Smells play funny tricks on my mind. I was in the kitchen peeling a tangerine, and the smell brought me back to a time long ago. I remembered the time my uncle brought tangerines from Bodrum (place in Turkey that has really yummy tangerines). I got the full image of us sitting around my grandma’s living room. My cousin Ayse was a few years old, my brother wasn’t born yet, neither was Ayse’s sister Elif. So that would make me about 8 or 9 years old. My grandma was there and so was my mom. I remember All of us sitting there peeling and eating tangeries, and of course talking.
The tangerine smell always reminds me of soba. (Hmm, soba is kind of like a big steel box that you burn coal in and it warms up the house, I am not sure what its called in English.) As a kid I used to put tangerine and orange peels on the soba. Another smell I have strong associations with is mint. I can’t stand the smell of mint. Whenever I smell mint, I start to get nauseated. My mom used to make me a tea out of mint and lemon when I had an upset stomach to help with nausea. If it was winter she would put the cezve (cezve is the thing to make the Turkish coffee in. it is a small pot with a long handle. It is also handy for boiling small amounts of water, and making one or two boiled eggs) on the soba and let the tea steep. I guess I developed an association for mint and nausea. If a dish has mint in it I can’t eat it. My mom likes mint in her mercimek corbasi (it’s a soup made with lentils, potatoes, carrots, onions boiled together than put through a strainer-or blender if you are feeling lazy!) so she has to separate some for me before she puts the mint in there.
Another association with mint I have is with my grandma’s bedroom. My grandma is an avid gardener. She used to have mint plants in our backyard planted in pots. She would collect the leaves and bring them in the house to dry. She would spread a sheet on the bed next to the window and put the leaves there to dry. That smell didn’t bother me. I liked crushing the leaves with my fingers when my grandma wasn’t looking
