Continue, Continue

This photo is of the library at Topkapi Palace, the great palace of the Ottoman Sultans built in the 15th and 16th centuries. No, it is not my house though Cihan often likes to refer to himself as "Sultan." Hm.

I don't have a lot of things I cook regularly, but the ones I do, I think I do quite well. I learned the secret to a good omelet from Martha Stewart and so, after many promises that I would one day cook breakfast, I made good on that promise yesterday. Seda was over at the house, and she made most of the breakfast items. Seda is Cihan's Turkish English teacher (stay with me here). She teaches him grammar and is a great help to him as she can explain the rules and translations in Turkish. She is a primary school teacher during the week at a private school run by an American university. She often comes over on Saturday night and stays in Burjuhan's room so that the two of them can have English lessons all Sunday. While she is pretty (she used to be a flight attendant on Turkish Airlines), I am certain that there is no funny business. Seda makes my job is really quite easy; she handles the grammar rules that I don't think I ever learned, and I just talk and listen. I have an easy gig.

So Seda came over Saturday night and taught grammar to Cihan for about two hours. I sat with them a bit and had to bite my tongue a number of times as she corrected him with some very awkward English sentence constructions: "Until when will my car be repaired?" I didn't have any problems with her making some odd sentence choices, it was that she was correcting his which weren't often that bad. My limited knowledge of Turkish sentence structure explained why she ended up with these constructions so I figured as long as they made some sense, I let them be. I don't want to knock down the confidence that is being built and sometimes English just doesn't make sense, grammatically. There were a couple of times, though, that I did have to say something... and get this - she challenged me with a tone of authority. "In English sentences, we put the subject first, then the verb... etc." I gently corrected her as I could. Ah, I do give her credit for teaching English while a native speaker is listening. She has this confidence that borders on arrogance, but I must say I like her.

Anyway, back to breakfast. A week or two ago I did admit to Cihan that I wasn't about to start cooking breakfast as once I started, it might become expected of me. This has become our first running joke. He will just say, with a laugh, "Continue, continue"... right. My fear. For example, IF I start doing some of the ironing, alas, I will become the one in the house who does the ironing.. and I have NO interest in starting bad trends.

So I made a 3 egg cheese omelet that we split. I put aside the fact that I know that eggs sit outside of refrigeration in the supermarket and that one of the ones I used had quite a number of little feathers on it. It was quite good (thanks Martha!). Seda put together the rest of the breakfast. Breakfast is a big deal here and you get to eat all kinds of things that I don't necessarily think of as breakfast-y: olives, halvah, salad. I asked if I could put out the white bean salad I had made the day before and she scoffed a little, and said "Uh no, that wouldn't be right for breakfast." Right. Note to self: halvah and olives are fine for breakfast, but don't even think of allowing beans on the table. So she put out the olives, bread, jam, cheese selection and some specialties she had brought back from her hometown where she spent the holidays. These specialties were a special beef sausage which was amazing and this soft cheese/butter thing that I think is actually the curds from fresh milk. I forget its name but it was excellent with honey on bread. The breakfast was wonderful and I was complimented with a Turkish idiom that means, roughly, "from your hands good health." Nice.