Tag Archives: assyrian

Dec 10 2012
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Time savers (& other baked goods)

You have to have time to figure out how to save time.

A rockin Saturday night to me means making bereshke (kinda like a pierogi). It’s fried dough stuffed with goodies – potato, ground beef, or jam, they’re super versatile. I’ve found most people (as in peoples) eat some kind of stuffed fried dough thing, and this is ours.

The recipe comes from the old country, from a woman called Cordelia. And we were chatting about how ingenious the recipe was and how quick and easy it was. We realized that a lot of great recipes come from this same village area. And maybe the reason these women figure out the best recipes, fastest, most delicious – basically the most bang for your buck – is that they had nothing but time to figure it out.

What we do with all this time we are saving is another question. But thanks Cordelia, for taking the time to figure out great bereshke so we don’t have to.

SAMSUNG

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Oct 22 2012
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Julia’s house (Assyrian lessons from a 3 yr old)

This is a couple weeks ago. Seana’s in town and we go visit our cousin Natasha and her 3 year old Julia. Natasha has a little bit of work to do so we offer to watch Julia so she can finish (and so we can get on with the drinking and eating).

Julia is smart as a whip and has so much energy, that between her and Russy, the Russell Terrier in the house, I have to take a knee. We bounce from hide-and-go-seek to drawing to trying to figure out which one of the eight remotes will play Kung Fu Panda in the span of about five minutes.

In the middle of this, Julia stops abruptly and asks, “Can we talk in Assyrian?” (Of course, saying this in Assyrian.) Seana and I nervously make eye contact and shift attention back to her. How do you explain to the child that you kinda sorta understand, and can say a few words but don’t really speak well? Actually, I did learn how to say, “I understand Assyrian, but I don’t speak” for just such an occasion. So I try it out on her. “Anna barmuyan suraiya, eena lemson robba sotan.” Yeah, that’ll do the trick, I think.

Hmm. How to describe Julia’s expression? She’s contemplative, as if she’s smelling a little stinky piece of cheese. She looks a little sad for us. Also, confused. But careful. The responsible adults in her world are at least bi-lingual and I worry that she thinks she’s gaining the upper hand.

She remains quiet, as if calculating her next move. Poor thing. We’ve put her in a terrible position. She can speak both and prefers to mix and match. Actually, she speaks an adorable hybrid of Bay Area English and Urmeznayeh Assyrian. Julia overhears when I tell Natasha, “she’s so cute,” and insists through her teeth (again in Assyrian), “I. am. not. cute.” She’s in an Assyrian-speaking household, we should be the ones adapting, making her feel comfortable. I mean, she’s 3 for Christ’s sake.

So, Seana and I throw out some Assyrian words we know, stumbling and groping for meaning like a drunkard pulling an unfinished cigarette butt from the gutter and putting it to his lips. “Boucta…um…shapirta brati. hmmm.” “Itakh kha snack?” This isn’t going well. Julia first looks at me and then at Seana. The tiniest downward angles form the corners of her mouth. Again, the flared nostrils. Pity? Disgust? Nah, I think confusion will cover it. But then, just as suddenly, she turns her back to us and continues chattering away, still drawing easily from Assyrian and English, focusing her energy on more important matters – Kung Fu Panda.

you want us to speak what?

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Apr 11 2012
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The Hairiest Ballerina (A Fictional Tale)

There once was a hairy little girl, named Harriet, who wanted more than anything to be a ballerina. She pranced and twirled all day long, swan-diving off furniture pretending to be in a professional production. Her parents could see her enthusiasm and agreed to buy her pink ballet slippers, a little tutu, and lessons.  Hairy little Harriet practically flew into her first lesson but stopped abruptly in the entrance. She found before her a sea of alabaster-skinned, blond 8-year-olds, their translucent peau practically aglow beneath their baby pink tutus and tights. Hairy little Harriet looked down at her hairy little legs and hairy little arms and turned beet red with embarrassment. Because you see, she was half Assyrian and half Anglo-mutt, which in her case created a combination of cream colored skin and dark, thick black hair – all over. Assyrians say that hairy people are nice people, but Harriet was pretty sure that a hairy Assyrian made that up to feel better. The poster children of the Aryan nation turned and glared at her. They pointed at Harriet and gasped, “Why are you so hairy?!”

Harriet looked down and thought, “I don’t fit in here.” But before she could turn around and leave, the ballet instructor started to play music and led the children in leaps around the dance floor. Harriet felt herself emboldened by the music. Before she knew it, she too, was leaping across the floor. She leaped higher and higher. Then all of a sudden a breeze caught her hair and she glided higher and higher with every leap. She could leap so high she even leaped over some of the other girls’ heads.

When the music stopped, all the other little girls turned and glared at hairy little Harriet. They gasped, “How did you learn to dance so well? How do you leap so high? Can you show us?” From that day on, the other little girls never made fun of Harriet again for they could see that the hair was in fact a magical power, making her the hairiest and the prettiest little ballerina around.

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Mar 14 2012
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Calorie Bazaar: Quantifying Bites and Negotiating Trades at the Dinner Table

There’s an Assyrian saying about eating in front of someone who’s not eating, “sapee khjboonelah” or “you’re counting my bites.” It’s bad manners to be at the table and be the only one eating, so I guess this is supposed to encourage others to eat too. My mom came over for dinner yesterday and pointed out how this expression literally came true in my house. And she’s right. Ever since turning, well, not in my early 20′s and graduating school to lead a sedentary, cubicle way of life, my body has paid the price. Same for my husband, who’s even more not in his early 20′s than I am. So we decided to take, what is for me, drastic measure. We decided to

COUNT CALORIES!! NOOOO!!!!

Which is insanely tedious, especially with my husband the engineer who weighs all our food. To make it less tedious we’ve been using the Lose It! app, whose interface isn’t that awesome, but it’s one of the better apps for the job that I’ve come across. The funny thing about counting calories is that you’re putting a number on something that is less than precise. You make a goal based on whether you want to lose or maintain weight, and it’ll tell you to eat 1800 calories a day or whatever. Then you go about looking up food items in the app’s database, trying to decide if you ate a medium or small banana and whether you think you had 1/2 cup of asparagus or 3/4 cup. The units of measurement aren’t always how we tend to think of food. Some items are just confusing. I looked up roasted chicken and it said one unit was 250 calories. What, like the whole chicken? Wow. See what happens. I didn’t mean to take us down this rabbit hole of detail, but that’s what happens when you count calories all day. It’s inherently obsessive if you want to do it “right.”

So you go about your day entering in what you ate, and if you do any exercise you get those calories back. (Which, don’t even get me started on the mental f*ck of trading exercise for food. Yesterday, I ran 6 miles so that I could have a beer. Sad. Lame.) ANYWAY, you’re going about your day and maybe you get to the end and you’re in the red. Literally, the total turns red. It turns red whether you’re 1 calorie over or 1,000 calories over. Well, this feels BAD. And this is what happened yesterday at dinner when my mom (who started us on the whole calorie counting thing which maybe she wouldn’t want me to say, woops – but whatever, she’s winning anyway) and my guy were comparing notes.

“You put too much for this chicken,” my guy says to my mom, looking at her calories for the day.

“Oh yeah? Fix it!” She responds, excited because maybe this means she won’t be in the red.

“I’ll give you 110 for the chicken.”

“Hmm. 90 would be better.”

“OK, OK, we’ll do 100.”

“Deal.”

“You’re counting 90 for this bulgur wheat?”

“Yeah”

“Well, I think you’re lying a little.”

This continues on for about 10 more minutes before we turn our attention to Cut the Rope. It’s exactly like being at the bazaar, negotiating every calorie, trying to stay honest while trying to get yourself the best “deal” possible. You can play with the food amounts and if that doesn’t get you there, you can massage the “exercise” calories for the day. “Hmm,” I’ll say to myself. “I probably walked for 10 minutes while I was grocery shopping earlier, what’ll that give me?”

“It’s supposed to build awareness,” my brother says watching and judging. “Then why is it red?! Why are there so many numbers!?” I exclaim. He doesn’t have to count calories, because unlike the rest of us, he actually is in his early 20′s. Just wait, on his first trip to the calorie bazaar, he’ll ask to use my mad negotiating skills to get him the calories he wants.

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Feb 03 2012
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Pinch your butt to ward off jealousy

For as long as I remember whenever I did something good such as do well on a test, my mother has pinched my butt. As a child she would literally pinch my butt, in more recent years she instructs me to pinch my own butt, or as she says in Assyrian, “theesa moocha” which is usually accompanied by a “mash allah,” or “God wills it.”

For years and years I did not question this. I didn’t necessarily think it was normal but I guess I kind of thought it was like a pat on the back or a congratulations, just in an ass pinching style.

It dawned on me more recently to actually ask my mother why she asks me to pinch my own butt. The answer was so convoluted it could only be Iranian.

Apparently if something good happens to you, spirits will cause harm to you because they’re jealous. The extremely beautiful are especially susceptible. To counteract this, you must hurt yourself by pinching your butt so they won’t be jealous of you anymore. The idea is that everyone is jealous of you all the time. Every time I would say that someone was not nice to me or I was mad that they didn’t invite me somewhere, my mother would always say, “they are just jealous of you.” I usually had to laugh because jealously had nothing to do with anything. At least it would make me feel better.

This is along the same lines as the evil eye. You have probably seen it before, that blue charm usually made of glass hanging from people’s (probably Middle Easterners) rear-view mirror. It stares back at the world to help ward off the evil jealousy. Blue eyes are supposed to be more evil or at least more prone to receiving evil mojo, so what I can’t figure out is why the charm is a blue eye.

It is hard for me to understand why every time something positive happens to you, you should do something negative to yourself in order to counteract it. Can good things just not happen to us? On second thought, it is kinda like yin and yang, there needs to be a balance. It is weirdly reassuring that completely different religions and cultures have such similar ideas.

I was pleasantly surprised to find that on Wikipedia’s evil eye page, Assyrians and ass pinching are mentioned (though it was probably one of my cousins that added it).

So go forth and when you get that job promotion or get an A on that test, theesa moocha!

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Dec 29 2011
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Tarof is not a French word

If you are offered dessert in an Iranian household it is customary to initially refuse the cake, cookie, fruit or whatever it is the first time you are offered it, no matter how much you want it. You insist that you are full, that you couldn’t possibly. The host gently pushes back, saying that the dessert will go to waste, that it’s really not that good anyway. There is an abundance of sweets and you have a large selection to choose from. After a couple more rounds you’ll end up with a chai and a sweet, and you don’t have to worry about losing out.

If you are offered dessert in a French household and you want to eat it, take it. Be clear that you’d like it. Take it. Take it the first time because you will not see that dessert again if you refuse. There is just enough dessert for the guests present and if you try to politely refuse your piece of cake, it will simply be divided up among the remaining guests. No second chances.

I’m sure I’m generalizing here a bit, but coming from a place where tarofing is expected, I was genuinely surprised when I had dinner with my French in-laws for the first time. It’s pretty stressful eating with your boyfriend’s parents when you don’t know the rules…they probably thought I was a little off for not wanting dessert or flaky for first saying no, and then yes. And I felt like I was in an eating frenzy, panicked by the thought that I might actually not be forced to eat dessert.

Even if by some freak occurrence you do not end up eating a sweet in the Iranian house, you can count on something being wrapped in aluminum and tucked under your arm on your way out the door. (At least, this is what I know of my Assyrian relatives.) The French traditionally don’t do leftovers. You will not get an extra lunch out of this dining experience.

But hey, once you know the rules, it’s easy to play. I just throw on a different cultural lens depending on my dining companions, and I always politely end up with dessert.

 

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