Food Installment #1

Week 7
8/8/07
They said it would get hotter in August, but it is the difference in temperature between spring and summer in Sacramento. The stockings I must wear in the classroom are ripped off when I enter our home, which is often the same bubbling heat as the blacktop outside. To cool our bodies way down we eat watermelon. Like tomato, it seems there is enough watermelon to fill our plates and to have between meals. Apparently back in the ‘80s Gorbachev went on an anti-alcohol campaign and replaced all the grape vineyards in Azerbaijan with watermelon. So every day when I come home from school, and every night before I go to bed, we gorge on the succulent, bright, life-saving melon. Thank paranoid Soviet prohibition for that.
Summer fruit is ripening, so pomegranates, blackberries and figs are selling like watermelon in bazaars. To prepare a semi preserve called murabba, I helped my mother poke holes with a fork, twice, in hundreds of summer plums. She placed the plums in a separate vat and topped the fruit with an amount of sugar that would scare the Keebler elves. The bowl boiled for hours on the gas stove. We snacked on some not long after it set, but the best serving was a morning later. A tinge of the sweet jam set it apart from the ubiquitous boiled egg, and bread and butter breakfast.
Like sugar in murabba, the amount of butter and salt used in dishes here is obscene. Every meal—dolmasi, potato wedges, badimcan (eggplant) and pomidor (tomato)—has mounds of butter and salt added. I think our family of six goes through a brick-sized block every day. No good stories, just a lota butta weighin’ me down.