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Commute
My life is getting a bit odd. I now commute with my two-year-old son twice a week on the commuter rail; 50 minutes, twice a day, on a train. It's...different.
Yesterday he was great in the morning, as he usually is. The conductor was a woman, which fascinated him - women usually do, particularly pretty ones. He still takes special note of tunnels, and asks a million questions, but is relatively quiet and quite good. We only got one "hate stare" from a middle-aged businessman, apparently annoyed by the mere presence of a child to distract him from his oh-so-important reading of the Wall $treet Journal.
Mind you, Sebastian was not being loud at all.
I'd brought a couple of pieces of choreg, which is a sweet Armenian bread; my grandmother used to make it, and my mother does sometimes, and even I won an award for some in Hyastan (Armenian) camp when I was a kid. There are many ways of making it, but we make ours with cardamom. Incidentally, if you would like to learn more about Armenian cooking, you might look here.
None of us had baked this particular choreg, as it had happened; I'd picked it up in Watertown when I'd gone to pick up some lehmejun - okay. This is going to be a long digression. Fair warning.
Lehmejun is another Armenian dish. Now, I'm probably the least adventurous person in the world when it comes to food - and if you don't believe me, ask anyone who knows me - but I was raised on this stuff, and every so often I simply have to have it. Basically it's a very flat disk of dough, a bread dough, with a paste spread over it made of ground meat (traditionally lamb, but beef is more common in the US), tomatoes, onions, garlic, pepper, and other seasonings. UNLIKE pizza, the primary ingredient of the topping is meat. Altogether a lehmejun is quite thin but not very crisp, and normally you'd roll it up to eat it. They're delicious.
Okay, still more of a digression: I'm 100% Armenian (as far as anyone can be certain about these things), but I don't look Armenian. Most of us have dark hair and very dark eyes, we tend to have olive complexions, and our noses are large and, well, uniquely curved (Cher had a traditional Armenian nose, but had it lopped off). I, however, have red hair, the pale skin of a redhead, a very ordinary nose, and the build of a football player going to seed (okay, going badly to seed). Most people take me for Irish; the one clear sign of my ancestry is my eyes, which are the almost jet-black of my people (it's hard to distinguish my pupils, actually). I also look like my father in some ways. Everyone else in my family has dark hair, incidentally, which is why I was all the more amazed when Sebastian was born with red hair. But then, he's my clone.
Anyway, one of the things that's wierd for me is going into an Armenian market or store. The smells affect me powerfully, reminding me of my childhood; I know I belog here. And inevitably the shopkeeper makes it clear that he thinks I'm not Armenian. Not in a rude way, but it's kind annoying. I sometimes think I should learn Armenian if only to surprise them, but even then I'm sure I'd speak with a bad American accent.
Darn it. A slip of the keys made Semagic post this before I was ready. Oh well.
Anyway, I was picking up a couple dozen lehmejun, one dozen each from two different markets in Watertown (there are four places that sell lehmejun within walking distance there, actually). I wanted to compare and contrast them, for some reason. Anyway, I carried Sebastian into the Arax Market and picked up a bag of lehmejun when the shopkeeper, charmed by Sebastian, told him that they were "a different kind of pizza". I was a bit horrified, partly because that's what we (Armenians) might tell an outsider. I was still more horrified when I got home and looked at the bag from Arax - it said "A different kind of pizza" right on the bag! This was the grossest heresy.
As it happened, the Arax lehmejun were rather different from normal lehmejuns; even thinner, and a little different-tasting. My mother was horrified, because Armenians wouldn't make something so skimpy.
Jeeze, was I originally talking about the commute? Yes I was. Okay. Anyway, I fed some choreg to Sebastian, and he loved it. But on the way home he often gets difficult, effectively demanding that the trip end each time we pull in to a station. Thursday was the worst. But we finally made it home and he calmed right down when he saw Teri at the station.
What a bizarre post this was. My brain is totally scattered today. Remind me next time to talk about the wheat donuts of Poughkeepsie.
Yesterday he was great in the morning, as he usually is. The conductor was a woman, which fascinated him - women usually do, particularly pretty ones. He still takes special note of tunnels, and asks a million questions, but is relatively quiet and quite good. We only got one "hate stare" from a middle-aged businessman, apparently annoyed by the mere presence of a child to distract him from his oh-so-important reading of the Wall $treet Journal.
Mind you, Sebastian was not being loud at all.
I'd brought a couple of pieces of choreg, which is a sweet Armenian bread; my grandmother used to make it, and my mother does sometimes, and even I won an award for some in Hyastan (Armenian) camp when I was a kid. There are many ways of making it, but we make ours with cardamom. Incidentally, if you would like to learn more about Armenian cooking, you might look here.
None of us had baked this particular choreg, as it had happened; I'd picked it up in Watertown when I'd gone to pick up some lehmejun - okay. This is going to be a long digression. Fair warning.
Lehmejun is another Armenian dish. Now, I'm probably the least adventurous person in the world when it comes to food - and if you don't believe me, ask anyone who knows me - but I was raised on this stuff, and every so often I simply have to have it. Basically it's a very flat disk of dough, a bread dough, with a paste spread over it made of ground meat (traditionally lamb, but beef is more common in the US), tomatoes, onions, garlic, pepper, and other seasonings. UNLIKE pizza, the primary ingredient of the topping is meat. Altogether a lehmejun is quite thin but not very crisp, and normally you'd roll it up to eat it. They're delicious.
Okay, still more of a digression: I'm 100% Armenian (as far as anyone can be certain about these things), but I don't look Armenian. Most of us have dark hair and very dark eyes, we tend to have olive complexions, and our noses are large and, well, uniquely curved (Cher had a traditional Armenian nose, but had it lopped off). I, however, have red hair, the pale skin of a redhead, a very ordinary nose, and the build of a football player going to seed (okay, going badly to seed). Most people take me for Irish; the one clear sign of my ancestry is my eyes, which are the almost jet-black of my people (it's hard to distinguish my pupils, actually). I also look like my father in some ways. Everyone else in my family has dark hair, incidentally, which is why I was all the more amazed when Sebastian was born with red hair. But then, he's my clone.
Anyway, one of the things that's wierd for me is going into an Armenian market or store. The smells affect me powerfully, reminding me of my childhood; I know I belog here. And inevitably the shopkeeper makes it clear that he thinks I'm not Armenian. Not in a rude way, but it's kind annoying. I sometimes think I should learn Armenian if only to surprise them, but even then I'm sure I'd speak with a bad American accent.
Darn it. A slip of the keys made Semagic post this before I was ready. Oh well.
Anyway, I was picking up a couple dozen lehmejun, one dozen each from two different markets in Watertown (there are four places that sell lehmejun within walking distance there, actually). I wanted to compare and contrast them, for some reason. Anyway, I carried Sebastian into the Arax Market and picked up a bag of lehmejun when the shopkeeper, charmed by Sebastian, told him that they were "a different kind of pizza". I was a bit horrified, partly because that's what we (Armenians) might tell an outsider. I was still more horrified when I got home and looked at the bag from Arax - it said "A different kind of pizza" right on the bag! This was the grossest heresy.
As it happened, the Arax lehmejun were rather different from normal lehmejuns; even thinner, and a little different-tasting. My mother was horrified, because Armenians wouldn't make something so skimpy.
Jeeze, was I originally talking about the commute? Yes I was. Okay. Anyway, I fed some choreg to Sebastian, and he loved it. But on the way home he often gets difficult, effectively demanding that the trip end each time we pull in to a station. Thursday was the worst. But we finally made it home and he calmed right down when he saw Teri at the station.
What a bizarre post this was. My brain is totally scattered today. Remind me next time to talk about the wheat donuts of Poughkeepsie.