasted veggies almost burned, and i had to do a lot of juggling to keep everything warm.
Not surprisingly, everyone liked the soup, since it was Turkish, except his sister, who came late, and who didn't want soup (no trying things to please the host). No one wanted a vinegar dressing on their salad, so i had to improvise a turkish one with olive oil, lemon juice and pomegranate syrup, even though, the mother and grandmother liked the beets which were marinated with the same balsamic vinegar from the dressing. I attribute this to the acidic vinegars available here (apple & grape - no mild red wine vinegars). The sister did not want meat, but liked the mashed potatoes, until i told her that there was celery root in them, which she doesn't like, but didn't notice previously. As i said, no one even touched the cauliflower gratin (again, no trying things to please the chef or broaden your culinary horizons).
I think one person tried one of my cookies, no one touched the dried apricots or mandarins, and everyone dutifully ate a thin slice of tart.
All i could think of was maybe it was just too different for them? Were their palates ruined by eating the same dishes over and over for their whole lives?
So now you can see, when I am faced with having to cook for my husband's family, I balk, not wanting to have a repeat of my Christmas feast, and not wanting to serve them inferior versions of the dishes his mother taught me to make, which would pale in comparison to hers.
I even tried to make pirzola (lamb chops) for them once and they didn't like them because they were not well, well done. I find it a crime to ruin expensive cuts of meat by overcooking it until it is dry and hard and resembles the texture of the sole of a shoe.
But this is what i am fed & I graciously eat it, even though I could still be chewing it now.
And I know it is family, so there is no need to be overly polite, but I always find I am the one who always tries everything and eats the most, to show my appreciation for the meal that has been made for me. And I can be pickier than most about the quality of my food, but I don't see any reason to not lower my standards on occasion when someone is taking the trouble to make a special meal. I have never met a country of such picky eaters! Honestly, I've come to realize that New Yorkers, like most denizens of large, international cities, are world class eaters, meaning they love to try & appreciate new cuisines, and even though we have our share of predilections when we eat out (such as dressing on the side or egg white omelets, although nothing in comparison with LA), we are gracious guests when we are invited to dinner and love to try & appreciate something new.
Ever since I took an interest in cooking 15 yrs ago, I was never at a loss of what to cook. Maybe it was being in NYC and having access to world class restaurants for inspiration, ingredients from all over the world, and a eager circle of friends willing to come to & host dinner parties which made cooking seem easy & fun & natural, and provided a safe, non-judgmental environment for experimentation. No one cared if we ate at 11pm or if the appetizer didn't work out. It was a party and there was a lot of food around to snack on & free flowing wine.
Never really having received any cooking lessons from my mother, and after muddling my own way through various cookbooks and cooking shows, not realizing that there were different measuring cups for liquid & dry measurements, I decided about 15 years ago, that it was time to get some formal training. So I enrolled in the Institute of Culinary Education on 23rd St. which held night classes for busy working professionals. Using generally accepted professional methods grounded in French technique, I learned the basic principles, theories & techniques to cook all kinds of dishes from hot & cold hors d'oeuvres, soups, salads, fish, poultry, meat, and dessert, including sauces, and knife skills.
This was a revelation to me, because it basically freed me from having to use recipes. Once i had mastered the basic techniques and proportions, the rest was just flavorings. At the end of class we shared the meal that we had prepared & critiqued it, accompanied by a few bottles of wine. I loved the class so much that I took a Spa Cooking course, to marry my new love for cooking with my interest in health & nutrition. But I knew that these courses were for laymen and were more of an introduction to cooking for curious beginners. I became so enamored with cooking that I seriously considered switching careers, and enrolled in a course at the French Culinary Institute on Broome St on lower Broadway. It was there that I learned in more depth & detail the classic French techniques (the French codified cooking in Europe) and basic recipes to make all kinds of dishes, all in a professional kitchen setting, along with standards on hygiene and food safety. We had our own chef uniforms, with our names embroidered on the white double breasted jackets and wore tocques and aprons. During the 22 sessions, we made stocks & sauces (including the mother sauces) and pastry doughs, including pate feuilletee, mousses, souffles, all the different cuts of meat, de-boning a chicken, cleaning fish & shellfish, even genoise, bavarian & butter cream, creme anglaise, and syrups.
In the end, with the prospect of starting over again at the bottom of a new career, and the long & physically demanding restaurant work hours while standing on your feet, I decided that cooking would remain a passion, but not a profession for me.
But in all the years that I have enjoyed the pleasure of cooking, I have never been at a loss for what to cook...until now.
Arriving in Turkey, newly wed and excited by the prospect of learning a whole new cuisine first hand with all its own exotic ingredients and spices filled me with anticipation. I had never had Turkish food, or maybe once, but had Greek food, especially from the islands, and middle eastern food, and although they were not my favorite cuisines, I embarked with an open mind, knowing that i could fall back on my Western cuisine whenever I wanted.
So after having shared several restaurant meals with my husband, most of which were meat-centric - doner, kebabs, kofte, pirsola, and also a fish restaurant, I have to admit that I was not very enchanted with Turkish cuisine. I found the meat overcooked, and the fish I had although fresh, was nothing to write home about. I could have broiled it myself at home for 1/4 the price. Where was the artful presentation? Where was the preparation, skill and variety?
I chalked this up to the mediocre touristy restaurants we had been to in and around Sultanahmet, where my husband worked, during our short but sweet courtship. But now after living here, and sampling the cuisine at a range of restaurants from low to high, I still feel the same disappointment. Even the prized Bursa Iskender which most Turks rave about alongside Ottoman palace cuisine, left me unfazed. Of course I can appreciate the freshness & simplicity of Turkish cooking. But it wasn't until I had dinner at his parent's house that I really started to enjoy and appreciate Turkish cuisine. There i was served vegetable dishes, like the zeytinyagli ones, but expertly made and seasoned, vegetables prepared in ways i had never tasted. I have also been on a low carb diet for years, which is difficult to do in Turkey, where they think it is normal to eat potatoes, rice, makarna (pasta) and bread all in one meal. And they call whole wheat bread "diet bread" like you need to have a health problem to want to eat it. And I never liked borek, the ubiquitous multi-layered or stuffed pastry found at every corner. Until I had his mother's borek which is wonderful and has even converted a die hard carbo-phobic into eating several squares. I now even enjoy her dolmas, biber (green pepper) and yaprak (grape leaves) which are vegetable carb bombs, stuffed with seasoned rice. people here even stuff potatoes with rice! she makes very little meat, but her kofte are excellent and her ground beef stuffed eggplant is divine.
So I give credit to my husband's mother for showing me what there is to love about Turkish cuisine, and proving that the best Turkish food is served at home, not at the restaurants, because like most food, the most memorable & satisfying meals are made with love and attention and not at the hands of short order cooks.
But back to my dilemma. Having lived here now for 9 months, and having to cook dinner almost every night since i arrived in June, I am at a total loss for what to cook. I can attribute this to several reasons, one being the fact that I have never had to cook dinner every night, and find it tedious. In NYC even if you are married, you eat out at restaurants and order amazing take out, and maybe cook once a week, because you have the creative urge. You cook for dinner parties, not for dinner every night - this is a whole different ballgame. Secondly, I also need to cook mostly Turkish food for my loving husband, who's exposure to foreign cuisine it limited to dominoes pizza and pasta with ketchup & mayonnaise. When i first witnessed this distressing behavior (in Turkey, ketchup & mayonnaise are liberally used to smother french fries, plain pasta, AND pizza), I was in shock, and all I could say was that it was lucky that I am not Italian, or I would divorce him on the spot. That is how offensive I find it. I won't even try to figure out why or how this horrible custom came about.
Even though there is ethnic food available at restaurants, they are for the most part, very overpriced, not impressive, and sadly not very authentic. Leaving very little incentive to try new cuisines. So I don't blame my husband for thinking that his favorite restaurant, Me Gusto is Italian, instead of greasy, glorified bar food - since when are cheesy potato skins Italian? - How can you fully appreciate Italian cuisine, when you can't even eat pork?
Thirdly, I am pregnant, and just getting over my 1st trimester morning sickness, which is a bit of a misnomer, since it actually lasted the whole day, and left me nauseous at the thought of cooking dinner. And lastly, when you are used to having a different cuisine every day, and you marry someone who grew up eating the same rotation of dishes on a weekly basis, and is not even familiar with regional Turkish cuisine, and when you are afraid of shocking this person's system with all your foreign food, you get so bored with making dinner that you want to shoot yourself.
But I have to give my husband credit for being very supportive on my culinary mishaps in Turkish cuisine and for trying all of my foreign dishes and even liking some of them (I think). He has come a LONG way since the early days of our marriage, when I dutifully tried to make Turkish dishes from my cookbook, only to watch him refuse to eat because it wasn't the same as his mother made it. I once made yaprak dolma or sarma and he refused to eat them merely because they were too large, even though i had followed the recipe from my Turkish cookbook and they were smaller than i had seen at nearby cafes. But I had hunger on my side, and so as my Turkish cooking improved, with the help of a couple of lessons from his mother, his mind & palate expanded, to be more forgiving & willing to try slightly different preparations of the dishes he grew up eating, especially when he was hungry. I've learned all of his likes & dislikes, and insist on trying new dishes to push the envelope & satisfy my own homesickness.
But with dinner parties for relatives looming in the horizon, I am again struck by a loss of what to make. Normally planning a dinner party menu was an exciting prospect for me, one that i relished and would map out like I was catering an event for royalty.
But when you are faced with feeding a group of picky Turkish people, who don't even agree on the same way to prepare the same dish, and are not interested in trying foreign cuisine, my safety net is taken away, and I am left with my not yet mastered Turkish dishes, that I have been served by these same guests.
And I think that I have been discouraged by my Christmas dinner that I made for his parents and grandmother. I tried so hard to make something that I thought they would like, yet I could tell that they appreciated my efforts, but not the food. I have never had anyone not rave about my dinners, so this was a heavy blow. I served spiced roasted nuts, plain mixed nuts, dried apricots & plums, and fresh mandarin oranges. I served mulled cider & sparkling cider (none of them drink alcohol) which i had to scour the high end supermarkets in far away neighborhoods to find. I made a red lentil soup, braised beef with mashed potato & celery root, roasted brussel sprouts, sunchokes, carrots, onions & chestnuts, plus roasted beets with garlic & thyme & balsamic vinegar. i made a cauliflower gratin with a shallot bechamel sauce that went untouched, and a mesclun salad with feta and walnuts and a shallot vinaigrette. I baked hazelnut cookies and pistachio shortbread, and a pear frangipane tart that was just beautiful.
Now this would be a much easier feat at home, but here, i had to figure out the correct cut of beef i needed for braising & try to communicate this, in Turkish, to the butcher, and stop him from slicing it up into "biftek" and then pounding it into schnitzel. Then I had to figure out how to come up with beef stock (which they only sell in msg laden cubes here). And at that point i had not yet mastered the fahrenheit to celsius conversion, and so the roasted veggies almost burned, and i had to do a lot of juggling to keep everything warm.
Not surprisingly, everyone liked the soup, since it was Turkish, except his sister, who came late, and who didn't want soup (no trying things to please the host). No one wanted a vinegar dressing on their salad, so i had to improvise a turkish one with olive oil, lemon juice and pomegranate syrup, even though, the mother and grandmother liked the beets which were marinated with the same balsamic vinegar from the dressing. I attribute this to the acidic vinegars available here (apple & grape - no mild red wine vinegars). The sister did not want meat, but liked the mashed potatoes, until i told her that there was celery root in them, which she doesn't like, but didn't notice previously. As i said, no one even touched the cauliflower gratin (again, no trying things to please the chef or broaden your culinary horizons).
I think one person tried one of my cookies, no one touched the dried apricots or mandarins, and everyone dutifully ate a thin slice of tart.
All i could think of was maybe it was just too different for them? Were their palates ruined by eating the same dishes over and over for their whole lives?
So now you can see, when I am faced with having to cook for my husband's family, I balk, not wanting to have a repeat of my Christmas feast, and not wanting to serve them inferior versions of the dishes his mother taught me to make, which would pale in comparison to hers.
I even tried to make pirzola (lamb chops) for them once and they didn't like them because they were not well, well done. I find it a crime to ruin expensive cuts of meat by overcooking it until it is dry and hard and resembles the texture of the sole of a shoe.
But this is what i am fed & I graciously eat it, even though I could still be chewing it now.
And I know it is family, so there is no need to be overly polite, but I always find I am the one who always tries everything and eats the most, to show my appreciation for the meal that has been made for me. And I can be pickier than most about the quality of my food, but I don't see any reason to not lower my standards on occasion when someone is taking the trouble to make a special meal. I have never met a country of such picky eaters! Honestly, I've come to realize that New Yorkers, like most denizens of large, international cities, are world class eaters, meaning they love to try & appreciate new cuisines, and even though we have our share of predilections when we eat out (such as dressing on the side or egg white omelets, although nothing in comparison with LA), we are gracious guests when we are invited to dinner and love to try & appreciate something new.
Wednesday, February 25, 2009
old world vs. new world
i've decided that even though my young, Turkish husband is ostensibly very modern, chiefly for being interested in marrying me, a Korean/American from NYC, and for his interest in travel, his open mind regarding race, religion, his liberal & leftist political leanings, and his natural ability with computers, software and technology, he is still "old world" at heart.
Because now after living together for several months, i know that he prefers me to be at home rather than work outside the house (ie: have a career), and loves being greeted with dinner ready when he returns home from work everyday, and complains when the house is messy. I realize that he still values having a Turkish housewife, someone who will pick up after him, keep a spotless house, always be ready to whip up a turkish meal, and never complain about having to hang the laundry or iron his socks. Traditions can run deep, especially in Turkish culture.
I am sadly only qualified in the cooking dept. and feel the need to justify my dinner responsibilities, by calling myself a "personal chef & nutrition counselor." and i have never aspired to be, nor will i ever be his fantasy Turkish housewife (ie: his mother). Of course i can scrub the toilet and bathroom scum from the shower doors, and degrease the kitchen hood and vacuum obsessively, but after a few times, it gets old pretty quick. I get bored of housework, which some could claim makes me a lazy person, but I have never been a couch potato - with a busy career & social life in NYC, you don't have time to watch Sex in the City at home, you are too busy living your own life, which can easily become quite complicated, leaving no time for mundane chores or sitting around watching TV. Between working full time, exercising regularly, meeting friends, attending various meetings, exhibitions & openings, traveling for business & just opening & shredding all your junk mail, there is hardly enough time for housekeeping, which is why less important tasks are happily outsourced. your free time is precious, why spend it scrubbing grout, especially when it will ruin your new spa manicure?
I can handle the light maintenance cleaning & picking up, but feel it is wiser to leave the deep cleaning to the professionals, and have always preferred to pay for this service. Why would I want to spend more than half of my life cleaning the same 500 sq.ft over & over again when i have creative outlets to pursue and business plans to hatch? I'm already at a loss for what to cook for dinner, having exhausted all the Turkish recipes i have semi-mastered. I have a University degree and had a successful career, and do not find it stimulating, but rather mind-numbing to clean the apt day in and day out, pacing around like a caged tiger.
So here is a recent example of an old world vs new world clash: A few days ago, as I was washing the dishes from breakfast, the sink stopped draining. I had noticed that it was draining slower and planned to use some drain cleaner this week, but it was too late, i had just poured out the remaining juice from a jar of pickled beets, and had a sink full of soapy, magenta water that wouldn't drain. Upon further investigation under the sink, I stared at a ridiculous mess of jury-rigged PVC that all ended in a flexible tube that was being forced to bend at an impossibly acute angle, causing a kink that was stopping the flow of water.
I tried to unbend the kink, only to find that the connecting pipe at the top was not securely attached and it came loose, causing a pink waterfall under the sink that flooded the kitchen floor, pooling under the refrigerator. Since i don't own a mop (but i do own a swiffer!) i tried to feebly mop it up with a towel, wringing out the pink dishwater into a pail. After mopping most of it up, i decided to wait until my husband came home so that he could help.
After exclaiming, "What have YOU done?" we finished cleaning up the flood & he went out to buy a replacement part for the cracked and clogged flexible hose. Meanwhile, I was trying to figure out how the mess could be streamlined so that it didn't have so many unnecessary twists & turns & extra pipes - it seemed like they just used whatever they had lying around & just stuck it all together. When my husband returned with the new flexi hose, he got really irritated that i had taken the pipes apart and started complaining that i was making a mess & there was nothing wrong with it, so why was I messing around with it?
which brings me to my conclusion that the Turkish mentality definitely operates under the adage "if it ain't broke, don't fix it." I have been told that if there is a problem, the Turkish will find a way around it rather than a solution to fix it. In America (the new world) we embrace challenges and always take the opportunity to improve on something and make it better. Change is good. In a competitive capitalistic society, you must change & evolve to survive.
Which is merely what i was trying to do. But my husband got really angry at me for this, not seeing the innocent goodwill in my intentions, calling me a "know it all" just because i happen to know more about proper plumbing than whoever rigged the make-shift set-up under the sink. Being a homeowner, I have spent extensive time at Home Depot, and had to remove a food disposal unit and replace the whole sink drain myself.
I never thought i was an expert at anything...until i moved here.
Besides, by training, i strive to make things more functional & aesthetically pleasing, so since i have no current outlet for my skills, i was just trying to apply them to the current situation.
So old world won this small battle, but i wasn't worried, because in the end, the new world will prevail.
Because now after living together for several months, i know that he prefers me to be at home rather than work outside the house (ie: have a career), and loves being greeted with dinner ready when he returns home from work everyday, and complains when the house is messy. I realize that he still values having a Turkish housewife, someone who will pick up after him, keep a spotless house, always be ready to whip up a turkish meal, and never complain about having to hang the laundry or iron his socks. Traditions can run deep, especially in Turkish culture.
I am sadly only qualified in the cooking dept. and feel the need to justify my dinner responsibilities, by calling myself a "personal chef & nutrition counselor." and i have never aspired to be, nor will i ever be his fantasy Turkish housewife (ie: his mother). Of course i can scrub the toilet and bathroom scum from the shower doors, and degrease the kitchen hood and vacuum obsessively, but after a few times, it gets old pretty quick. I get bored of housework, which some could claim makes me a lazy person, but I have never been a couch potato - with a busy career & social life in NYC, you don't have time to watch Sex in the City at home, you are too busy living your own life, which can easily become quite complicated, leaving no time for mundane chores or sitting around watching TV. Between working full time, exercising regularly, meeting friends, attending various meetings, exhibitions & openings, traveling for business & just opening & shredding all your junk mail, there is hardly enough time for housekeeping, which is why less important tasks are happily outsourced. your free time is precious, why spend it scrubbing grout, especially when it will ruin your new spa manicure?
I can handle the light maintenance cleaning & picking up, but feel it is wiser to leave the deep cleaning to the professionals, and have always preferred to pay for this service. Why would I want to spend more than half of my life cleaning the same 500 sq.ft over & over again when i have creative outlets to pursue and business plans to hatch? I'm already at a loss for what to cook for dinner, having exhausted all the Turkish recipes i have semi-mastered. I have a University degree and had a successful career, and do not find it stimulating, but rather mind-numbing to clean the apt day in and day out, pacing around like a caged tiger.
So here is a recent example of an old world vs new world clash: A few days ago, as I was washing the dishes from breakfast, the sink stopped draining. I had noticed that it was draining slower and planned to use some drain cleaner this week, but it was too late, i had just poured out the remaining juice from a jar of pickled beets, and had a sink full of soapy, magenta water that wouldn't drain. Upon further investigation under the sink, I stared at a ridiculous mess of jury-rigged PVC that all ended in a flexible tube that was being forced to bend at an impossibly acute angle, causing a kink that was stopping the flow of water.
I tried to unbend the kink, only to find that the connecting pipe at the top was not securely attached and it came loose, causing a pink waterfall under the sink that flooded the kitchen floor, pooling under the refrigerator. Since i don't own a mop (but i do own a swiffer!) i tried to feebly mop it up with a towel, wringing out the pink dishwater into a pail. After mopping most of it up, i decided to wait until my husband came home so that he could help.
After exclaiming, "What have YOU done?" we finished cleaning up the flood & he went out to buy a replacement part for the cracked and clogged flexible hose. Meanwhile, I was trying to figure out how the mess could be streamlined so that it didn't have so many unnecessary twists & turns & extra pipes - it seemed like they just used whatever they had lying around & just stuck it all together. When my husband returned with the new flexi hose, he got really irritated that i had taken the pipes apart and started complaining that i was making a mess & there was nothing wrong with it, so why was I messing around with it?
which brings me to my conclusion that the Turkish mentality definitely operates under the adage "if it ain't broke, don't fix it." I have been told that if there is a problem, the Turkish will find a way around it rather than a solution to fix it. In America (the new world) we embrace challenges and always take the opportunity to improve on something and make it better. Change is good. In a competitive capitalistic society, you must change & evolve to survive.
Which is merely what i was trying to do. But my husband got really angry at me for this, not seeing the innocent goodwill in my intentions, calling me a "know it all" just because i happen to know more about proper plumbing than whoever rigged the make-shift set-up under the sink. Being a homeowner, I have spent extensive time at Home Depot, and had to remove a food disposal unit and replace the whole sink drain myself.
I never thought i was an expert at anything...until i moved here.
Besides, by training, i strive to make things more functional & aesthetically pleasing, so since i have no current outlet for my skills, i was just trying to apply them to the current situation.
So old world won this small battle, but i wasn't worried, because in the end, the new world will prevail.
Thursday, February 19, 2009
DIY Turkey
I've come to the realization that Turkey is the perfect place for DIY types, but not the glossy made for TV types-you need to be more a cross between the die hard loyal Martha Stewart type and Survivor, because even though there are Home Depot knock-offs here, called Bauhaus (the reference being totally lost on my husband - despite Turkey's strong ties to Germany) and Koctas where you can find basic building supplies and maybe a glue gun, but there are no craft stores or places to buy the unusual art, building or sewing supplies that you see on the DIY website or shows like While You Were Out.
You have to be more hard core than the weekend fan to try to search for what you need for your projects and may even have to make your own tools and will have to expertly substitute freely when you can't find what you need.
But DIY here is not only for interior design or small home projects. It most often extends to everyday tasks and modern conveniences that people in the Western world take for granted. Compared to NYC where Convenience is King and there are countless time-saving products lining the supermarket shelves to suit one's hectic lifestyle, here women mostly don't work, so there is no one willing to pay the extra price for prepared anything, especially when you still have your mother around who is always ready to come by with a tray of borek or dolmas. The only saving grace to all this extra work is that one gets to actually utilize all one's skills that have been acquired over years of obsessively becoming an expert in the hobbies you have chosen.
For example, after I had finally figured out how to ask in Turkish, to both the local and supermarket fishmongers, to please clean & fillet my fish, and watching in dismay as they lobbed off half of my expensive, imported, albeit farmed, salmon (no wild salmon here) that had already been weighed & paid for, and neglected to remove the pin bones, I resigned to continue to DI Myself at home, dissatisfied with their lack of skill, and somewhat perplexed, since this was their chosen profession. The same held true for de-boning chickens, and unless you want your meat pounded to a few millimeters in thickness, you need to stop them and take it away from them before the meat pounder falls. Besides butchering, I now make my own pastry shells, puff pastry, hummus, yogurt with live active cultures, cheese, curtains, duvet covers, grow my old herbs...the list goes on and on.
When you can't find something, or more importantly, when you can't find something at the taste level that you like, you must resort to making it yourself.
Yogurt is a great example. For a nation that eats every meal with yogurt and probably consumes more plain yogurt than any other country in the world, buying it by the 1500gr tub, none of the commercially available yogurts are organic, antibiotic or hormone-free and the most distressing, none contain live yogurt cultures, which are so important and beneficial to our digestive systems and one of the most compelling reasons to eat yogurt. There is Danone Activa, but it comes in tiny 4 pack thimble size containers that cost the same as 15x the amount.
But to be fair, most of my need to DIY comes from my foreign tastes. Within Turkish cuisine there are convenience foods available, such as all types of kofte, boregi, spice mixes, and strange pre-made dry cake, etc, but once you venture into foreign food territory, the choices are non-existent.
You have to be more hard core than the weekend fan to try to search for what you need for your projects and may even have to make your own tools and will have to expertly substitute freely when you can't find what you need.
But DIY here is not only for interior design or small home projects. It most often extends to everyday tasks and modern conveniences that people in the Western world take for granted. Compared to NYC where Convenience is King and there are countless time-saving products lining the supermarket shelves to suit one's hectic lifestyle, here women mostly don't work, so there is no one willing to pay the extra price for prepared anything, especially when you still have your mother around who is always ready to come by with a tray of borek or dolmas. The only saving grace to all this extra work is that one gets to actually utilize all one's skills that have been acquired over years of obsessively becoming an expert in the hobbies you have chosen.
For example, after I had finally figured out how to ask in Turkish, to both the local and supermarket fishmongers, to please clean & fillet my fish, and watching in dismay as they lobbed off half of my expensive, imported, albeit farmed, salmon (no wild salmon here) that had already been weighed & paid for, and neglected to remove the pin bones, I resigned to continue to DI Myself at home, dissatisfied with their lack of skill, and somewhat perplexed, since this was their chosen profession. The same held true for de-boning chickens, and unless you want your meat pounded to a few millimeters in thickness, you need to stop them and take it away from them before the meat pounder falls. Besides butchering, I now make my own pastry shells, puff pastry, hummus, yogurt with live active cultures, cheese, curtains, duvet covers, grow my old herbs...the list goes on and on.
When you can't find something, or more importantly, when you can't find something at the taste level that you like, you must resort to making it yourself.
Yogurt is a great example. For a nation that eats every meal with yogurt and probably consumes more plain yogurt than any other country in the world, buying it by the 1500gr tub, none of the commercially available yogurts are organic, antibiotic or hormone-free and the most distressing, none contain live yogurt cultures, which are so important and beneficial to our digestive systems and one of the most compelling reasons to eat yogurt. There is Danone Activa, but it comes in tiny 4 pack thimble size containers that cost the same as 15x the amount.
But to be fair, most of my need to DIY comes from my foreign tastes. Within Turkish cuisine there are convenience foods available, such as all types of kofte, boregi, spice mixes, and strange pre-made dry cake, etc, but once you venture into foreign food territory, the choices are non-existent.
Friday, February 13, 2009
foggy Istanbul winters
Except for my 2 week holiday in december 08/jan 09, this is my first Istanbul winter, and although it snowed last year around Christmas, this year there was only a few flurries that didn't stick and it was very mild, mostly raining. Driving around Istanbul at night, you can see a blanket of fog on the streets and highways which is not from the rain. It took me a while to figure out what this was, until after several visits to my husband's parents' apt in Bagcilar, I was exasperated by this fog as i waited outside by the door as he parked the car within centimeters of the ground floor apartment's window bars. I am a few months pregnant and my nose is on overdrive, overly sensitive to all the smells around me. So I started complaining about the horrendous air quality in Istanbul, imagining it choking our 11 week old baby inside me, and blaming the truck & mini bus exhaust and the lack of emission standards here.
Then my husband told me something far worse - "it's from the coal" he said. Yes, they still use coal in many neighborhoods to heat the buildings, because it is cheaper than natural gas, and cheaper than converting to a more environmentally friendly system. "What is this, Victorian England?" I exclaim, wondering how Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger would handle this problem, instead of the apathetic (or pathetic) Turkish government. Some of the political parties even hand out coal to the people to curry votes. Then i imagined my husband growing up in this neighborhood, oblivious to the detrimental effects of burning coal (such as the release of lead & mercury into the air), and was thankful that our neighborhood buildings were mostly heated by gas. I suppose the air is cleaner if you live near the water, something we will have to look into when we move house in 2 years (insallah!).
Then my husband told me something far worse - "it's from the coal" he said. Yes, they still use coal in many neighborhoods to heat the buildings, because it is cheaper than natural gas, and cheaper than converting to a more environmentally friendly system. "What is this, Victorian England?" I exclaim, wondering how Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger would handle this problem, instead of the apathetic (or pathetic) Turkish government. Some of the political parties even hand out coal to the people to curry votes. Then i imagined my husband growing up in this neighborhood, oblivious to the detrimental effects of burning coal (such as the release of lead & mercury into the air), and was thankful that our neighborhood buildings were mostly heated by gas. I suppose the air is cleaner if you live near the water, something we will have to look into when we move house in 2 years (insallah!).
Thursday, January 15, 2009
deviled eggs
I was feeling a bit homesick & nostalgic the other day, and it brought me to thinking about my mom and what she used to like to cook. she was actually a better cook than i ever gave her credit; being Scottish and growing up in the 50's, she had a lot to overcome.
When i was growing up, i was not interested in cooking, but used to help her & liked to watch her cook. Our kitchen was the warmest place in the house and the place where everyone would gather and socialize and gossip, rather than the living room or dining room. my mom still does all of her sitting in the kitchen now, although she can't cook anymore, and just sits and watches tv. just seeing her there brings back memories of my childhood in that house and the succession of family events that all revolved around the kitchen.
i was a fussy eater when i was very young, and my mom used to pay me 25 or 50 cents to finish my meal when we went out to restaurants, which wasn't often. I can remember going to IHOP and a chinese restaurant up the street called Gam Wah, where the owner was super friendly and let us have tea with milk, English style.
I can remember making pancakes in a cast iron skillet. she used to cut out eyes, a nose and a mouth for me to eat because i couldn't finish the whole pancake. and she always made our school lunches, and i remember the way she used to pleat the slices of ham so that it wasn't a flat, thin layer between the bread. i was also convinced that i didn't like mayonnaise, but for some reason i liked tuna salad, so she used to swear that there was no mayonnaise in it so that i would not be disillusioned.
i remember her making lasagne, watching her boil the pasta sheets and dry them on dishtowels, and then layering the meat sauce, ricotta cheese and mozzarella. she always bought a jarred sauce and then doctored it up by simmering it with other ingredients.
when she made meatballs, i would watch her mix the ground meat with eggs and bread crumbs with her hands. she would offer me a small piece to eat, which by today's food safety standards is quite horrifying. imagine giving a child raw meat & eggs to eat?
she also made a good eggplant parmesan and would freeze it into individual squares that i would take back to college with me.
since my father was a butcher, even though we were poor, we always had meat. she would make london broil, and pour the blood & juices that collected in the pan over our mashed potatoes, calling it "gravy". she also used to make boiled tongue for my father, and i can remember her peeling the outer layer of taste buds off and all the bones at the base of it. once it was sliced and served with mustard, it tasted good, if you didn't see it in its original form.
and i can remember holiday get-togethers when she would make her infamous Scottish meat pies that we would always find scattered & abandoned around the house with only one bite taken out of them.
she made some other strange things as well. one of her favorites was a dish she called "franks and beans" which was a canned baked bean casserole with pieces of hotdogs. she made this dish for my sweet 16 birthday party which i found embarrassingly white trash. she would also make us deviled ham sandwiches with relish, which no one else I knew ever had for lunch.
but i can also remember always having tomatoes during the summer, warm from the garden and the sun, and homemade chicken soup with vegetables, that i rejected, in favor of canned Campbell's.
she would go through phases where she would make something, and if you liked it, even just a little, she would make it over and over almost everyday, until you couldn't stand the sight of it. she did that to us with deviled eggs.
so in her honor, i made deviled eggs for the first time for my new husband, wishing i could call her for her recipe, not because her's was necessarily the best, but because i miss being able to call her and ask her anything - she has alzheimer's and i feel like i've lost a primary link to my past. she can't even tell me what day it is, or who i am, which is like talking to an empty shell of a person who was once the most important person in my life. not that she isn't still important to me, but it is like interacting with a memory of a person, rather than the real person.
so my version of deviled eggs had minced shallot, turkish dijon style mustard, mayonnaise and yogurt, and paprika. i think she used to use coleman's dry mustard, but they were delicious, and my husband even liked them, which means he ate more than one, which is what he does with anything new that he likes. i've never seen him dig heartily into a new dish unless he was starving or it was disguised as fast food.
so i will wait a couple of weeks and maybe make it again, when the mood strikes me.
In hindsight, I realize that she very interested in cooking, having discovered a trove of her gourmet magazines and cookbooks when i was at the house, sorting through all my belongings in storage, that had accumulated over the years, in preparation for my move to Istanbul. and I knew, as I flipped through the pages of her magazines, marveling at the glossy photos of fancy dishes that she never made, that she found it more important to be a good mother than a great cook and always catered to our young, undeveloped palates.
When i was growing up, i was not interested in cooking, but used to help her & liked to watch her cook. Our kitchen was the warmest place in the house and the place where everyone would gather and socialize and gossip, rather than the living room or dining room. my mom still does all of her sitting in the kitchen now, although she can't cook anymore, and just sits and watches tv. just seeing her there brings back memories of my childhood in that house and the succession of family events that all revolved around the kitchen.
i was a fussy eater when i was very young, and my mom used to pay me 25 or 50 cents to finish my meal when we went out to restaurants, which wasn't often. I can remember going to IHOP and a chinese restaurant up the street called Gam Wah, where the owner was super friendly and let us have tea with milk, English style.
I can remember making pancakes in a cast iron skillet. she used to cut out eyes, a nose and a mouth for me to eat because i couldn't finish the whole pancake. and she always made our school lunches, and i remember the way she used to pleat the slices of ham so that it wasn't a flat, thin layer between the bread. i was also convinced that i didn't like mayonnaise, but for some reason i liked tuna salad, so she used to swear that there was no mayonnaise in it so that i would not be disillusioned.
i remember her making lasagne, watching her boil the pasta sheets and dry them on dishtowels, and then layering the meat sauce, ricotta cheese and mozzarella. she always bought a jarred sauce and then doctored it up by simmering it with other ingredients.
when she made meatballs, i would watch her mix the ground meat with eggs and bread crumbs with her hands. she would offer me a small piece to eat, which by today's food safety standards is quite horrifying. imagine giving a child raw meat & eggs to eat?
she also made a good eggplant parmesan and would freeze it into individual squares that i would take back to college with me.
since my father was a butcher, even though we were poor, we always had meat. she would make london broil, and pour the blood & juices that collected in the pan over our mashed potatoes, calling it "gravy". she also used to make boiled tongue for my father, and i can remember her peeling the outer layer of taste buds off and all the bones at the base of it. once it was sliced and served with mustard, it tasted good, if you didn't see it in its original form.
and i can remember holiday get-togethers when she would make her infamous Scottish meat pies that we would always find scattered & abandoned around the house with only one bite taken out of them.
she made some other strange things as well. one of her favorites was a dish she called "franks and beans" which was a canned baked bean casserole with pieces of hotdogs. she made this dish for my sweet 16 birthday party which i found embarrassingly white trash. she would also make us deviled ham sandwiches with relish, which no one else I knew ever had for lunch.
but i can also remember always having tomatoes during the summer, warm from the garden and the sun, and homemade chicken soup with vegetables, that i rejected, in favor of canned Campbell's.
she would go through phases where she would make something, and if you liked it, even just a little, she would make it over and over almost everyday, until you couldn't stand the sight of it. she did that to us with deviled eggs.
so in her honor, i made deviled eggs for the first time for my new husband, wishing i could call her for her recipe, not because her's was necessarily the best, but because i miss being able to call her and ask her anything - she has alzheimer's and i feel like i've lost a primary link to my past. she can't even tell me what day it is, or who i am, which is like talking to an empty shell of a person who was once the most important person in my life. not that she isn't still important to me, but it is like interacting with a memory of a person, rather than the real person.
so my version of deviled eggs had minced shallot, turkish dijon style mustard, mayonnaise and yogurt, and paprika. i think she used to use coleman's dry mustard, but they were delicious, and my husband even liked them, which means he ate more than one, which is what he does with anything new that he likes. i've never seen him dig heartily into a new dish unless he was starving or it was disguised as fast food.
so i will wait a couple of weeks and maybe make it again, when the mood strikes me.
In hindsight, I realize that she very interested in cooking, having discovered a trove of her gourmet magazines and cookbooks when i was at the house, sorting through all my belongings in storage, that had accumulated over the years, in preparation for my move to Istanbul. and I knew, as I flipped through the pages of her magazines, marveling at the glossy photos of fancy dishes that she never made, that she found it more important to be a good mother than a great cook and always catered to our young, undeveloped palates.
Friday, January 2, 2009
Turkish is a very economical language
this blog thing is really distracting. for example, now, instead of doing my Turkish homework for my weekend class tomorrow, I would rather write about all the funny words I have learned in Turkish. As I have been told by my Turkish friends, "Turkish is a very economical language," after pointing out that there should be different words for "take" and "buy" and that Turkish is not as descriptive or precise as English. Which should be helpful to someone like me who is trying to learn Turkish at an age when the window for learning a language has long since shut, and was never a whiz at languages to start with, because there are less words to learn.
funny words in Turkish: *pls note my mac does not have turkish characters*
foot=ayak, finger = parmak >> toe=ayak parmagi (foot finger)
same for ankle=ayak bilegi (foot wrist)
door=kapi, arm=kol >> door handle=kapi kolu (door arm)
after learning these words, i couldn't help laughing for 10 minutes straight with my Turkish husband, who had to admit, it was pretty comical.
i am sure the language is more expressive than my current grasp of it, and my goal is to be able to read Orhan Pamuk in Turkish, but for now, I will settle for the gazete (newspaper) which I still cannot read without having to look up every other word (even the free ones they give away at the metro stations). but it's not my fault, there is too much grammar! I am currently taking the 2nd level course at Dilmer, and we still haven't learned how to say when. of course we learned When? (ne zaman?) and "when i was young" but not "when i was shopping", or "when i saw him" very simple thoughts, but apparently so grammatically advanced that they haven't taught us yet. and there seems to be many ways of saying when.
which is frustrating, because it means that i still cannot express myself and have to translate my thoughts in my mind, altering them and reducing them down to about a 1st grade level, in order to be able to speak. which makes me very slow at speaking, as my brain labors at finding ways of dumbing down all my thoughts to fit into the grammar that i have learned.
not to say that i am not trying! honestly it is really the language.
at my first and last job (so far) in Turkey, I was hired on a 3 month trial basis, with the promise of being hired full time being contingent on my ability to learn Turkish. I didn't anticipate how difficult this would be, having learned a working knowledge of Italian before, and not knowing enough of Turkish yet to realize how challenging this actually was. and as with any industry, i not only had to learn basic Turkish to communicate, but i also had to learn a very highly specific technical terminology for the fitting of garments, much beyond dress and pants and pins, but needed to be able to communicate pattern corrections and construction specifications, all in Turkish. so i would diligently print & translate emails & compiled a detailed glossary for myself. but to illustrate how difficult Turkish is as a language and to show why (Imperialism aside) why more people speak English, rather than Turkish in the world, it all comes down to the fact that it is impossible to have Turkish spell check.
Why is that? because of agglutination, which is the Turkish way of modifying a word with different suffixes, to the point where you don't even recognize the root word. thus resulting in so many forms of a word, plus very specific grammatically correct usage of each form, that it is impossible to have spell check. and even the online dictionary i was using, often came up empty when i tried to find the root word in a sentence.
all of this was made even more difficult by the fact that Turkish grammar is so difficult that only a small percentage of the population can write correctly, which if you can imagine emails, where typos & incomplete thoughts abound, full of idioms and tenses i hadn't yet learned, and the grammar of factory workers not being equal to the university graduates in my office, and in addition, the highly confusing practice of many people not using the turkish characters on their keyboards, due to habit or laziness (or my theory, which is that they are stuck in places that are not easy to reach), all of which made it a Herulean task to decipher Turkish emails.
But after 3 months of toiling away, with very little support from my busy co-workers, as a blessing in disguise, on the eve of my 3 month anniversary, I was let go because of the "ekonomik kriz."
ok, i should really start my homework!
funny words in Turkish: *pls note my mac does not have turkish characters*
foot=ayak, finger = parmak >> toe=ayak parmagi (foot finger)
same for ankle=ayak bilegi (foot wrist)
door=kapi, arm=kol >> door handle=kapi kolu (door arm)
after learning these words, i couldn't help laughing for 10 minutes straight with my Turkish husband, who had to admit, it was pretty comical.
i am sure the language is more expressive than my current grasp of it, and my goal is to be able to read Orhan Pamuk in Turkish, but for now, I will settle for the gazete (newspaper) which I still cannot read without having to look up every other word (even the free ones they give away at the metro stations). but it's not my fault, there is too much grammar! I am currently taking the 2nd level course at Dilmer, and we still haven't learned how to say when. of course we learned When? (ne zaman?) and "when i was young" but not "when i was shopping", or "when i saw him" very simple thoughts, but apparently so grammatically advanced that they haven't taught us yet. and there seems to be many ways of saying when.
which is frustrating, because it means that i still cannot express myself and have to translate my thoughts in my mind, altering them and reducing them down to about a 1st grade level, in order to be able to speak. which makes me very slow at speaking, as my brain labors at finding ways of dumbing down all my thoughts to fit into the grammar that i have learned.
not to say that i am not trying! honestly it is really the language.
at my first and last job (so far) in Turkey, I was hired on a 3 month trial basis, with the promise of being hired full time being contingent on my ability to learn Turkish. I didn't anticipate how difficult this would be, having learned a working knowledge of Italian before, and not knowing enough of Turkish yet to realize how challenging this actually was. and as with any industry, i not only had to learn basic Turkish to communicate, but i also had to learn a very highly specific technical terminology for the fitting of garments, much beyond dress and pants and pins, but needed to be able to communicate pattern corrections and construction specifications, all in Turkish. so i would diligently print & translate emails & compiled a detailed glossary for myself. but to illustrate how difficult Turkish is as a language and to show why (Imperialism aside) why more people speak English, rather than Turkish in the world, it all comes down to the fact that it is impossible to have Turkish spell check.
Why is that? because of agglutination, which is the Turkish way of modifying a word with different suffixes, to the point where you don't even recognize the root word. thus resulting in so many forms of a word, plus very specific grammatically correct usage of each form, that it is impossible to have spell check. and even the online dictionary i was using, often came up empty when i tried to find the root word in a sentence.
all of this was made even more difficult by the fact that Turkish grammar is so difficult that only a small percentage of the population can write correctly, which if you can imagine emails, where typos & incomplete thoughts abound, full of idioms and tenses i hadn't yet learned, and the grammar of factory workers not being equal to the university graduates in my office, and in addition, the highly confusing practice of many people not using the turkish characters on their keyboards, due to habit or laziness (or my theory, which is that they are stuck in places that are not easy to reach), all of which made it a Herulean task to decipher Turkish emails.
But after 3 months of toiling away, with very little support from my busy co-workers, as a blessing in disguise, on the eve of my 3 month anniversary, I was let go because of the "ekonomik kriz."
ok, i should really start my homework!
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