It’s a major irresponsibility that I never composed a post dedicated to drooling over the culinary glories of Asia Minor. [pause to let eyes glaze over dreamily] It seems especially poignant now that it’s raining buckets here, and Istanbul is just a sun-drenched, produce-rich memory. Karl, the unstoppable documentarian, took a million pictures, and though we griped at the time, we’re now all quite grateful (Tamara nixed the bawdiest bathing suit pics; I’m trusting Peter cut the ones of me with the worst posture), and he’s nodding smugly.

First of all, let me just say that cookbook author Paula Wolfert deserves sainthood. She’s out there, in tiny villages all around the Mediterranean, talking to little old ladies and writing down their recipes before they croak and all is forgotten. She also wrote an article for Food & Wine, way back when Istanbul was just a gleam in our eyes. I cooked all the recipes by this alleged genius chef, Musa Dagdeviren, and drooled. Then Tamara was talking to the food editor of Saveur, and she was raving about the same guy and his fantastic restaurant. It’s called Ciya, on the Asian side, in the produce market of Kadikoy, and it’s the most phenomenally wonderful food I’ve eaten in years. Very simple–a cold help-yourself salad bar, then a point-to-order collection of hot stews and so on. No booze. Yummy melon and cherry drinks. The most charming waiter in the world, who brought us little extras like oregano tea. Unfortunately, the specifics are fucking lost, because I managed to leave my little notebook in a cab recently. (Why is my record-keeping life unraveling this way? First my computer, then this….) We also went back for lunch, when we had extra time to meander in the market, leading to ecstatic tastes of five kinds of honey, inside the beautiful honey shop, all wood-paneled, filled with dizzy bees, and sporting a honeycomb-pattern ceiling, as well as photo ops with heavy lifters of fish and roving geese.

We’d wanted to go to Ciya again for dinner (yes, that’s three meals in three days–so?), but we got happily waylaid at our new friend Gurhan’s, in an evening that deserves its own coverage. [pause to swoon with memory] Otherwise, we ate some intensely delicious ice cream (I think I’d mentioned before): a comedy of errors in the ordering, but we ended up with flavors none of us could complain about, even if they weren’t the ones we’d asked for. One example: the green fig ice cream. Another: banana, which was really, really just like bananas, but richer. And all the dark berries. We slurped at our spoons while transfixed with embarrassment at the flat-screen TV showing appallingly slutty Christina Aguilera videos. (Can someone, for the sake of America’s global image, reign in MTV just a tad?)

We also had some manti, these little tiny lamb dumplings covered in garlicky yogurt sauce. We had beautifully composed maqlubeh (a sort of Levantine upside-down eggplant cake with rice in the middle) and the most amazing crumbly pistachio cake topped with clotted cream at a little Armenian place in the car-parts district. Ayran and fresh-grilled fish sandwiches–big slabs of oily mackerel with skin so black they looked like eggplant slices from far away. And the very first day we were in town, we had kebabs galore, plus some cheese the guy had made himself–and this was in the sorta tourist zone. And back in Ayvalik, where our hotel owner snipped some grapes right off the shade-making vines in the backyard, and they were perfectly honeylike…

I’m crying right now that I don’t have my notebook. All the Turkish words I wrote down. All the little memories I could be jogging, just flipping through the pages. And I’ll never know whether that salad I ate at Ciya was sorrel or what. Unless, of course, I go right straight back next year.

A gentle reader–let’s call him Spicy and Sociable–wonders:

Does cumin smell? Specifically, does cumin smell like really bad body odor? I ask because we spilled some in one of our kitchen drawers a couple of weeks ago, and now every time I open that drawer I reflexively sniff my armpit. Am I crazy?. . . And if I eat lots of food with cumin in it, will I smell terrible?

Hm. I have had someone say, “Ugh, you positively reek of curry.” Which could be related to the cumin in the curry. Or is S&S having one of those weird synesthesic breaks that I think is a precursor to a full schizophrenic freakout? Or am I making crap up because I’m too lazy to look up how to spell the word synesthesic, and whether it has anything to do with overall mental health?

Has anyone else experienced this scent association? Been caught sniffing the corners of the spice cabinet? Been reviled by non-cumin-eaters? Tell all…

This afternoon I was wallowing in that wonderful treat the Dutch call muizestrontjes, or “little mouse turds.” (Actually, per recent official Dutch spelling changes, I guess it should be muizenstrontjes.)

That’s the not-such-a-stretch term for chocolate jimmies, or sprinkles, which the Dutch, in all their ingeniousness, sprinkle on warm buttered toast, so they get a little melty. The larger category of jimmies is called hagelslag, which means something about hail, which I now forget. But I just picture a little hailstorm on my buttered toast and get all warm inside.

Stupidly, I have never incorporated muize(n)strontjes into the Amsterdam Diet. I guess because I knew I was eating so badly in all other arenas that I couldn’t bring myself to eat chocolate-covered toast for breakfast on top of it all.

But then Rod gave me a box of hagelslag for Queen’s Day (did he buy it second-hand? I hope not), which is a variety pack of dark chocolate, milk chocolate and fruit-flavored jimmies. One little pack of jimmies is good for two pieces of toast, even if you’re sprinkling very liberally.

The classy thing is that this is very good chocolate. It’s not the crap you get on your sundae at the Mr. Softee truck. But now I’ve eaten all the dark chocolate packets, and I’m not so excited about the milk and fruit flavors. Next trip, I’m stocking up on all dark, all the time.

Last night, from off in the hallway, Peter says, “Hmm, that duck isn’t making me feel so good.”

A couple of hours earlier we’d had a dinner of leftover pad thai, which we’d made the night before, and some leftover duck salad from a restaurant, from Friday night. Both things we’d eaten before, to no ill effect.

When Peter says he’s feeling sick, no offense, it usually means he’s eaten too much. Which also means that I’ll probably be okay, but it all depends on the party we’ve been to. It’s far less likely that he’s about to throw up because he’s eaten something toxic.

As I’ve related earlier, I have a bit of a tetchy gut, and just about anything semi-dodgy makes me yak; when I travel, I plan on being down with vomiting for a day or two. (Miraculously, this has never been the case in Mexico.) By contrast, Peter has a GI tract of steel, and can eat steak tartare sandwiches given to him by lepers. It’s a little infuriating to travel with, in fact (‘cause, y’know, Lonely Planet says those leper-made sammies are the tastiest thing to eat in Cuba!).

So, when Peter says he’s feeling sick, and I’ve just shared a dinner with him, I have two very conflicting responses: 1) Gosh, Peter, I hope you’re fine. 2) Gosh, Peter, I hope you are sick, just so you know what it feels like for a change.

And then, the corollary to the latter: If he’s sick, then I am truly screwed. How sick am I willing to be just for a little petty satisfaction?

As I’m sitting in my chair, writing and mulling over this dilemma, Peter does indeed start throwing up. It doesn’t sound pretty. I’ve very quickly lost my nerve—I take it all back. I never wished he’d be sick. Evil, evil, evil. And is that a dull ache I’m feeling in my own gut?

From here, it’s waiting—to see if I really get nauseous, and to see if he has to throw up again. If it’s just a one-shot deal, then it was pure gluttony or just too much chili in the duck (that shit was deadly hot), and I’m off the hook. I’m mentally calculating the ratio of my dinner to his—I’d really had only a few bites, because I’d had a bunch of bread and cheese beforehand. So, 1:4, maybe? Does that mean I’ll puke 75 percent less?

Just about the time I’m really beginning to question my own digestion, Peter rouses himself from bed to throw up again. I am still wide awake, sitting up writing, and now I know I am fucked. I close up my computer and ready myself for misery.

But I’m an old hand at this. So I’m regaining a teensy bit of that schadenfreude, because I can puke up my dinner like a pro, and I know I’ve been through a lot worse than that meager bite of duck (or was it the shrimp in the pad thai?) can do to me. It has been a few years, so I’m a little rusty, but it’s just like riding a bicycle. There, one quick visit to the toilet, and I’m feeling much better. (But I can tell that won’t be the end of it. Not sure how I know, but it’s one of those things you get good at judging.)

Meanwhile, Peter’s coming around for his third visit, and moaning a bit—“No màs,” he says weakly, futilely. I can’t say I’m actually enjoying watching him, because it is awful to see someone you love suffering for something they didn’t set themselves up for (if it’s their own damn fault, well, that’s different). But there is this nasty little core in me that is taking a sick pride in my years of experience with food poisoning, dysentery and so on. From the age of eight, I think it was, and that roast beef au jus at Villa di Capo in Albuquerque, in which the beef had a fascinating iridescent gleam to it, yet I still ate it because the au jus part was so fancy-sounding… Certainly, controlled vomiting was never a life skill I aspired to perfect, but I’ll take what I can get.

“Hon,” I want to say to Peter as he huddles on the bathroom floor, “this is nothin’.” But he’s already heard my worst barfing story, so I try to look at the bright side: “At least we’re not so in synch that we need the toilet at the same time. At least we don’t have diarrhea too. At least we’re not in a palm-thatch backpackers’ hut somewhere up the Mekong with only a pit latrine.” And to myself I say, “At least I had only a couple bites of dinner.” Evil, evil, evil.

We made it through the night, having heaved up everything by about 4am. The next morning, Peter said, “I think that’s the most I’ve thrown up, well…ever.”

Damn it. This robs me of all satisfaction, as it only reminds me of all the times I’ve gotten sick and he hasn’t, of what a strangely lucky duck he is (ew, duck, just the mention makes my head spin a little). Is there a German word for the sort of schadenfreude that comes back to bite you in the ass?

From the Polenblog, it’s, uh, a little late, but perhaps for all of those who still have some matzah to use up? I personally have sampled both of Twin C’s tasty specialties, and they’re great:

Work is at its regular intolerable levels. Short day today. Seeing my friend Kara’s dance production at Symphony Space. Then two days of Jewin it up, Passover style. I have to run home and cook up a batch of Chocomatzah, the only way to eat matzah!(TM). Basically it’s matzah with about five gallons of homemade caramel on it, then melted chocolate on top of that. It’s yummy, and pretty easy to make (you know I wouldn’t be making it if it was difficult!). Next week, another batch of chocomatzah, as well as perhaps the most bizarre thing I make – coffee boiled eggs. Two dozen eggs go into a big pan (I usually use a turkey roaster) with a lot of coffee grounds, a decent amount of water, some onion skin, and a little olive oil. This gets placed in the oven at 200 degrees for somewhere around 14 – 18 hours. When the eggs come out, the coffee has seeped through and flavored them, and the onion skins have (hopefully) made really cool designs on the shells. I don’t remember where the recipe comes from – I think it’s Romanian? Sarah Braun told me about it originally, I think.

The egg-boiling thing is used in Egypt as well, for the record, and not just by Jews.

And happy real (Greek) Easter to those who care about things like calendrical logic (how can Easter ever come before Passover?).

I’m in Amsterdam now, and have been practicing the tried and true Amsterdam Diet, which does not involve (very much) pot, as it happens. Yesterday was Queen’s Day, which was insane, raucous and delicious. More on that later, and on the intricacies of the diet, which Peter and I will turn into a book and make a mint off of. (Warning to lazy Americans: it does involve some exercise. But also lots of fried foods.)

Before I get to the grisly matter at hand: We cooked a big meal, it was delicious, and we all loved each other soooo much. Easter, this time. We made a toast to the lamb.

Surprisingly, for a meal that started at 4 in the afternoon, I didn’t eat myself sick, but somehow we did get on the topic of throwing up. And telling my Cairo barfing story made me think that since I haven’t done anything worth writing about recently (those aren’t even my deviled eggs in the Easter photos–I just held the egg halves while Karl piped), I’d catch up on old times, a la Jefe. This story even involves drugs, of a sort.

From my very first day in Cairo, I was sick. I’d gone there for CASA, this hard-core Arabic program that lasts precisely one year and is the hazing process and crucible for any Middle East scholar of merit. (That’s a bit of foreshadowing–note that I am not at this time a Mid East scholar of merit.) Cairo is truly one of the world’s great cities, as I’d learned on a previous stint there that involved serious research into its nightclub culture, but I wasn’t too excited about going this time, due to various misgivings: already, my future as a medieval Arabic poetry pundit was in doubt, and my boyfriend at the time was back in the States.

Almost immediately, the city of 19 million clamorous strolling knife sharpeners, horn-happy cabbies and sidewalk lechers took its toll on my body. After a nasty long flight that required extensive napping in a construction zone at the Frankfurt airport (am I remembering this right? I do of course remember meeting Aaron on the plane, who asked me if I happened to know Peter M. at Princeton), our merry band of twenty Arabic dorks were whisked from the airport to our hotel, sent to bed, and roused at 8am to sticky summer heat and a quietly sweating buffet in the breakfast room. By noon, I was peeling off from the campus walking tour to go heave up my morning meal in a strange bathroom.

The school staff were very solicitous, because someone on the program had actually died the previous year, collapsed in a diabetic coma and not discovered for days. So I had people ringing me up and coming by with presents and telling me strange medical tips, and I managed to regain enough intestinal stability to start class along with everyone else.

But I was never quite right, it seemed, and in a few more weeks I was sick enough to go the campus clinic. The doctor there listened to me describe my symptoms–just nothin’ was staying in–and rather blithely, I thought, diagnosed me with amoebic dysentery, but as I’d been lying in bed thumbing through all the woeful tropical disease descriptions, I was just happy it wasn’t meningitis. He gave me a prescription for Flagyl and sent me on my way.

Even at that point, I was no stranger to throwing up, as I’ve always been a stomach-stress kind of person (ask my third-grade friends about my behavior post-state-spelling-bee, and a chocolate ice-cream soda). I was also no stranger to Flagyl, known as the top-of-the-line, most vicious of all anti-every-little-critter drugs. While I hadn’t taken it myself, my good friend Karen, whom I’d met on my previous visit to Cairo in 1992, had practically been a Flagyl junkie that summer, and she’d still had to be whisked back to a hospital in the States on short notice in the middle of the night. (You should’ve seen her shopping for gifts right before she left, though–intense GI trouble can make you into a very insistent bargainer with very little patience for dilly-dallying.)

So as I walked toward the pharmacy with my Flagyl prescription in my hand, I was a little worried. Would this even help?

And even more important, would I be able to drink while I was on this?

See, coming up the following weekend was the very first party of the CASA season. Already I could see that this was going to be just like high school, all cliquey and shit, and it seemed crucial not to be marked as the outcast by the other 19 people, whom I would be in class with all day every day for the next year, this early on, as it could easily ruin my time in Cairo and affect the rest of my Arabic career. I’m not exaggerating–bitter CASA-year rivalries are legendary, persisting for decades, so that so-called colleagues are still snubbing each other in the halls at the annual Middle East Studies Association conference. And of course I was in Cairo–so how could I pass up the opportunity to drink a gin-and-tonic under the dusty chandeliers in Aaron’s faded-glory colonial-era apartment in Garden City?

So I got my prescription filled at the pharmacy, a kind of sloppy process in which the guy just slid me a few blister packs over the counter and sent me on my way. No box with dosages, or warnings, or explicit words on whether I shouldor shouldn’t booze it up.

On my walk home, I reasoned that if it were really horrible for me to have a drink, either the doctor or the pharmacist would have said something…right? I figured it’s just like any other antibiotic, and booze would just make it less effective (which I now know is a lie, as it happens–turns out antibiotics just make you get drunk faster). I know, this all sounds really, really bad and addicted and dangerous to someone just reading this, but when your life has come to consist solely of shuffling back and forth between bed and the bathroom, you really start looking forward to some kind of social outlet.

Well, party night rolls around, and my course of Flagyl is nearly up anyway, so I have a wee gin and tonic and start a-chatting with my colleagues. About halfway into my second drink, one of the Mormon guys is dancing with me and flips me over his head (gee, remember the swing dance revival? Those crazy 90s…). A little bit after that, the room becomes quite spinny, and I’m not feeling so hot. A little bit after that, I’m discreetly vomiting in the faded-glory colonial-era bathroom. I go back out and check my gin and tonic: No, I didn’t drink any more than half of that second one.

Oddly, throwing up hadn’t really made me feel any better. After a while, I’m feeling so much worse I can’t even rally to go home. But I’m in a room full of all-but-strangers and I don’t want to let on quite how shitty I feel. Because I only drank ONE AND A HALF drinks. What’s wrong with me? I’ve got plenty of time to mull this over, sitting on the floor, head propped up against the wall, quietly sweating and wondering how much longer before I have to bolt to the bathroom again. I was just about to turn 25…maybe this was just what getting old felt like?

After what felt like a million years, I got home, only a few blocks away. I threw up again for good measure, drank a ton of water, and went to bed, hoping for quick sleep and no dreams about my clearly impending mortality.

The next morning, whaddya know, I still felt like shit. In fact, I could safely say that this was the very worst hangover I’d had in my entire life. It didn’t help that I was in Cairo, in July, with no air conditioning. And like every apartment in Cairo, ours was directly across from a mosque with a loudspeaker. It was Friday, so roundabout noontime, the big weekly sermon started. I was pressed against the cold marble floor in the bathroom as the guy across the street began to declaim. If this had happened at the end of my year there, I would’ve been able to understand that they guy was yelling, in his formal, grandiose, near-medieval, super-bombastic Arabic, that GIVING ALMS IS AN ABSOLUTE GOOD, ONE OF THE FIVE PILLARS OF ISLAM!!! or something equally benign. But at the time, he sounded like he must certainly be saying, “DECADENT, DRUNKEN AMERICAN WOMEN MUST SUFFER, AND SUFFER, AND SUFFER SOME MORE!!!” and he said it for about 45 minutes.

The sun finally set that day, probably the longest of my life up to that point, and I went to bed again with high hopes for full recovery in the morning.

No luck. I still felt like shit the next day, but at least it was just ordinary hangover-level by now, and the uncontrollable retching seemed to have subsided. But I felt bad enough that I called my mom, the first of several near-collapse calls I made that year. I explained my situation, throwing in the self-pitying part about feeling really old. My mom, who’s an herbalist, went into instant diagnostic mode. I could hear the pages of her Physician’s Desk Reference flipping in the background.

“Wait–Flagyl? You didn’t drink, did you?!” she finally said.

“I swear, just one and a half drinks! And the pharmacist didn’t say I couldn’t!”

“Oh, honey,” she said in that same I’m-so-very-sorry way she reserves for when I adopt a particularly unflattering style of dress. “It says here that one of the major components of Flagyl is also the active ingredient in Antabuse. You know, the drug that they give alcoholics to make them hate drinking so much they’ll never do it again.”

If I’d had more than spotty dial-up Internet then, I could have found out all of this. (Oh, that’s just great–reading all that now, I see that I actually could’ve died.) But when I heard my mom say that then, all I could think was, Thank god, I’m not getting old after all.

I wish I could say that once I recovered from that hellish little interlude, the rest of the year was smooth sailing. But no–I just kept yakking away, for no particular reason. After just a couple more months, all my fellow CASA people were bragging about how they were practically eating raw chicken right off the sidewalk, and I was still having nightmarish visions of the few shreds of amoeba-coated lettuce that had snuck into my sandwich, as I hunched over the toilet. I’m surprised my teeth didn’t fall out.

But the great thing about the whole Flagyl incident is that I really did appreciate my booze a lot more after that–and, I’ll be honest, drinking is what got me through my last six months there. And I did really teach myself to cook that year, because I couldn’t eat anything in restaurants for most of the time. I went to cooking lessons at the Indian consulate, which was hilarious and useful, and made me feel like not the only idiot in Cairo. But that’s maybe a separate story…and it doesn’t involve so much throwing up.