Boiled cow feet, sir?

I am a terrible, terrible wife.

We all have our dirty little pleasures. Some people have sex with goats.
I watch Eastenders. And I love my occasional copy of the Russian Cosmo my mother brings when she comes over.

And every time, I swear: every single time it has some article that would slot right into my life in its current stage. Spooooky.

This time, I read a piece about becoming lazy in relationship, and how this woman’s husband did not even notice she was sporting a fake moustache one night.
So, the article claimed you know you got too lazy if you don’t remember what town your husband has just been away for work to.

F***!- I thought- Was it Leeds? Was it Nottingham?

(Have actually checked with him, and it was Chel-ms-ford. I mean, how would anyone expect me to remember that word? I am foreign, after all. All English towns sound pretty much the same to me.)

And, as if that was not bad enough, I was also convinced he was not back till tomorrow night. If I had known he was coming back today, I would have prepared, you know- cancelled all the lovers coming over; but more importantly, I would have planned a different dinner, and warned my mother to hide some stuff.

Husband loves Azeri dishes. Most of them. Not the fried burgers (kotletas) we planned for tonight. Neither does he appreciate some very peculiar things my mother arranges around the kitchen. For instance, she might decide to prepare her own pickled red cabbage. It smells as if someone with a digestive disorder died in our house about a month ago. Our freezer is packed with imported wine leaves and occasionally, we find trays with drying mint all over the kitchen.

What’s that?- husband pointed to a complicated arrangement of pots and towels in the corner of the kitchen worktop. I explained that my mother was busy turning the full fat milk into a natural yogurt, or motsoni.

According to her, the yogurt they sell in the UK is not good enough, as it is packed with chemicals. And my mother is determined to feed me the most natural yogurt possible. She believes my blotchy body needs cleansing and detoxifying. I am being very patient about the whole thing, because I know it could be a lot worse. She could be insisting on colonic irrigation.

We also are not very traditional Azeries. Husband has to be grateful for that. We could be cooking Khash in our English kitchen. Khash is a national dish that Azeries (mainly men) traditionally consume early in the mornings, with some vodka. You need vodka to be able to enjoy boiled cows feet. The below the knee parts (including hooves) get placed in a large pan of cold water and left simmering over night. Russians enjoy theirs in a form of a chilled jelly (Holodets).

But hold on, before you think Azeries are weird, what about some other national dishes? Don’t they bury fish in Iceland before they eat it?
Kazakhs eat horses, Koreans- dogs, and my mother in law…. Well, my mother in law likes to make soup.

To be precise, a second-hand soup. Only very poor people would do something like that back home. When there is a war.
Because, to an Azeri, using a carcass of an already once cooked chicken would be like announcing to the world we could not afford a fresh meal.

Brits, however, happily use the left-over bones from their roast chicken dinner to make a soup. My mother in law takes it a step further, and adds anything else that I was not quick enough to bin. I had been pretty good about it until one day, she chucked in the left-over chips from fish & chips dinner the night before.

As I said, I am a terrible, terrible wife. And a daughter in law.