Ever wanted to try a perde pilav from Siirt or some delicious manti
from Kayseri but couldn't actually get to those places yourself?
If so, check out this article from Today's Zaman, which lists
restaurants in Istanbul that specialize in food unique to Turkey's other
regions. I'm embarrassed to say that I've only tried a few of these restaurants, but there's no time like the present to remedy that!
Over the last 20 years İstanbul has grown enormously. A city that had at the time of the Ottoman conquest in 1453 a population of around 60,000 is now bursting at the seams under the strain of perhaps 16 million residents, with its furthest reaches now sprawling almost all the way to Tekirdağ on the European side and Kocaeli (İzmit) on the Anatolian side.
Paying more than quadruple the price of something back home to satisfy a craving: an occasional indulgence.
At the so-called "Amerikan pazarı" (American pazar) in Alsancak here in Izmir, you can find a whole myriad of stuff that you probably don't need but reminds you of home. There's boxed pancake mixes, canned frosting, the most ginormous bottles of Listerine I've ever seen, and Juicy Fruit gum.
Among the weirder stuff they have: Maxwell House coffee and Lipton tea. Both imported from America.
Because Turkey totally lacks a coffee and tea culture.
You can also get a tattoo, pick up a vinyl record and a bottle of Jim Beam while you're at it.
The Amerikan pazarı is actually housed in the Kervan Pasajı (click for map), but I think most people around here refer to it by the former name. The easiest to find entrance to the pazar is across from Altin Kapı restaurant on 1444 Sokak.
How do you define what is and is not a Turkish dish?
Do you define it by whether the dish is served in a restaurant in Turkey?
Or while you're a guest at a Turk's house?
Or maybe by the addition of Turkish red pepper, which -- I might add -- I sprinkle liberally on pretty much everything?
Take this soup for example: White bean and vegetable soup, or sebzeli kuru fasulye corbasi. I made this on a whim several weeks ago while looking for an alternative to ezogelin corbasi, which was, until a few weeks ago, the only soup I could make.
I've never been served this soup in a restaurant, never seen it on a menu, never eaten it at anyone's house. Yet there it was, in a Turkish cookbook. I tried it, liked it, loved it. I've made it several times now.
A few weeks ago I made it for two friends of ours, both of whom were our Turkish teachers at Dilmer when we were living in Istanbul. Neither one of them had ever eaten the soup before either.
So is the soup Turkish or not?
There are some foods that you can categorize as Turkish. Baklava is one that comes to mind. Lahmacun is another. You could also add kofte and kebabs to that list.
But Greeks also claim baklava as a national dish, you can eat lahmacun and kebabs in many Arab countries, and kofte is nothing more than a meatball, which many other national cuisines are also known for.
Wikipedia defines cuisine as "a specific set of cooking traditions and practices, often associated
with a specific culture. It is often named after the region or place
where its underlining culture is present. A cuisine is primarily
influenced by the ingredients that are available locally or through
trade."
So this soup is Turkish because I used all local ingredients, right? Is it still Turkish if I have to substitute green pepper for celery because celery stalk is so hard to find?
Bah, in the end, it doesn't really matter what this dish is, other than truly excellent. This is really a great soup for the winter and is an excellent first course for a dinner party. When I made this soup with fresh celery and a pot roast, Jeff said it was the best thing I'd ever made.
2 tablespoons olive oil 2 tablespoons butter 1 small onion, diced 3-4 garlic cloves, minced 2 large tomatoes, diced 2 tablespoons tomato paste 1.5 cups small white navy beans (kuru fasulye)* 1.5 litres of chicken stock or water 1 carrot, finely diced 1 celery stalk, finely diced** 1 teaspoon Turkish red pepper salt and pepper to taste 1/4 cup finely chopped parsley
In a medium-sized saucepan, heat the oil and the butter together over medium heat. Add the onion and the garlic and cook gently for about 2-5 minutes, stirring, until they're softened but not brown.
Add the chopped tomatoes, tomato paste, beans and stock. Bring the soup to a boil; then lower the heat and simmer for about 30 minutes.
Add the carrot, celery and Turkish red pepper and cook for another 30 minutes, stirring occasionally.
Ladle the soup into bowls, sprinkle with parsley and serve.
*To prepare the beans, cover them with water and bring the pot to a boil. Allow the beans to boil for about 3 minutes, then cover with a lid and let sit for at least an hour. Alternately, soak the beans in cold water overnight, for about 8-10 hours, then wash and drain them in the morning.
**Celery stalk can be mighty hard to find in Turkey. Make sure you ask for kereviz sapı, which is Turkish for celery stalk, not just kereviz, or you'll get a big hunk of celery root. Which is a lovely thing, just not for this particular dish.
So remember last month when I returned home from pilates class one morning to find that a neighbor had invited me over for coffee? Except it wasn't just one neighbor, it was all the women in the building sitting in a well-appointed salon wearing nylons and heels? And I had rocked up still in my sweatpants thinking I could gracefully defer the offer for coffee and come back another time?
Since then, I have joined the ladies in my building every other Friday for coffee and sweets, swapping my usual work attire -- which, because I work at home, consists of the above-mentioned sweatpants or pajamas -- for dressy pants and a blouse. I sit and listen, they sit and muhabbet sohbet (chit chat) while I try to keep up and say something useful every now and again.
Last Friday, it was my turn to host, an event I have been nervous about for over a month. I decided to make my Pumpkin Spice Bread, which was specifically requested after I had given some as a gift to a few neighbors.
But just in case someone didn't like the combination of nutmeg, cinnamon and cloves, I also decided to go for something chocolatey, so I turned to my need-dessert-in-a-hurry recipe: brownies.
These are the simplest brownies to make. All you have to do is combine this, stir that, plop it in the pan and bake. The ease of making them, though, belies the chewy and light wonderfulness that they become.
113 grams (1 cup) butter, melted and cooled 1 cup sugar 1 teaspoon vanilla extract 2 eggs 1/2 cup flour 1/3 cup cocoa 1/4 teaspoon baking powder 1/4 teaspoon salt 1/2 cup chopped walnuts
Heat oven to 350 F or 175 C. Butter a 9-inch (22 cm) square baking pan.
Stir together butter, sugar and vanilla in a bowl. Add eggs, beat well. Stir together the flour, cocoa, baking powder and salt in a separate bowl. Gradually add this dry mixture to the egg mixture, beating until well blended. Stir in chopped nuts. Spread batter evenly into prepared pan.
Bake about 20-25 minutes, or until the sides of the brownie begin to pull away from the pan. Cool completely on a wire rack. Makes about 9 big brownies or 16 small ones.
Afiyet olsun!
I apologize for only posting recipes with cup and teaspoon measurements. Next month we are going to the states and I plan to buy a scale so that I can actually measure out the weight of all these ingredients, which will make it so much easier to convert, for example, a cup of sugar into grams. Until then, you can use a Turkish water glass (which holds about 6-8 oz) as a cup and a cay spoon as a teaspoon.
Anybody still out there? Yes? Oh good! I'm so glad you haven't left me after my little hiatus there. What have I been doing?, you ask. Oh, the usual. Drank too many martinis on Saturday night at a dinner party, which left me with absolutely no brain cells to write on Sunday. Then got caught up with work on Monday and had somewhat unexpected guests arrive at 8 am on Tuesday.
But then I put on my cooking apron and decided to do something with the frozen pumpkin puree that's been sitting in my freezer for a month. Come hell or high water, I decided, something must be done with it.
So I searched my favorite cooking websites and found this, which seemed to be the perfect pumpkin spice bread. It got rave reviews from commenters and the pictures looked oh so divine.
Sadly, however, I had to make several substitutions seeing as how I did not have canned pumpkin (yuck), sour cream or grapeseed oil. I used fresh pumpkin puree, yogurt and corn oil, respectively, in their places, and the bread suffered for it.
Oh, it smelled just divine, don't get me wrong. But the bread was soggy and mushy inside, a result, I think, of too much water in the puree and yogurt. And maybe I didn't bake it long enough. Who knows?
But oh the smells. All that fresh ground nutmeg and cloves and cinnamon....oh my goodness, I knew that I had to try again. And so I went out in search of another recipe, this time knowing that it couldn't have as much water in it, which meant that sour cream or yogurt was out, and preferably called for pumpkin puree, not canned pumpkin.
And oh, I found it. And it was wonderful.
Now, I've eaten pumpkin spice bread as a kid, and it is always good.
But this....this is AMAZING. And it's all because of one single thing:
fresh spices. They are the single most important part of this recipe.
I used to gripe that it's hard to find ground spices at the supermarket in Turkey, but fresh is so much better, even if I do have to go to three different stores to get enough spices for one recipe and even if I do have to look up what the heck to do with whole cloves online.
Be sure to buy fresh whole nutmeg, which you can grate down with the smaller side of a cheese grater. And purchase whole cloves too, which you can pound into powder in a plastic sandwich bag with a hammer. Or, if you don't have a hammer (and what expat does?) use the heel of a heavy boot.
Hey, I'm all about working with what you've got.
The cinnamon I used was not fresh (that is, I didn't grate any cinnamon sticks for this recipe, but I think I will next time so I've specified to do so in the recipe), but it was fairly new so that helped.
The first loaf I baked of this pumpkin bread was a test one to see if the recipe worked. And huzzah! It did! I baked a second loaf to freeze for the Christmas party we're hosting this Saturday, but the bread wasn't 20 minutes out of the oven before I couldn't help myself, I had to slice into it and eat a big chunk off the end.
All right, I thought. Well, nobody has to know that the end is missing. Everyone will assume someone else at the party ate it.
Nah, I said. Who cares? Here's hoping the pumpkin man at the pazar has more fresh pumpkin for sale!
1 1/2 cups flour (210 grams) 1/2 teaspoon salt 1 cup sugar (200 grams) 1 teaspoon baking soda 1 cup pumpkin puree (1/4 litre) 1/2 cup olive oil (1 dL) 2 eggs 1/2 teaspoon fresh grated nutmeg 1/2 teaspoon fresh ground cloves 1/2 teaspoon fresh grated cinnamon sticks
Preheat oven to 350 F or 180 C. Sift together flour, salt, sugar and baking soda.
Mix together the pumpkin, olive oil, eggs and spices with a whisk or a hand-held blender. Combine with the dry ingredients, but do not mix too thoroughly. Mix until just combined.
Pour into a well-buttered (don't skimp!) loaf pan (any size is fine, as long as it is shaped like a loaf of bread). Bake about 1 hour or until a toothpick inserted into the centre comes out clean and the top is browned and crackly.
After 10 minutes in the loaf pan, turn out the bread onto a cooling rack.
Sugar cookies are a staple in pretty much every American household during the holiday season. They're pretty, they taste good, they don't have any expensive hard to find ingredients and they're great fun for kids, who can use cookie cutters to make fun Santa Claus shapes and Christmas bells out of the dough.
In my effort to celebrate the Christmas season, two of the four above reasons cinched the deal for me on why I should make sugar cookies this year: they taste good and they don't have any expensive, hard to find ingredients.
In fact, you probably already have everything you need to make sugar cookies right in your kitchen. Technically, you can make these cookies year round, but I prefer to eat them only at Christmas.* I think it makes them more special that way.
Most sugar cookie recipes call for freezing or refrigerating the dough for a few hours before baking. This one doesn't and I think it's because this recipe is not necessarily meant for using with cookie cutters. I could be totally wrong about that, of course, so do feel free to try rolling this dough out and making neat shapes.
Me, I'd just rather eat the darn cookie than roll out the dough into snowflakes.
The one thing I noticed when I looked at this recipe was that it called for a lot more flour than sugar, which I thought was odd. Why not call them Flour Cookies, then? I guess that name wouldn't work, though, since in the end they really taste like sugar, not flour. Which is good, obviously.
2 3/4 cups flour 1 teaspoon baking soda 1/2 teaspoon baking powder 1 cup butter, melted and cooled 1 1/2 cups white sugar 1 egg 2 teaspoon vanilla extract or 1 teaspoon vanilla crystals (found in Turkish supermarkets)
Pre-heat oven to 375 F or 190 C. In a small bowl, stir together the flour, baking soda and baking power. Set aside.
Melt the butter and let it cool. In a large bowl, cream together the butter and sugar until smooth. Beat in egg and vanilla. Gradually add in flour mixture.
Using a teaspoon, making small rounded dough balls and place them evenly spaced apart on an ungreased cookie sheet. Make sure the dough balls are small; the cookies will expand in the oven.
Bake 8 minutes in the preheated oven. Let cookies stand for 2 minutes on the cookie sheet before cooling on a wire rack.
Afiyet olsun!
*To jazz things up a bit, you could add a teaspoon or two of fresh lemon juice or lemon zest, or candy like M&Ms, to make these cookies throughout the year. I'm a simple gal, though, I like 'em plain.
They were dressed impeccably, in black velvet pants and nylons and
shiny patent leather high heels. Their hair was done up, curled just so
and their lips painted in various shades of rose.
Immediately, I
flushed. Having just come from Pilates class, I was wearing grey sweats
and a purple t-shirt with a red cardigan over it. I was also wearing
furry brown slippers. In no way was I prepared for whatever this was.
Hesitantly,
I stepped into the salon, waving feebly. I sat down next to one of the
women and looked around. Everyone was looking at me, smiling politely.
My
neighbor brought me a coffee and I took it eagerly, grateful for
something to do, something to look at other than my fuzzy slippers next
to my neighbor's sparkly black pumps.
Just 10 minutes earlier I had arrived home from my early morning workout when Hanife Hanim, the cleaning woman, (yes, I debated and decided to hire one) told me that my neighbor across the hall had dropped by to invite me for coffee.
Really?
I said. How interesting. I've only seen her
a few times and I don't even know her name. How lovely of her to invite
me over.
I had to start work soon, though, so decided to stop by and say thank you for the invitation but could we please have coffee
another time?
I knocked hesitantly on my neighbor's door and prepared for what I
would say. When she opened the door, I was greeted with a hearty "Hosgeldin!" and a heartwarming smile. She ushered me inside with a "gel, gel".
I
had just opened my mouth to speak when she put her hand on my shoulder
and extended an arm towards the salon. I turned to look and saw three
of my female neighbors sitting there sipping coffee.
It turns out that I had just been invited to the bi-weekly coffee club
for the housewives in my building. Unbeknownst to me, they meet every
other week for coffee and sweets and gossip, switching houses each
time. Yesterday was the first day that I was invited.
Over
the next hour, we chatted about how to make homemade facial creams --
rose water keeps away crows feet, apparently -- and how much one
woman's husband loves to sleep.
After some of this lovely chit
chat, I poked my head into the kitchen to tell the host that I ought to
be getting back to my computer.
She waved her hand away. Just have one slice of cake, she said.
Well, I really shouldn't -- wait, is that lemon? Well, I suppose a few more minutes wouldn't hurt...
This
led to a spirited discussion of where to get the best slivered almonds
in Izmir, an item of concern for me as I need to find slivered almonds
for a French chocolate cake I plan on making this month.
Eventually,
I did slip away, with promises to see them all again in two weeks at
another neighbor's house. I came home and told Hanife Hanim about how I
had really just planned to be gone for 2 minutes but...
Have you never been invited to one of these things? she asked.
No, I said.
I have lived in Turkey for more than two years and I've never been
invited. Of course, I've always been in an office during the day....
As she turned away, I asked if she and her friends did something similar.
The life of an expat is many things. It is sometimes adventurous, oftentimes frustrating, more often than not quite exciting, and occasionally even glamorous.
But it can also be very lonely if you don't have a close circle of friends who have become your family.
This is the worst time of year for loneliness, right around the holidays. I am not necessarily hungry for turkey or stuffing or pumpkin pie this year -- although don't get me wrong, I would LOVE some right now -- but I am more hungry for time and knowledge, the kind that comes from interaction with people you love and spend time with on a regular basis.
Living abroad you learn many things about people, about life, and about yourself. But the one thing that I think I am truly missing out on right now is the kind of learning that you pick up during Sunday dinners with the family, the kind that is fluid and spontaneous and without form.
There is so much to learn from family, from close friends who have been there, done that. I told my stepmother more than once, for example, that if Jeff and I ever buy an apartment in Turkey, I want her to come for a few months and oversee the renovations. She's good at that kind of stuff, she knows how to lay tile the right way and can tell if the contractor is doing it wrong.
And my mother, she and my stepdad could write a book about how to tell authentic antiques from fake ones, and how best to refinish a dilapidated dresser, and which kind of rusted watch sold for $1 at a flea market will get you the big bucks on eBay. And sometimes I wish I could ask my dad about all the stuff he's got planted in the yard, what kind of flower grows best in the shade, how I can grow basil on my balcony.
So instead, I turn to the internet for nearly everything I need to know. And the internet....well, let's just say it's lacking in so many ways, especially when you're trying to learn how to cook, which I have been trying to do for a few months now.
In a piece I read today, of all days, in the New Yorker titled "What's the Recipe? Our hunger for cookbooks" by Adam Gopnik, he writes about how many cookbooks have turned into rote grammar books, whereby we don't actually learn how to cook but instead learn how to simply put together a recipe:
But is learning how to cook from
a grammar book—item by item, and by rote—really learning how to cook?
Doesn’t it miss the social context—the dialogue of generations, the
commonality of the family recipe—that makes cooking something more than
just assembling calories and nutrients? It’s as if someone had written
a book called “How to Play Catch.” (“Open your glove so that it faces
the person throwing you the ball. As the ball arrives, squeeze the
glove shut.)
And that is EXACTLY what I have been doing. I do the same thing with food blogs (cookbooks are too expensive here) by finding ones I trust and like and go back to again and again when I want to make something. But by doing that, I'm really not learning how to actually cook anything.
My friend Chole is one of those people who can look at a recipe for chocolate chip cookies and judging by how many eggs there are or how much sugar it calls for can tell what kind of cookies you're going to get. When I told her last year that I wanted to make thick and chewy chocolate chip cookies but that every recipe I was trying produced flat ones, she found me a recipe that produced exactly what I was looking for. How? She knows that more brown sugar and egg yolk will produce thick and chewy cookies.
Now, I do all this stuff by trial and error which means that yesterday I boiled the lasagna noodles because the recipe I'm following says to EVEN THOUGH the box says NOT TO. But you must follow the recipe! Indeed! The recipe will show me the way!
I've got a kilo of pureed pumpkin in my freezer that I am terrified of using because I have no idea what to expect with any of the recipes I've found. Spicy Thai soup sure does sound great, but will it be so spicy that Jeff won't eat it? And what about all those pumpkin cupcake recipes -- which, first of all, would mean I'd have to buy a cupcake pan -- that call for cream cheese frosting? I don't know about those either.
I guess what I would rather do, what I feel I am really missing out on, is being able to call someone and say, hey, have you ever made pumpkin soup before? Come on over to my house and let's do it together. Oh, and bring an eggplant over, will you, because I have yet to learn how to broil one.
That'd be so much more fun than following a recipe off the internet.
So yesterday I'm having lunch at the Bostanli pazar, a farmers' market/flea market that converges on my neighborhood every Wednesday, when I notice an old man sitting next to an cart full of chickens.
The cart, which was set upon two rickety wheels and encased in chicken coop netting, had a umbrella attached to it with rope. The fact that the old man's "shop" was set up a ways away from the main selling area made me wonder just what it was he was doing with those chickens.
I slowly ate my gozleme and sipped my steaming cay as I watched the old man. He fidgeted with his bright blue wool cap and watched the scores of people go by. I hoped one of the passers-by would do something, anything, to give me a better indication of what it was the old man was doing there, but nobody seemed the least bit interested in him or his chickens, except for a naughty little boy who tried to poke one of them.
It occurred to me that the only was I was going to find out the particulars of this man's business was to ask him myself. I mean, I'm not entirely stupid; obviously he was selling the chickens. But how? Live? Dead?
I thought about how I might ask these questions in Turkish without appearing like an idiot. In the end, I gulped my tea down and stood up. Here goes nothing, I thought.
"Excuse me, may I ask something?" I asked tentatively.
"Of course," he said.
"Are you selling those chickens?" I asked.
"Yes" came the reply.
I paused. Okay. We've established what I already know.
"Well...how are you selling them? Like this?" I gestured weakly towards the chickens to indicate that I mean alive.
"However you want. You can buy them alive, or I can cut them. However you want."
I assumed that by using the word "cut" he really meant "kill." Now for the hard part.
"Okay....where do you cut them?"
The old man jerked a thumb behind him, but all I could see was a dilapidated bicycle and a dirty white tarp. He squinted up at me and I could tell that the furrow between his eyebrows wasn't only because of the afternoon sun. He must have been wondering why I was asking him such dumb questions.
"Where's your farm?" I said.
"In Izmir, not far."
I stared at the chickens a moment. Here it is staring me in the face, everything I'm always reading about sustainable living and organic this and free-range that. Here it is, complete healthy chickens from a local farm and I'm all squeamish because I can't stomach the thought of one of them being killed under a dirty tarp and then having to take it home how? In a plastic bag? What would I do with the feathers? Yech. I decided to stop asking questions.
On the other hand, he did say I could buy it alive, and a live chicken would be a great play mate for my cats.
It was well over a year after I had arrived in Turkey that I finally discovered the glory that is Yemek Sepeti. I don't think it was until I started making expat friends that I heard about this website, this wonderful website that delivers food to your door. Well, the website doesn't, but you know what I mean.
Gone were the days when I had to actually call a restaurant and -- gasp! -- speak to a human being to order my lahmacun. Now I could go online, click the dishes that I wanted and yippeee! 30 minutes later somebody brought it straight to my door.
The best thing about Yemek Sepeti, I think, is that you don't enter any credit card information online. You simply pay the delivery guy with cash or a debt card or whatever when he shows up with your food.
You totally need this in your life.
The first thing you want to do is go to Yemek Sepeti's homepage. From here, choose your city.
