Spinach and Persimmon Salad

Aren't these the biggest, most beautiful persimmons you've ever seen?

Nature's candy!

I bought these without thinking about how six persimmons were rather a lot to eat before they went bad. So I trolled Epicurious for persimmon recipes. There were sadly few, and most needed equipment I did not have. Like an oven. I eventually found a few salads and sort of combined ideas from them to make this, which was amazing.

Lemon-mustard dressing (Adapted from the best kale salad recipe ever.):

1 pt lemon juice
1 pt olive oil
1 tsp Dijon mustard
1-2 tsp garlic powder (I like garlic, okay?)
Salt & pepper
(I also add 2 tsp of dried onion at home.)

Add the mustard a bit at a time as it gets very mustardy very quickly. (This also depends on whether you have nice or crappy mustard.) If you really like mustard, add more. Mix very well!

Salad:

1 persimmon*
Spinach (or mix of greens)
Feta cheese, brynza, beyaz peynir, or the like
Your favorite thinly-sliced cured meat**

Simple. Wash and tear spinach. Cut up meat. Cut up persimmon. Cut or crumble cheese. Dress. Amazing salty-sweet-tart goodness!!



* I realize persimmons are not exactly easy to find or cheap most places. But you could easily replace it with any somewhat similarly textured fruit. Or any fruit at all really. I think it'd be good with nectarines or maybe mangoes.

** I used pastırma. Pastırma on its own I found to be terribly disappointing. It is beef that's been salted, cured, and covered with a spice paste, then thinly sliced. Someone described if as prosciutto, but made with beef, and I got very excited as I love prosciutto but generally prefer other meats to pork. But by "like prosciutto" I guess what this person meant was "cured meat" because it did not taste like prosciutto at all. It's vaguely sweet in a way that I found very off-putting. Now, it's not terrible, and I can see how others might like it, and I may even try it again from a proper butcher's instead of Happy Avantaj supermarket. Anyway, I cut off the thick spice-paste crust and cut the meat in tiny bits and it was okay in the salad. But use prosciutto if you can, because it is amazing. [Man, if I were an EU citizen I would so be living it up in Spain and eating all the cured pork. Sigh.]

Pastırma (note spice-paste)

Whirlwind day!

Highlights: as good as yesterday's observation was, today's was bad. For so many reasons. Actually debated merits of cutting and running in middle (pros: possibly fired already, don't have to finish the worst lesson ever [which was definitely up there with top worst 40 minutes of my life {which says a lot}] cons: if I run I'm definitely fired). Good points: managed to last through without even crying or losing temper, nobody killed or hurt each other, am not in fact fired, came upon the brilliant idea of teaching them to tiptoe and have Competitive Quietness be a Thing That We Did. Whee.

I hope my coworker is better tomorrow because if I have that class again, I will cry.

Anyway, after school went to the mall (a bigger one, not scary one) with a coworker and some of her friends. So I got to meet new people, who were very cool, and just hang out with people in a social setting which--I just realized-- I have not been able to do since I've got here. No wonder I've been lonely. Got cute cheap hat. It looks sorta like a train conductor hat. I like trains. And my hair looks cute sticking out.

Anyway the real important part of said mall trip was cake and tea at an outdoor rooftop cafe with heaters and a little pond up there. So nice! So tasty!

I am awesome, EOM

...or maybe not yet. Anyway, had my second observation and totally rocked it. Which is good, because the first one I felt was rocky. And it was the same class! Oh, and they were excited to see me (which observing teacher noted)-- once I came in they were all, "Erica-teacher! Erica-teacher! Hello!"

Anyway, it wasn't perfect, and I made some mistakes, of course. But it is such a good feeling to have a class not only go well, but to be able to say, look. That. That is what I can do. I fully did my best, and I am proud of that. Any mistakes I have made are fully my own, and they are due to things I have not yet learned rather than crappy luck or anything else. (You could argue that ideally one could handle anything chance threw at you, but really, there is still that element of chance there.) Anyway, it is a good feeling, and one I've never had after an observation lesson.

Also the kids got a bit rowdy at the end but the observing teacher had already left, ha-ha!

Rosetta Stone pt 2

Ok so after the other day's negative comment in re: Rosetta Stone Turkish Level 1, I thought I'd share a positive as well.

They do such an amazing job of introducing vowel harmony. I was wondering how they'd ever do it. But they show it very clearly using color-coding of the vowels and sort of walking you through it step by step. I mean, you wouldn't fully understand it, but you'd know something was going on with vowels changing without having to go HAY GUYS HERE'S A REALLY COMPLICATED LINGUISTIC CONCEPT, hope you paid attention in Ling 301!! (Also note that most Turks probably don't fully understand vowel harmony, much like most Americans or Brits don't understand, I dunno, prefix assimilation or something, so you don't need to understand it to speak it.)

Rosetta Stone

First of all, in general, I am super awesome at Rosetta Stone. Then again, I think they set it up that way, so you feel like you're figuring stuff out though you retain very little.

Anyway.

Just wanted to complain about the speech recognition for the Pronunciation bits, where they go much harder on you, plus they break it down syllable by syllable. I had to pronounce "zü," which is pronounced /zy/ for you fellow phoneticians out there. I know how to pronounce /y/. It's the French 'u,' the German 'ü.' I kept saying /zy/, /zy/, ü ü ü, and it kept scoring me wrong.

Wait a tick. I had an idea.

I tried /zu/, with the flattest American /u/ I could muster.

It passed. WTF. Rosetta Stone, you fail at teaching people to pronounce Turkish. Now hire me to make you better-- I'm available for cheap.

Welcome and wanderings

So here is my little blog to chronicle my adventures in Istanbul.  I debated having separate blogs for random slices of life here and something which I really wanted to do, which was create a blog for cooking abroad.  You know, recipes that work almost anywhere, exploring local fruits and veg as well as cuisine, and links to good resources.  But then I realized that I probably won't post enough to justify two blogs.  And I'll likely post a lot of "this is my life" stuff at first and then more "this is me cooking" stuff later, so I guess it'll work out.  I mean, it will be vastly entertaining and incredibly interesting so you should visit all the time.

I had all these great ideas for posts in my head but now I can't think of any so I shall tell you about my day.  (We're on holiday for Kurban Bayramı so I've been running around doing interesting and/or touristy things.)

I went to the Museum of Science and Technology in Islam which is awesome.  Um... maybe not up everybody's alley though?  Let's put it this way.  Do you like looking at astrolabes? Would you enjoy reading a bunch of signs on the invention of algebra and calculus, even if there are few actual items to look at?  If the answer is yes, then oh man do you need to go here.  Also, it's super cheap ($2.50 USD) and short enough to do in two hours (um... probably shorter for normal people).  It is located in Gühane Park near Topkapı Palace, in the old town area.  (Note to admin at museum: Please let me correct the English on your signs.  Please, it would be the culmination of everything I have ever enjoyed in my life.  Oh, I could attempt to translate them into Russian, too!  You wouldn't really have to pay me even, just let me live in your museum and throw me some bread once in awhile.  Please.)

Then I wandered around the park but it was a bit chilly so I went to find a restaurant.  At all of these places they have wait staff hanging around out front chatting you up, trying to pull you in.  At the third I approached, a lady did the whole "Oh, where are you from" bit, I said I was American and she responded in kind, saying she was from Georgia.  "Before Soviet Union Georgia."

I didn't know exactly what she meant so I replied (in Russian), "So you don't speak Russian then?" (Thinking maybe she meant her family had come over before the USSR.)

She just stared at me and her eyes got real wide and she said, "Of course I speak Russian.  Uh... how do you know Russian?"

And then she praised my Russian skills so I had to go to her restaurant.  Which was decent enough.  Overpriced in general but cheaper than the other restaurants in the touristy area.  I got free tea, yay.  (They always offer me tea and it seems to be a crapshoot as to whether or not I'll have to pay for it.  So far it seems young men that may or may not be hitting on me and kind Georgian ladies happy to speak Russian both give me free tea.)  Anyway that was nice as I got to use more Russian than I did in some places in Moscow.  She did inform me that there were no good Georgian restaurants in Istanbul, sadly.  (But they do have pide here-- more on that later.)

It was here that my day took a turn downhill, sadly.  I walked through the cold drizzle to the tram stop, was all excited that I got a seat right away, and this thirteen or fourteen year old kid sat next to me.  He starts crowding me into the wall a bit-- I thought at first he was just being oblivious and rude as teenage boys sometimes are-- but no, he's definitely trying to feel my leg up.  I unfortunately forgot how to say "You should be ashamed" in Turkish (it's definitely in my flashcards), debated saying it in Russian (it's scarier than English), and ended up going the language-free route of physically shoving him away from me.  As he was only like 13, he got scared and ran off the tram at the very next stop.  Teenage boys.  Ugh.

(I would like to found a culture where men give up their seats to women AND they don't grope them on public transport.  But if I have to pick one or the other, I'd prefer to not get my ass or thigh pinched, thanks so much.)

Then I braved The Mall.  The Mall is scary because it is across a major thoroughfare and you have to walk up stairs and then across a really high bridge and then all the way back down and I am so terrified of heights you don't even know.  I get vertigo really badly and often can't stand up straight. And I faced it ALL BY MYSELF, go me.  I tried the elevator on the way up but it moved so slowly (and had glass sides) so it was actually scarier than the stairs.

Anyway.  I went to MediaMarkt to find a charger for my camera because even though I found it at home and even put it aside I apparently neglected to actually pack it.  So I have a camera with no charge and no way to put pictures on my computer even if it did have a charge.  I finally found a guy who spoke English and he told me that even though they do sell a similar camera they do not sell the cables separately and I need to order them from the internet.  Which means finding a Turkish site or waiting for forever to get one from... well probably from my parents because Amazon does not ship to Turkey.  They ship to Russia now, but not Turkey. And it has to be sent to the central office and blah blah blah TL;DR it's going to be a pain in my ass.

I went to Carrefour (large fancy chain of supermarket), but even finding pesto (yay!) and cheddar (not so sure it'll be good...) could cheer me up.

Then I had to face The Mall Bridge all over again and tried to take a shortcut home because my feet hurt and my bags were heavy (buying all of your water + needing extra water due to meds = I should have awesome biceps soon).  Of course I got lost.  And this country is like most countries in the world in that apparently street signs are like taboo or something.  Honestly, most differences and even the lack of things that I am used to don't really faze me, or if they do they don't certainly upset me.  But I was lost and tired and I just wanted to punch Turkey in the face because there is absolutely no good goddamned reason why I should walk nearly a kilometer on a main road and not see a single goddamned sign to tell me what street I am on.  I mean, really. 

(So it turns out I was exactly where I thought I should be the entire time it's just that the route was longer than I had estimated.  Whoops.)