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.

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!