Cooed

I've been home from work for about two and a half hours now and I'm both exhausted and wide awake. The worst combination. Today wasn't "bad" per say - but it was more of the same and lately that in itself feels bad enough. Some hard decisions are on their way - and hopefully some subsequent changes. All I know right now is that I don't like my job (actually, I kind of loathe it), and I plan on getting a little French on whomever chooses to be rude to me next. And unfortunately, that might very well be my boss. Oops.

My friend Kate pointed out a glaring blog oversight to me today. Amongst all of my Turkey Talk and Istanbul zeal, I've managed to not discuss food once. What the fuck. Me? Not talk about food? When the number one item on my to do list in NYC was "go to Mast Choco. Factory" and number two was "eat chocolate"? I'm either experiencing a rare Eastern European Brain Fever, or I'm subconsciously repressing all the great memories so I can cope with the blandness of my own cooking. Hmmm. Brain Fever it is.

I'd like to begin by saying that I didn't go to Turkey to eat. The only thing I knew about Turkish cuisine before stepping foot onto our plane at LAX was that "döner" of "döner kebab" is a Turkish word, and therefore, in all likelihood, I as a vegetarian would be shit out of luck. Actually, that's not entirely true. I also knew that Istanbul was a city surrounded by lots of water, and that I don't eat fish or crustaceans, or any beasts of the sea. Even more out of luck.

And - I knew Turkish Delight was... well, Turkish. My friend Robin gave me a box of Turkish Delight when I graduated college FOUR YEARS AGO (!?!) as a very sweet and considerate joke. I have no idea where the hell she found it in Portland, OR, but I remember hesitantly opening the box and nibbling a piece. It smelled and tasted like my grandmother's moth-eaten nightgown. Rose water. Lots of it. Have you heard of Turkish Delight? Do you remember where you first heard of it?

If you're like me and read The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis when you were young and impressionable, then that's where. Our friend Clive introduces it as THE candy Edmund chooses (out of every conceivable item) when the White Witch offers him a gift. In exchange for a box of the good stuff, he agrees to sell out his family, thus becoming a shifty bastard, and well... Judas. Curious, non? His little boy heart's desire? A symbol of sweet, foreign EVIL? It doesn't take but a moment's digging to discover that this was a rather unsubtle piece of propaganda on Clive's part. The Ottoman Empire allied itself with Germany during WWI and Clive couldn't have his readers admiring anything about the east. Anyway. Robin had heard me ranting and raving about what a prick I think C.S. Lewis is for an entire year. It seemed fitting.

So. Kebab. Fish. Rose flavored cloyingly sweet chunks of goo. Sounds delicious.
Oh, how wrong I was.

Two things struck me as soon as our flight took off. 1. The flight attendants passed out bags of nuts, but they weren't peanuts. They were HAZELNUTS. And on the packaging was written: "The Miracle Nut HAZELNUT Comes from Turkey!" Salted hazelnuts in a bag with a Turkish flag winking at me. Holy hell. A revelation. I don't even know if they really DO come from Turkey, but I don't care. I'm sold. 2. While perusing the beverage options, I noticed a juice called "sour cherry." Not one to back away from such a claim, I tried it post haste. Amazing. Not very sour.

I'd managed to find a list of vegetarian or vegetarian-friendly restaurants on the interwebs, but my mom and I weren't really in a state to seek any of them out when we landed in Istanbul right before dinner time. After we checked into our hotel and did a happy dance in our room, we moseyed downstairs to ask the receptionist for any suggestions. I admit that I was nervous to tell him the bleak truth about my eating habits, and I expected a look of condescending pity or incomprehension. I tell French people that I'm a vegetarian and they say "but you still eat oysters, right?" Or "but you still like ham? You know, the pigs are meant to be eaten. They like it." What I wasn't expecting to hear was "oh - well, there's an Indian restaurant close by. They have a lot of options."

Neither of us eat lamb so I'm very willing to say we didn't get the full Ottoman dining experience, but we did have a shocking array of options wherever we went, whether to "Dubb" (the Indian place), the little deli on the corner, or our hotel terrace where we ate breakfast every morning. There are lots of kebaberies, sure, but shaved chunks of meaty goodness isn't the end all be all. I've been trying to replicate the incredible "mucver" - zucchini pancakes we had in the mornings, but while I have the flavor profile down, I think the texture still needs work. Turks don't seem to believe in subtle flavors or overly fussy ingredients. My mucver recipe is essentially grated zucchini, eggs, crumbled feta, toasted sesame seeds, and a healthy dose of dill. Dill! Fierce! We also ate a lot of feta-full filo dough concoctions. Also present at our breakfast buffet: beautiful, ripe and robust cherry tomatoes, sliced Armenian (looking) cucumbers, olives, the freshiest-fresh non-cow cheese. A sweet citrus-flavored bread with raisins, bits of fig, sesame seeds, and honey. Tiny sesame encrusted ring-shaped crackery things. Muesli and yogurt. More tea than you could shake a stick at. Turkish nutella. I am a big fan of understated French breakfasts, but this was better. Certainly healthier.

In fact, the healthy-yet-delicious component to everything we ate really impressed me. Another breakfasty food that we never consumed at breakfast time was red lentil soup. I read that it became popular in the 1940s when some poor woman made it to impress her Syrian mother-in-law and because of that, it's often given to brides on their wedding day as a ritual for a happy marriage. We found our favorite rendition in a deli full of men, so I can't speak to that. But it is absolutely delicious, very light, and totally satisfying. We also ate a kugel-like something with noodles (?), more amazing feta, and bites of bright parsley. Hearty, but not greasy. Flavorful, but not overpowering.

Aforementioned receptionist, Tarık, and I actually made it to one of the vegetarian lists I'd found on now defunct nextstop.com. I'd shown him this list and I guess he'd done some research, because he seemed surprisingly enthusiastic despite his steady diet of cute fuzzy creatures. While we waited for the tram that would take us across the Golden Horn to Taksim, he told me with a smirk that he would happily eat meat for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I said "what about dessert?" and then we discussed the merits of bacon maple doughnuts. He isn't sold on the idea, yet. When the tram arrived and we squeezed our way on, he said "let's go eat some vegetables!" What a good sport. I hate to say that "Helvetia," a restaurant so hip it doesn't even have a sign, wasn't that awesome. Tarık asked me what I thought of my dinner and I said "it tastes... healthy." By which I mostly meant vegan. We went to a coffee shop afterward and I told him I felt pretty much obligated to try Turkish coffee. It was murky brown sludge, to put it bluntly. Good, slightly sweet sludge, but sludge indeed. He told me in-between cigarettes that people read the coffee grinds at the bottom of the cup much like other cultures read tea leaves. Half of the cup is coffee grinds, so it must be a very subtle art indeed.

I had what felt like more than my fair share of strong Turkish tea, as well.



Whether being cooed into a carpet shop with a piping hot glass of apple tea by a smiling stranger, or spontaneously brought the more normal variety by Tarık while outside, I couldn't escape the stuff, and didn't want to. I also couldn't escape the mounds of baklava.



I'd bathe in the stuff if I could. Fresh, sweet, flaky, a little coarse, a little delicate. The perfect indulgence.



I took that photo at the Egyptian Spice Bazaar. They literally have MOUNDS of baklava there, as well as mounds of dried kiwi, hills of apricots, palaces of dried rose buds. More saffron than I've ever seen, tea leaves, peppercorns... Huge logs of Delight in every flavor and nut combination. I felt it my duty to sample whenever I felt brave enough to acknowledge the vendors calling to me, and I think my favorite is pomegranate/pistachio. I didn't feel up to taking a picture of it then and there because I'm a sissy, but I'll take a photo of one of the boxes we brought back. (We bought four.)

Until then... to bed I go.
Hope that answered your question, Kate!

p.s. fruit widely available: oranges and pomegranates. lots of little stalls sold fresh-squeezed orange juice they made on the spot, AND fresh-pressed pomegranate juice. WHOA.