Fifth Generation

I made some delicious chaka last night. I took advice and thickened the yogurt and it tasted much better. I talked to my brother in Idaho last night about it and he told me about a yogurt drink he would make in Mongolia. He said he would mix some yogurt into some milk and cover with a towel and keep put for one or two days. I then told him that sounded a lot like kefir.

I looked it up in one of my trusty cookbooks and sure enough my brother described kefir. As I was talking to my brother about it, my husband overheard me and added that his mother in Uzbekistan made it the same way.
My cookbook, however, described kefir as Polish and had other yogurt recipes from all over Eastern Europe. I turned more pages and saw a yogurt recipe from India called kadhi. So from Europe to Mongolia yogurt is a popular condiment also known as katyk.
The word yogurt comes from Turkish and originated in Central Asia. It was popular in Central Asia to Western Asia until the 20th century. There is even a form of yogurt in Indonesia made from buffalo milk.

Popular yogurt drinks are kefir (airag in Mongolian) and lassi. (my sister-in-law has a recipe for lassi at recipeconnection.blogspot.com)

I love yogurt because I am lactose intolerant. I miss having TCBY’s frozen yogurt nearby my house. I had
a friend who worked there and would give me free frozen yogurt whenever I wanted. I also enjoyed yogurt drinks in Korea long before they became popular in America. I first used yogurt in cooking when I made an Afghan recipe using yogurt to marinate chicken. It was delicious.

I am open to using yogurt in other ways and will try to collect more interesting recipes. Please share your favorite yogurt recipes!!!

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This soup took me a long time to make but it was worth it. It is perfect for the winter and goes nice with pita bread.

1 cup navy beans or red kidney beans

1 cup mung beans or split green peas

Soup Herbs: 1 leek, 1 stalk celery, 1 bay leaf, 2 sprigs parsley, 2 sprigs fresh thyme

1/2 cup long grain rice

1lb ground beef or lamb

black pepper and 1tsp red pepper

dash of cinnamon

1/2 cut fresh mint leaves

2 tablespoons vegetable oil

1 medium onion chopped

2 fresh tomatoes (or 1 large can of tomatoes)

1 1/2 cups chaka

Wash navy beans in large soup pot, cover with cold water and soak overnight (or cheat and just use canned beans) Cover mung beans with boiling water and let soak to expand for one or two hours. Ass other beans to the soup pot and add water an inch above them. Ass soup herbs and simmer for 1 1/2 hours or until tender. Mash beans lightly. Add Rice and only enough water to cook the mixture. Simmer 20 minutes. (soup will be thick). In a bowl, mix ground meat, cinnamon, pepper and mint. Knead, shape into balls.n a pan heat oil and saute onions until soft, about 2 minutes. Then add meatballs, cook until browned. Stir in tomatoes and enough water to half cover the meatballs. Cook until sauce thickens. To serve, spoon bean-rice mixture into bowl and top with meat ball sauce. Garnish with mint leaves and chaka.

Chaka

2 cups of plain yogurt, drained in a dampened cheesecloth for 30 minutes

4 to 6 cloves garlic minced

pinch of salt

Mix yogurt, garlic, and salt. Store 2 to 3 days covered in refrigerator.

Recipes are from The New York Ethnic Food Market Guide and Cookbook by Vilma Chantiles.

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This is spaghetti made Uzbek style. My mother- in- law taught me. Yes, I am cooking it in a real kazan.

Just heat some oil. Cook chopped onion in the oil until soft and then add a large can of tomato sauce and salt. (my mother-in-law uses a lot of salt) Then I cook the ground beef until brown and then add the cooked spaghetti noodles.

Kids usually love it and it is not recommended for those on diets. Perfect winter food!

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It is strange how a move can completely change your life. It is a jolt in your universe. I write this after sitting mind numbed staring at a computer screen reading television reviews.

I was motivated before. I wanted to be some sort of writer and used blogging as a way to practice and grow. My pregnancy was my muse. My insomnia filled nights gave me more time to focus on the troubling news of our times. I felt like a hero watching the free world’s arch enemies in Iran and Columbia using my words as a small weapon against them.

Then my son came, my energy sapped. I lost my former direction and landed somewhere on a new road in another more personal, darker land.

Maybe it is the constant fatigue but my creative world is filled with fog and murkiness. I no longer care about arch enemies of the universe. No one else seems to care anyways. In many peoples mixe up minds America is somehow the enemy yet I don’t see anywhere Americans throwing millions into incinerators or executing women and children by shooting them in the back of their heads. America never purposely started a famine killing the folk of the farmlands. America has always been progressive. America changes over time,until now, for the good. Now we seem to be spiraling back into darkness. America is like myself after giving birth to a miracle, we just now feel so darn empty and lost.

I don’t believe that cynical writing will be my future. I have always been a positive person. I person who sees good in the future. That is why I can’t really say that I have post partum depression. I just lost my way a bit. I lost my schedule, my life, my sleep. I will slowly gain those things back as I get used to my new life and surroundings.

My marriage is happier, more than it has ever been in a while. My children are as confused as ever, living strange lost schedules, refusing to sleep at their bedtimes. My infant son seems to think it is playtime all night and sleep time in the day.

However, my favorite time of the year, Halloween, is coming soon. I think this weekend will give me a chance to reboot and get my life together again, back on a more sunnier path.

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In university, I used to always get angry at the Californian and New Yorker students because of their ignorance of American geography. They would first begin by mistaking my soft spoken southern accent (stronger then than now) for a British one. Then we I would explain that I was from Tennessee I would hear all sorts of weird comments and questions like, “Is Tennessee next to Texas?” (only alphabetically) or “Do they have paved roads in Tennessee?” or “You have a lot of cowboys in Tennessee?”(again TEXAS!!!)

I asked my aunt’s husband who is a real Californian patriot, about the ignorance of Californians and he laughed and told me because if you live in California, the rest of the country doesn’t matter.

This is my take on the new movie “Borat the Movie”. The movie stars Borat Sagdiyev a fictional character played by Sacha Baron Cohen. He travels around pretending to be a journalist from Kazakhstan acting weird. Since few people know anything about Kazakhstan, he makes up weird things about the country and people believe him.

He says “jagshemash” is Hello when actually it isn’t. The funniest part of it of all is that he doesn’t even look Kazakh! Also, few in the USA especially know that Borat is actually a Jewish comedian so when he says anti-Semitic remarks as “Borat” few get the joke that he is making fun of himself.

The funniest part is that the jokes show how ignorant people are about the world that they would actually believe Borat is a real Kazakh. It reminds me of a joke I used to tell people when they would ask me what country I came from. I would say “Azerbaijan” and I would always hear that they never heard of the country. So of course they would believe me.

Because of the ignorance, Americans believe Kazakhs drink horse urine, have many wives and girlfriends (the girlfriend part maybe true), and want to start war with Uzbekistan. Because my husband is Uzbek and gets that there is no way this guy is a Kazakh, he thinks it is hilarious. I guess that gives me permission to laugh too! My husband gets blank stares when he mentions that he is from Uzbekistan, so really he could make up weird things too and people would believe him!!

Are Americans really ignorant and are unable to learn geography? No, I think that to most Americans (not all ok!! so don’t get offended!!!) , once you live in America, the rest does not matter.

Here is Borat’s response to criticism by the Kazakh government

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