Monday, December 26, 2005
Is there anything that cannot be improved by pickling?
A wise person asked this question this very blog not long ago. According to Samaya, our cleaning lady, the answer is an emphatic "YOX."
Let me give a brief tour of our refrigerator right now, highlighting all the different agricultural products that she improved by pickling:
- chili peppers;
- garlic
- green bell peppers
- special white cucumbers from Sheki;
- ordinary everyday green cucumbers from someone's dacha;
- tomatoes;
- a caper-like flower;
- beets;
- cabbage;
- mushrooms, and,
- red bell peppers.
If Samaya was president of Azerbaijan, I'd buy stock in brine.
And this doesn't even count all the varenekis, or jams, she's made for us:
- Fig jam;
- three different kinds of jam made from a cherry-like thing that people have insisted would cure a migraine (pure quackery, not surprisingly);
- persimmon jam;
- sweet apple sauce;
- rose hip jam;
- raspberry jam;
- walnut jam;
- blackberry jam
- and about three others I have never been able to identify.
Azeris sweeten their tea with these jams so they go through them quickly. We aren't big tea drinkers so we serve them with ice cream at dinner parties. It hardly makes a dent in our supply. No one eats as many pickles as we've got on hand now.
