Bringing Us All Back Together Again

Warning:  This post is full of pictures that really only relate to the last few sentences of this post, but that’s okay because everyone likes stunning pictures and delicious food.  Right?



Believe it or not, these are lemons

Oh look.  Bit of a pause.  Okay, so I haven’t been particularly good at writing lately ... at all.  I own that.  I’m sure your lives have carried you through many days and you’ve all survived in my absence.  Truth is though, I’ve missed this.  If you’ve missed this as well, I hope you’re excited, because during my little hiatus over the winter months I haven’t been hibernating as one perhaps should when temperatures dip dramatically below freezing and blizzards come roaring in.  In the time that I haven’t been writing I’ve taken a road trip up the eastern coast of the United States from Georgia through the Shenandoah Valley to Boston.  I travelled to Maine as the leaves began to change, and then again in the dead of winter.  Funny thing is, winter in Maine isn’t dead at all.  Considering the multitude of layers of clothing that are required to be outside for any length of time, you’d think it’d just be easier to be dead … but that’s a story for a different day.  Perhaps a day when the weather outside is cooking us in the northern hemisphere and we need to think back kindly on a day when intellectually we know it was cold even though we can’t fathom what it would be like to feel cold anymore … because it has just been So Long since that has happened.

Potatoes and Carrots

Downsides –

1. It’s been so long since I’ve taken part in this blogging exercise that keeping on track and making any sort of intelligible sense is hard.  Like convincing a cat to take a bath kind of hard.  Like, me staying in one place for an extended period of time kind of hard.  I would continue to tell you how difficult ... but that would be yet another tangent.  Focus!

2.  I seem to allude to many things … many things that I’m not likely to address for a while.  Remember that road trip?  Yeah, that’s not what this post is about.  Gotcha!

This post is actually about sameness.  This post is about the world, as one, with humans on it.  We, as a community, have so much more in common than we ever have had as differences.  Okay, so a post on sameness alone could either be 5,000 printed pages (and) or the most boring post in the history of posts, which given the qualifications it takes to start your own blog … might be saying something.  This post is about one of the grandest things that brings us together.  No, not your family.  I love my family but I can say with a certain amount of surety that while a family might be brought together just by their familialness … they are also sometimes driven out of the room from one another because of that very same familialness.  This is a post about food.  Who doesn’t like food?  I don't know of a single culture in which food isn’t used to bring people together.  You want to entice warring clans to talk – present them with food.  You want to convince staff members to come to a meeting and pretend to enjoy one another’s company – provide food.  You want students to show up to an event – Food. 

Please come to our wedding, oh yeah, and you’re required to give us money/gifts when you arrive –  No problem!  Just make sure there’s food.  Want the kids to come home after they’ve become adults?  You ply them with good food their entire childhood and only give them the recipe for the most difficult dishes.  They will happily return, if only for Mom’s stuffed shells, Dad’s barbecue sauce, Eje’s beef and tomato noodles, or Oma’s wiener schnitzel.  You ask almost any traveler who has been on the road longer than a month or two what they miss most from home and food will likely be within the top three answers … if not the very first answer.  I love you mom and dad, and have missed family very much when I’ve travelled, but in 2007 when taking my first bite of real cheese that melts, I cried.  What a reunion.  My traveling companion and I took pictures with that cheese, and when we returned to our home base away from home, we carried hike packs full of marshmallows, peanut butter, and other scrumptious delights to our fellow travelers, so that they too might have a taste of home.

Most times when you think about getting together with people there is food involved.  Dinner parties, dinner and a movie, going out for drinks, meeting up for coffee.  Even going out to play sports with friends usually ends with some kind of food … not because we haven’t already eaten, but because it’s a common space in which human beings can share.  We don’t all have the same tastes, but we all require food.  We all keep each other emotionally alive while the food does the rest.  Food is a beautiful thing.  And today while we blamed the lamb that was for dinner, I spent time with a friend and she and I ignored the world, enjoyed fellow company, and cooked some food.  Bon Appetite, and as always, thanks for reading.

Asian Fusion

It’s 10pm and still VERY VERY VERY hot.  Yesterday at this time it was 30 degrees.  Today, was forcasted to be 38 during the day, 2 degrees hotter than yesterday, and tonight I’m certain it is hotter than 30.  Sitting here with the window open (there’s a shade, but air can move through), in shorts and a tank top, directly in front of a fan on high, I am still - if ever so slightly - sweating.  And yet, I don’t wish I had your air conditioning.  I DO wish it were cooler.  I do wish I could comfortably consider the idea of Capri yoga pants without being disgusted by the knowledge of how hot and sticky that would be …. But I do not long for dry frigid air and long sleeves in summer.

Not to mention, when it’s this hot all I want to eat is soup and watermelon.  Today I even skipped lunch because it was just too hot.   Since I haven’t made it to Frisbee this entire time (a.  It’s hot.  b. Frisbee is a 6 mile round trip walk in addition to, well, Frisbee.  c. Frisbee happens on the first and usually only day that I get to be alone for the whole of the day … guess Frisbee will just have to wait for Boston.), and I’ve only managed to do some yoga once, perhaps a change in diet is warranted.  Good thing because a change of diet is entirely unavoidable.

My cooking is not, nor is it ever likely to be described as “asian” of the central or any other sort of asian.  However, being that I am here, and local food is almost always cheaper than imported foods why not incorporate a few delicacies into my diet.  The following is an account of some of the foods that I have concocted or stumbled upon along the way.

Dried kiwi:  It’s sort of like dried mango, only it’s kiwi and has an odd aroma of fish.  I do wonder if that’s perhaps because of the situation in which it was dried, but also try not to think about that situation in any form whatsoever. 

Walnut cookies:  I don’t know who makes them, or where they come from, but they make me so happy.  We had these in Turkmenistan too, and it didn’t seem like they came from that place either.  Deceiving as the name may be, they do not seem to have any walnut in them.  They are merely shortbread type cookies with some sort of dulce du lece type filling, that when sandwiched look an aweful lot like walnuts.  I should also note that this name is not even close to being official and most people wouldn’t know what I was talking about when I say “walnut cookie”. 

Bisella:  Aka duo crème, aka crème duo, aka that nutella cream with the vanilla swirled in, or as shown Benuta Duo.  Not sure how it made it here.  So unbelievably happy it did.

Cream of Goat soup:  Is about as bad as it sounds like it would be.  I made this delicious lentil, bean and goat stew from some left over roast animal, but I had a few cartons of heavy, heavy, so heavy as to be sour cream consistency without the sour part, heavy cream that I needed to use.  I figured cream of chicken soup was good, cream of beef wasn’t unheard of, creamy lentil is also good.  Why not?!  Because it’s terrible.  That’s why not. 

Watermelon:  You know that part of the watermelon right in the middle where it’s bright, bright red and super sweet?  Now imagine the whole watermelon tasting like that.  Everything, right to the rind, expect maybe for the middle part which is a little more flavorful.   

Tea:  I drink so much tea here.  Green tea, Black tea, and not yet black powder tea … but maybe soon.

Pears:  I ate a pear here the other day that tasted like you would expect pear syrup to taste.  It was the flavor that candy manufacturers based pear flavoring on, if they’d actually based it on a real fruit.  It was delicious … unfortunately by the time we’d eaten through ¾ of the pear, the ants agreed with us, and the last ¼ was no longer appetizing.

Montu:  Kind of like Monti … only as big as your hand.  Steamed dumplings of ground meat and onion.  They’re as pretty as they are delicious.

Laghman:  Also known as soup.  It’s like Turkmen soup on a bed of noodles.  No?  Okay, how about … it’s soup with chunks of meat, half of a potato (no need to chop it up), a carrot (also whole), and tasty broth, but rather than putting it in an empty bowl, we’ll pour it into a bowl that happens to already be half full of homemade noodles.  And just to keep you guessing – maybe we’ll add a dollop of sour cream.

And I think my favorite dish here:  Shakarob!  It seems that most cultures have recipes to deal with left over bread/baked goods that just go stale too quickly.  The Austrians have Sacher Torte, smearing jam between two layers of cake to make sure that even if it would have gone bad, maybe it will just absorb the extra jam and taste fine a few days longer.  The French have bread pudding.  Oh bread pudding.  Right now there are two people who are tied for first place when it comes to bread pudding.  Michael and my Dad.  I do admit that my father is at a bit of a disadvantage, however.  I haven’t had my Dad’s bread pudding in years, so the memory isn’t very fresh in my head … whereas Michael made it just a few months ago.  Don’t worry though, being fair minded as I am, I will most certainly allow my father  the opportunity to best Michael with his culinary magic.  Tie breakers will be determined at a later date.

… I have allowed myself to be distracted:  Always a danger when writing a post about food.  So yes.  Austria:  Sacher Torte.  France (England?):  Bread Pudding.  Moving on to the savory responses to stale bread Turkmenistan has Dograma.  Dograma is what happens when culinary school goes very poorly.  I was not a fan.  In order to make dograma you wait for bread to go stale … Luckily, depending on the bread, you might not have to wait more than a minute or two.  Then you shred this bread into small, stuffing sized pieces.  (ooohhh Stuffing!  Another answer to stale bread.  Yummy!)  These pieces of stale bread are topped with a piece or two of meat and then broth is poured over the whole thing.  Salt liberally.  The bread is about as bland and soggy as you would imagine.  The good news is, it fills the belly and is relatively safe to eat without threat of broken tooth or intestinal distress.

Finally, there is Tajikistan’s response:  Shakarob!  I wish I could write that out with the same enthusiasm and enunciation as I have in my head, but no phonetics will do this word justice.  It is pronounced something like Shah-ka-ROBE, but whenever I say it it’s almost like a battle-cry or something that a child would excitedly cry before doing something particularly brave.  Anywho, much like dograma, the bread is shredded only this time it’s spread out on a wide flat-ish serving bowl.  It’s then topped with tomato, cucumber, onion and whatever herbs are in season.  I had it once with mint and dill and I HIGHLY recommend that.  Then the whole thing is doused with a thin yogurt mixed with linseed oil.  It’s delicious. 

Perhaps this also should have been divided into several posts, but I couldn’t find a place to pause.  Rather than actually wrapping this up, let me leave you with a question:  Does anyone know where one would get linseed oil (the non-poisonous, edible kind) in the US?  I know more than one of you frequents whole foods – is this something they would have?