Turkish Latte!

Throw a latte lover in the jungle and she'll whip you one up with coconut milk.

Or so the saying should go.

Mommy needed a latte when Starbucks was too far. So she employed all her resources (and Google) and invented her own twist on the traditional Turkish coffee. 3oz Turkish muddy coffee topped all the way up with hot frothed milk.

I am still campaigning for a cappuccino machine for our 7th wedding anniversary.

Trail mix musings

The best trail mix I'd ever had had to be Sherri's bowl of insanity at Karma Kids NYC while training for teaching yoga to kids. It might have been effected slightly by the amazing mind set I was in in those times...all healthy and om and centered and whatnot.

The second best trail mix might be the one I mixed tonight in my Turkish kitchen. All full of delights that I collected over the course of one night and two..count 'em...TWO shops! Malatya Pazaar and Koylu Peynircilik, both found in my amazing neighborhood within walking distance of my apartment.

I started out small...

...but ran short of space and I had only added about half the goodness.
So I enlisted the otherwise rarely used soup bowl.
Yum. Now it's all in there.

Dried bananas, pineapples, papaya, apricots (Wizard's dad's own), cranberries (yaban mersin in Turkish FYI), and kiwi. Hazelnuts, cashews and peanuts cover the nutty department while shelled sunflower seeds add a band or at least a pretty heavy pattering of vitamin E.

What yummy goodness would be in your dream trail mix?

One of those legendary times...

Wizard's sister Mubareh, sifting through their dried apricot depot. We have 2 kilos of these coming soon.

placekeeper-1

This post shall have no pictures

And you can blame my kids for that.

On Saturday we took a trip out to Torium, the biggest shopping mall near us. It boasts many international brands not found in other smaller malls like, Nine West, Marks and Spencer, H&M, Mango, Zara, Pull&Bear, Gap, Sephora, and Swatch. Not to mention, an indoor snow play ground complete with hills to sled down. Skis and snowboards can be rented as well.

As for us, we'd have enough of snow the last winter to last for a life time. So we shielded our eyes from the evil white condensation and walked on.

At first, it seemed like it will be an easy day out as they do provide a 50 minute free play area pass for kids's Monster's age. I spent those 50 minutes flying around H&M trying on clothes.

After that, it was all downhill. Monster tried several times to run away from us (but that's hardly anything new), tried to take off her clothes in a changing room. At Mango she nearly pulled down a rings display, had a meltdown at a shoe store, and lastly jumped off a stool at the food court banging and cutting her lip against the table. We ate food to the "music" of her continuous whining, and the intermittent gagging from Falafal who insisted on biting of chunks of potato fries stolen from the table.

We still managed to keep our spirits up until it was time to go home. We missed the last free bus service provided by the mall that takes you home so we had to hop onto a crowded mini bus. It still would have been fine if BOTH my kids didn't decide that this was the perfect time and place for having a meltdown....in the middle of armpits and asses and bags hitting me in the head and Falafal clawing my scarf off my head.

Falafal was still easy to handle, all I had to do was take him out of the carrier and let the crowd entertain him (or was he entertaining the people?) Monster continued to whine and cry and poke me in my ribs asking for more space (we did manage to get a seat thanks to a friendly rider). By the time we neared home, I had resorted to tuning out to my own kids pretending they were not mine, even considering giving up ONE for adoption (only as a joke of course). Then I felt sorry for the people who would adopt them and decided to do this kindness to humanity and raise these devils on my own.

One thing was confirmed though and I informed Wizard of this too: I am good with these 2 kids! I have no wish to go through these days again with another 3 year old and a 6 month old. We'll have to tolerate Falafal since he's here anyway and hopefully make the 6 year old Monster take care of his 3 year old issues (muahahaha). No way am I messing up this situation any further.

Of course, Wizard laughs at me and goes "In a few years you will want another baby and you know it."

So I had to tell him "I shall write a detailed blog post on what happened today and use that as a hormonal deterrent."

So here it is, the post that shall be tagged so I can read it "when hormones attack my brain cells" and I am conned into wanting another child.

Are there days when you want to contact a child psychologist just to explore your options, or contact a mental hospital?

That one image...

Every time I head out in the world, I am always on the look out for that one moment in time captured in a photograph that can sum up my life. I have yet to find that one image that will contain my life inside a frame...

I am not even sure if it is probable. My life has been so complicated from the very beginning. I used to think my early years were probably incident free but came to realize that they still had a great impact on my adolescent years. There is a 6 year old hiding in my heart and she remembers everything.

Perhaps, it is merely wishful thinking...wanting to go back to those days when we were living our life not aware of how it will change our future. Had I known about my future, I might have stared at a neighbor's garden a little bit longer, committed to memory the feeling of stealing falsay from a tree a little bit harder. I would have asked another question or two, I would have acted to certain people differently. More kindly.

Had I known. Had I known my life will be so interesting in the future, I would have felt better about the mundane little things that brought me down.

I confess, it will be a hard task to find an image that will sum my life in a photograph. Yet, I keep on searching... for me it's the journey that is the adventure, not the destination.

Got Milk?

Sure, I have some recent unforgettable moments too, like the one with Wizard's sister in law showed me her milk cabinet filled to the brim with packaged milk. I naively asked her "Won't it all go bad? Why isn't it in the fridge?" As if I've never seen UHT treated milk before. *Sigh* It was becoming a fad as I left Pakistan in the fall of 2003 and we did prefer it over unpasteurized milk because our milk man kept trying to keep the traveling milk cool by melting ice blocks in the milk cans....ice blocks that had been sitting next to horses and their copious dung!

(Side bar: When we moved to Lahore from Karachi in the summer of 1997, my brother wondered why his hair was turning a slight shade of green by each evening. A kind cousin explained it was the dried horse dung hanging in the air over Mall Road.)

http://www.calstatela.edu/faculty/hsingh2/articles/milk.research.pdf

To be honest, I'm not convinced that UHT treated milk is good for human consumption. I'm of the times when unpasteurized milk was boiled twice and cooled before drinking and that was that. We never got sick, and certainly were not lactose intolerant. I do remember the first few times we started drinking Haleeb Milk (Pakistan's UHT treated milk brand), yes, it caused a number of issues with too many bathroom trips afterwards. I never really connected the two.

All I know is, you can't make yogurt with UHT treated milk and that is cause for concern hahaha.

Edit: Since I started writing this post, I have discovered the existence of unpasteurized milk in Istanbul as well. I'm seriously contemplating switching us all back to that.

I'm curious to what my few readers think. Please share your experience with unpasteurized, pasteurized, and/or UHT treated milk.