sazji

Wow - baklava is not cheap even here (at least not if it's a good one) but 8 Euros is a lot. I love good baklava but generally could easily do with about half of what is considered a standar portion here, about 6 pieces. You need lots of strong sugarless tea to get through that! I hope your situation resolves soon!

If I wanted to raise vegetables indoors, I'd just go for a simple halide setup. A 400-watt metal halide system is around $300, but it gives you *so* much more growing space, with the intensity to grow plants requiring vertical space as well, and the heat that helps certain plants like tomatoes. Light intensity decreases with distance from bulbs, so many plants will suffer as soon as they start getting tall. If you want to have vegetables and grow other houseplants/orchids as well, then go for a 1000-watt halide, it gives you nearly a 10 x 10 foot growing area. Arrange plants according to the intensity of light they require, stronger-light plants in the center of the area. You can grow all these plants quite successfully in a good potting soil mix, and have the option to fertilize organically as well if you want. There are also smaller units available but under a certain size the price doesn't decrease proportionately to make it worth it; go for growing area!

Well, I think EZ-Jet (sp.?) has a flight from London to Istanbul for around 43 Euros!

Wednesday morning - one of the things I'm most grateful to have in my neighborhood is the Mardin bakery. It makes the favorite breads of the southeast including pide (the Turkish equivalent to pita but much larger and with no pocket), lavaş (lavash), and yağlı ekmek, or "oily bread." I swore I would wait till I could pull my belt in a notch before I had this again...well, okay I can't do it completely comfortably, I'm headed in the right direction. (A month in the US with a list of "have to eat" favorites can be dangerous...) In some parts of the east, rolled out breads like pide are called açık ekmek ("open bread") while bread in loaves is kapalı ("closed") ekmek.I Here the baker has just restoked the wood-fired oven and is making lavaş. The bread is formed by a man esconced in the little cubbyhole at right until it's about the size of a large dinner plate. It rests for a moment, then the baker takes it and stretches it out thin on the backs of his hands, lays it on the wooden paddle and slides it directly onto the floor of the oven. The finished product is brushed quickly to remove any ash that might remain and stacked for immediate sale. They sell to the public but also to those kebap restaurants that don't make their own. Yağlı ekmek is a favorite for breakfast. It uses the same dough as lavaş, but it is first brushed with oil/butter, folded, brushed and folded again, then scored before baking. The interior is very tender, almost like ultra-thin noodles, wonderful with good jam and tea. Ever since Behemoth mentioned helva with halloumi cheese, I had been thinking of it, so I stopped by and got a bit of both to try with the lavash! Perhaps if I'd melted the helva first it would have been better (I just remembered that part...). This way it didn't do much for me; the helva and halloumi flavors seemed to exist in a sort of culinary apartheid - side-by-side but distinctly seperate. I'd get a bit of one and a bit of the other. I'll try melting the helva a little later, now I'm kind of oiled out....

Sorry, I did miss your questions! Yes, it's basically the same dough but in a different form. The traditional one is about an inch wide, and these are the only ones sold on the street. The stuffed ones are an entirely new thing; they appeared for the first time about 3-4 years ago. The first kaşar cheese-filled simit were wonderful, with a really great bunch of gloppy cheese inside. As with so many things here, once they had made them popular, they decreased quality so often the cheese inside is hard to find. If you get a cheese poğaça almost anywhere, you will be lucky to even find the cheese, they put so little in. There seems to be a (very) slow reversal of this trend now as the economy improves, but it's mostly in the form of slightly more upscale places catering to a wealthier crowd, while the older more established places stay the course in order not to lose their customers. There are also bakery simit (meaning the ones you get at the regular bread bakery or pastry shop), which tend to be lighter. I'm not sure they always used to be; bread in general has, in Istanbul, turned from a chewy satisfying thing into a light fluffy item. This happened during the extreme inflation of the 90s - there is a government regulation that says a loaf of bread of a particular size must have a particular amount of flour by weight. But to make more money, bakers started adding more...additives, and rising smaller pieces of dough to the same size. If a baker followed the government regulation (and thus started getting more business) he would very soon get a call from the bread mafia (I'm not kidding) and a cordial request to knock it off or see his bakery burned down. Mafias are a big deal here, there is one for many different professions. They control who opens, who gets ahead, who can work and who cannot. Yes. They are crusty outside and very chewy inside. Well, I'd say that now that language cultural rights have been recognized, most Kurds are not for a separate country. Also these are Alevis, who may be speakers of Turkish, Kurdish or Zaza. Some Kurds consider Zaza just another kind of Kurdish, though it's quite different; Zazaki speakers tend not to agree (but some identified with Kurds because they both were in the same boat during the period of repression of minority languages/cultures), this was, I think, more true of the Sunni Zaza speakers, also known as Dimili. Alevis tend to see their unity in religion and culture, with their language being a detail. Confused yet? As far as cooking, it's mainly a regional thing. In areas where there are both Turkish and Kurdish populations (for example Sivas and Malatya), they make pretty much the same foods, which are dictated mostly by the local environment and influences. I'm not aware of any significant differences between the food in Zaza speaking and Kurdish speaking villages in Tunceli for example. In rural E Anatolia, the diet is pretty simple, centering around cheese, yogurt, bulgur, bread and mutton. As you move south towards Iraq and especially towards Antep and Urfa, Adana, things get more interesting with much more variety and use of spices; these areas are nearer to ports and centers such as Aleppo and Damascus. As far as I know there is no significant difference between say, Kurdish, Arab and Assyrian foods in Mardin (where most people didn't speak Turkish till the early 80s). But I haven't spent enough time there to be really sure. There were Armenians in much of this area too; there are certain dishes associated with Armenians but Armenians in Istanbul come from all over Anatolia and have also become experts at Istanbul cuisine as well, so I'm not sure about differences in their regional cooking between places like Sivas, Diyarbakır, Ağrı etc. There's so much to know! Yes, we have had the YTL (Yeni Türk Lirası, or New Turkish Lira) for 2 years now. When I first came to Turkey in 1982, the TL was 160 to the dollar. A lahmacun on the street cost 10 lira. The next year it was 50, the next year it had reached 110. I wasn't back for 11 years and missed the runaway inflation of the early 90s. When I got back in 1996, a lahmacun was 350,000 TL. So imagine something that had cost 10 cents in 1982 costing $35,000 dollars in 1996! In 2000 the price was around 500,000, and there was a price jump in 2001 with an economic crisis, so that 2 years ago the price was around a million or a million and a half. Of course tourists had a fun time dealing with all the zeros..."did I just give him 500,000 or 5,000,000?" And some unscrupulous folks, notably taxi drivers, didn't fail to take advantage of the confusion. I always advised people to learn the colors of the bills! There were also two different versions of coins floating around to make things more confusing, as 50,000 was once a lot of money, then it was less money (but still significant) when it went from bill to coin, and finally almost negligible when it became the equivalent of about 3 cents US. (This was going on with all the denominations of course, the last to go from bill to coin with the old lira was 250,000 TL.) There had been plans to remove the extra zeros; they had even gone as far as to color the last 3 zeros on the bills a different color in preparation for the change. However inflation continued and it would have hardly been worth it if the bills were going to just grow another line of zeros! But inflation has finally leveled off, and 2 years ago they finally implemented the long-talked-about removal of the extra zeros. 1 million lira became 1 YTL, 500,000 old Lira became 50 kuruş. For about a year it was very confusing, especially for tourists, because there were both sets of bills and coins in circulation (try counting change!) and to make things harder, most people still talk in terms of millions and hundred thousands. It's just as easy to say 500,000 (beşyüz bin) or 50kr (elli kuruş) after all! An extra added bonus of the YTL - the coins look just like Euro coins. Except that 50kr is the same size/color as a 1 Euro coin, and a 1YTL coin is the same size/color scheme of a 2 Euro coin! This has led to many headaches just over the border in Greece obviously — because each EU country already had its own coins and people were going mostly by size and color to differentiate. Now along comes a coin that looks like 2 Euros but is worth far less than 1 Euro...gotta check that number!

I'll have to try this. Overall the concept of sweet and salty together doesn't exist here, but in the E Mediterranean area there is of course künefe (konafa), the kadayıf baked with cheese and then doused in syrup - it's something you get almost exclusively at kebap places run by people from Antep or Urfa, but has become a standard all over the country.

Ah, Syria is a place I really want to go to. I have friends here with family there and they and all the friends they've taken never stop praising it and the food. And Syrian baklava... I've looked all over for sweetened condensed milk, or even evaporated, and it doesn't even seem to be a concept here. That seems to be an item that follows in the tracks of European colonialism, and Turkey was never colonized. As for sweet potatoes, I have some of them coming with a friend in a couple weeks, and plan to grow them in the garden next spring. I tried it this year but had a variety that wasn't very good, and was battling Ailanthus trees which sucked the water out of the soil as soon as I could water. They are getting murdered as we speak...so this year should be better! Yes, we have mazot heaters here too. It's fuel-oil, and it's stinky. Well, coal is stinky too, but if you are good with your soba you get pretty good at avoiding getting any coal smell in the house. Using high-quality coal instead of the brown government-subsidized stuff helps too, that stuff burns really dirty. You still have to be very careful with it as many people die each year from coal-related monoxide poisoning — usually when they don't clean their chimneys, and throw a bunch of coal on before going to bed. I like using a soba even if dealing with the ash is a pain; somehow it's pleasant to have the heat coming from an identifiable source. But my computer is set up in the next room so I need to get a fan to distribute heat a bit. (Is there something just a bit odd about having high-speed internet and heating with a coal stove?)

Hmm, I'd be interested in trying these! Mom used to get Aplets, but I'd never associated them with lokum till much later. Then, the only lokum I'd had was "loukoumi" from Greece, which is variable but generally a bit softer, not so much chewy as gooey, a very different product. It occurs to me that another candy I like a lot (bought 4 bags when I was back in Seattle) is also a lot like lokum: Ting Ting Jahe, the Indonesian ginger candy. Much chewier than the chewiest lokum but I wonder if it was inspired by it? The ingredients are about the same.

Well, to be fair, the expression probably originated when all available quinces were like the one in my garden - very astringent and sour raw. The favorite variety in the markets is "Ekmek," or "bread," which is quite sweet and you can eat it raw to a point. But what happens is eventually you get to the point where it starts catching in your throat. The temporary solution to this is to suck on a seed or two; the pectin coating the seed makes your mouth slippery again. But it's really a temporary fix. I don't know the chemistry of it but you mouth will feel raw for a half hour or so. Still the taste is very nice; they are so fragrant. Here they often poach quinces in a syrup made with loğusa şekeri or "sugar for women who have newly given birth." It's colored brilliant red (anatto perhaps?) and has a bit of clove in it too. The quinces come out beautifully. Haciabdullah restaurant, which unfortunately has gotten extremely expensive, makes a beautiful poached quince. The quince is billiant red, with a pure white daub of buffalo milk kaymak, sprinkled with ground brilliant green pistachio, truly beautiful to look at.

Okay, another installment...it was not a great day for Istanbul photography but while I waited for my minibus to the instrument shop I help out at occasionally, I got a shot or two across the Golden Horn. For those of you who doubt that winter in Istanbul is like Seattle's, here is your proof! For lunch we ordered gözleme. It is a plain flour dough rolled very thin, folded over a filling of what-have-you (mine was potato and cheese with red pepper) and cooked on a convex grill. The last time I ate gözleme from this place I ended up with intestinal fun. But anything for a photo op. You see what I suffer for you people?! (9:02 p.m., everything is still just fine...) By the way, when I was taking pictures at the restaurant yesterday, Ferda the co-owner said "Bob, I hope this business of taking pictures of everything you eat won't last very long. It doesn't become you. You are going to end up like Tijen!" (T. Inaltong, a Turkish food writer who is a good friend of hers.) I could do worse I suppose! On the way home, as promised, I went by one of our "semt pazar"s, or "neighborhood markets." These happen once a week in various neighborhoods; there are four in the area around where I live. They cover several city blocks and you can buy just about anything there from produce, dairy and dry goods to kitchen supplies and clothes. Here's one of the entrances: Once inside you realize how big it is. Some things are similar to what we have in the west - here are leeks, chard and kale - but the varieties are different. Here also, they hill the leeks when they grow them to get them very long. The chard is flat-leaved, good for making sarma/dolma. One thing that struck me in the markets here is the care with which things are arranged to make a good display. This woman (who didn't want her picture taken) has decorated her grape leaves to make them more attractive. Fruits in season include pomegranates and quince, which are proclaimed to be "like cake." Meaning that these are a variety you can eat raw. You can, for a bit. Then you start choking. Probably the origin of the Turkish expression "Ayvayı yedik!" - "We've eaten the quince" but more figuratively, "Now we're really screwed." By the way, notice the very nice tomatoes in the background...it's December! If you get too loaded to carry your haul, there are men very happy to carry it for you, for a fee. These olives caught my eye... ...as did these pickles! (Note the buckets of pepper paste at the far end...) The long white things are "acur," or armenian cucumber, picked while still small. The fat green-striped things in the front corner (and lower left hand of the next picture) are "kelek," or unripe melons. They are picked at the end of the melon season when they have no chance of ripening. The taste is similar to cucumber but slightly sweeter, very nice. I did say I was going to cook something tonight. I was thinking of dolma but was really tired (I'm still pretty loopy from jetlag) so settled for rice and spinach. Got my spinach and onions, came home, found no rice in the house. I did have bulgur and lentils and some leftover dried stuffing peppers. So I fried the onion, boiled the bulgur and lentils with the pepper, added chopped carrot, pepper paste (of course!), powdered dry tomato, and a bunch of spinach at the end. Topped with lemon it was very good. (And about all I could manage tonight!) Then I opened another cupboard and found a full bag of rice. It all worked out. Tomorrow...haven't quite decided yet!

Ooops...seems html tags don't work in headers. And I can't change it now. I'm sure somebody can! ============ The new year is just a little over 3 weeks away. Fill in any or all of the blanks below: In 2007, I will eat more fish. I will make at least 10 recipes from the new Indian cookbook I got. I will find a good recipe for the walnut çörek I ate last year. I will learn to make my own yufka. I will use more eggplant. I will give at least half of anything sweet I cook to other people. Unless it's made of chocolate. My kids will continue not to exist. I will teach my friend who wants to learn to make cheesecake the necessity of having an oven thermometer. I will read more local Turkish foodblogs!.

This thread was started last year by Pontarmo, and as the new year approaches it seems to be reviving. So I thought I'd start it up again with the current year! ---------------------------------- The new year is just a little over 3 weeks away. Fill in any or all of the blanks below: In 2007, I will eat__________________ I will make_______________________ I will find___________________ I will learn_________________________ This is the year I will try_____________________________ I will taste____________________________ I will use________________________________ I will give________________________________ I______________________ We________________________ My kids_______________________________ I will teach____________________________ I will read___________________________

Or even better, when you specifically go out and buy a digital camera in order to carry out an eGullet food blog. (Okay, I did own an old one before the blog, but it went pffffffft! the very first morning of the blog, so...)

Or even better, when you specifically go out and buy a digital camera in order to carry out an eGullet food blog. (Okay, I did own an old one before the blog, but it went pffffffft! the very first morning of the blog, so...) ← Or when you put off doing the blog requested because you want to have a better digital camera first....

Muhallebi with Chocolate Sauce At first glance this doesn't sound that special, and one could certainly dress it up (I substituted some butter for part of the margarine for example). But it's quite good as is. It falls sqarely into the category of "ladies' magazine recipes." The original recipe (which came from the mother of an employee) was poured into a flat pan and served in sections; but they have played with it and arrived at its present incarnation. Pudding 1 lt milk 5 T flour 1 c sugar half packet vanilla sugar 100 gr margarine Combine flour, sugar and vanilla sugar, add milk, heat stirring with a whisk, add margarine. Bring to a boil, reduce heat and simmer 10 minutes or so, stirring constantly. [if you beat it afterwards with an electric beater, it's even better.] Pour into bowls, leaving room for sauce. Sauce 6 T sugar 6 T cocoa 2 eggs 100 gr margarine Combine margarine, sugar and cocoa, heat but don't boil. Remove from heat and add eggs, beat well with electric beater, pour over pudding, cool, refrigerate.

Here's one from a Turkish foodblog, "Hanifenintarifleri" (Hanife's recipes). The 1 1/2 egg yolk makes me think this is a halved recipe. Typically (as in my photo) the kaymak is layered in between two of these, so double the recipe if you want to do that. Unfortunately the poster does not say exactly how big a pan, but when you roll it out you should have a pretty good idea. I suppose it should hold 6 cups of water at least! (see below). My comments in brackets. Ingredients: - 25 gr butter cut into cubes - 100 gr milk - 10 gr dry yeast - 25 gr powdered sugar - 250 gr flour - 1 1/2 egg yolks (!!?) - pinch salt Preparation - Warm milk, to half the milk add the yeast and 1T powdered sugar, wait till it gets bubbly. Then add half the flour and knead, cover with a damp towel and allow to rise for 15 minutes. - Combine remaining milk, sugar, flour and salt, add to the already-prepared dough and knead. (As my dough was very stiff, I added a bit more milk.) - Add egg yoks and butter, knead again. - Grease a large round cake pan and roll out the dough to the size of the pan. Place in the pan and let rise for at least one hour. - When it has risen, bake in a preheated 200C oven till brown, test with a toothpick. - Soguduktan sonra kalipdan cikarin ve kullanmak icin 24 saat bekletin. - After its cool, remove from pan and let stand 24 hours before using. Syrup: [evidently this was a reply to another post] I have two suggestions concerning the syrup. The idea to caramelize one ladle of the syrup seems to be a good one, you can use the syrup below in the same way. [Place kadayif in pan], pour 6 cups of lukewarm water over the kadayıf, let it sit a half hour and absorb as much as it can. Then using either thick paper towlels or kitchen towels, press lightly with open fingers to remove the extra water in an even way. Do this a few times. Combine: 4.5 c water and 4 c sugar 2 1/2 t lemon juice (if you like it very sweet you can add half a cup more sugar, but this seems sweet enough to me). Boil in a saucepan until you have a thick syrup. This takes about half an hour on a medium flame. [Comment - I don't know why you couldn't just start with less water...] Then pour the syrup over the kadayıf. Turn a burner on to medium, and turning the pan over it constantly, let it simmer lightly until the syrup has been absorbed well. This takes around half an hour. When you see it making bubbles on top of the kadayıf take it off the fire and let it cool. Serve with kaymak [if you can find it!], or cream, mascarpone or ice cream.

It's just straight yogurt beaten a bit, nothing else. Yogurt here is much richer than in the states. God, I could do a whole day on just yogurt! I read a really interesting article about seminomads in SW Turkey that renew their yogurt culture each year with dew taken from the grass on the morning of Hıdırrellez (a spring festival). I.e. the dew is added to the warm milk as the only culture. I will have to try it. They say it only works on Hıdırellez, but I might try it anyway. I'm going to one of our neighborhood markets this afternoon (albeit not the best one, that's Saturday). I'm big into unusual fruits and vegetables too. It's not like SE Asia where nearly everything is new, but there should still be some surprises! Mosques...actually I was going to snap a shot of Sarayburnu yesterday afternoon but we had such a fog that I could hardly see it from where I was! I'll keep trying.

Qawarma = Turkish kavurma. (From the verb kavurmak, to fry in a pot/pan. I have a recipe from Adana for hummus with sauteed pastirma laid over the top, that was very nice. Some of the "tost" (grilled sandwich) places here also make a sandwich with kavurma and young kashar cheese.... I'm going to try the gloopy helva! With haloumi...we can get that here, it's called hellim in Turkish and mostly comes from Cyprus. What do you do with the cheese? Here it's usually fried before eating, it doesn't normally melt as I remember. I don't know if living in a place you take on local genetic material but perhaps having a Greek grandfather helps!

Oh great, I'm so glad they didn't get mashed! I was really careful but found when we opened the box I brought for my mom that I'd been meticulously carrying them upside down the whole time... How long would it take to eat an entire block of Helva...well, for a normal person... Uff, my stomach hurts just thinking about it! It reminds me of a joke actually...an American walks into a pub in Ireland and announces "I've got 500 dollars here for anyone who can drink pints of Guinness in a row! The room went silent, nobody came forth. One guy even got up and walked out. About 10 minutes later, the one who left came back, and said "If your offer's still good sir, I'd like to take you up on it." The American said "sure, line 'em up!" The barmen set 10 pints up, the Irishman lit into them and in no time flat, had drunk all of them. The American, amazed, said "Well, you did it fair and square, but let me ask you, why did you leave 10 minutes ago?" The Irishman answered, "I went down to another pub to make sure I could do it!"

Pepper paste really is used a lot, especially in the east, and nothing really substitutes for it. Unfortunately the commercially prepared stuff (like Tamek brand) is almost flavorless...I remember finding a jar of it in Seattle several years ago and going "Oh Boy..." and then being really disappointed at its lack of flavor. The really good stuff is boiled, then sun-dried. I use it when I make stuffed vegetables Mardin style - the filling is made from rice (short grain like calrose), finely cubed meat (never ground), isot (a very dark, roasted and oiled pepper from Urfa), sumac, tomato and pepper paste, chopped tomato, parley and dried mint. My favorite is to do it with dried peppers and eggplants but fresh vegetables are great too, as are vine leaves. What else - it's used in the bulgur shells for içli köfte (stuffed köfte), in kisir (sort of a Mediterranean Turkish take on tabboule with many more ingredients), in batirik (another köfte type dish similar to mercimek köftesi but with the addition of chopped mint, parsley, cucumber, tomato, toasted sesame, fried tahini, and pounded peanuts, which can also be "watered down" into a cold soup with the addition of lots of lemon). It's also indispensable for Turkish style lahmacun (the Turkish equivalent of lahma bi ajeen...the Levantine version is very different though). I sometimes use it in omelette type dishes too, like menemen. Really you can use it almost anywhere you want a good pepper taste! If you have friends from E Turkey with someone in the village, chances are they have someone making their own...ingratiate yourself...

Yes, I would bet it's pretty much the same thing with a different name. In the southeast they use fine bulgur/meat combinations a lot. Now I find myself thinking about making analı kızlı - small bulgur shells stuffed with a meat mixture and served in a lemon-tomato sauce. Lessee...when do I have all afternoon free....!

The way I understand it, Aplets/Cotlets were inspired by lokum. They are very different though, Aplets and Cotlets are made from fruit juice and are not nearly as chewy. Lokum is made with sugar, water, cornstarch and flavorings like rose essence, mastic etc. There is also a "double boiled" one that is darker (more caremelized) and chewier, that generally has pistachios in it. The "sauce" is essentially a finely chopped salad. Add some parsley and a bit of mint too if you want. The tepsi köfte - I don't think there is any trick, the köfte are raw, and it gets cooked till the potatoes are done by which time the meat is certainly done. I don't know the actualy mixture for the meat though. Onion and parsley are in there for sure, I don't think it has bread crumbs.

Okay, time for another installment. I spent today up in the Taksim area, because I had to get a bag of special plant soil from a friend (I'm also a garden/plant freak). He suggested we meet at Voldemort's, because being recently returned from Seattle, it would make me feel "at home." It's in a 100 year-old building on İstiklâl Caddesi, the long pedistrian street that runs through Beyoğlu. I will say this for them, they have done their homework when it comes to Turkish coffee/tea culture. While many Starbucks in the US seem to be designed to encourage people to come, get the coffee, drink it and make room for the next customer, the ones here have very comfortable living room-like interiors that invite you to stay and chat. (At 4 YTL — almost $3 US — for a short latte, they damn well better invite me to linger!) Here is what I look like when I haven't had a decent sleep in four days. After the soil was obtained, I remembered my promise to get lokum pictures, and Hacı Bekir'swas right down the street. Haci Bekir is commonly credited with being the inventor of Lokum as it's known today, and are widely considered to make the best. I have to agree. Here's their display window, sorry about the glare. A selection of mixed lokum: Plain, rose, pistachio, walnut, hazelnut, mastic. A decidedly posed shot of my friend Emre not actually eating a piece of walnut lokum. Why didn't he eat it? I don't know, he did buy it. I guess he was waiting for that perfect moment! Though Hacı Bekir's best known product is lokum, they also make all sorts of other confections as well, notably very good halva, or in Turkish, helva. It's sold in bulk. Meanwhile, Koska, another old though slightly touristy company, is better known for its halva but also sells lokum. One winter specialty is hot helva, where helva is melted back to its gooey state. I haven't tried it actually, this was the first time I'd seen it. I would have tried it but it wasn't melted yet! What I did end up getting (from another place) was a few pieces of cezeriye, which fits into the broad category of helva. To make it, carrots, preferably "black" carrots (actually they are beet red) are boiled, mashed and sweetened. After they have reduced, pistachios or other nuts are added, and after cooling and cutting, the finished product is rolled in coconut. It's said to be very healthy, and an aphrodesiac to boot. I haven't ever taken Viagra but I'm sure this tastes better. Having had dessert first, I decided to drop by Ferda's (see first installment) restaurant, called 3. Mevkii. It's a small "home cooking" restaurant near Taksim. They have had a very faithful following for many years, have never advertised, and have not even let themselves be written up in the papers, because they have plenty of customers as it is. Even the sign is miniscule - about 8 inches wide in the corner of a window; it's definitely a word-of-mouth place. There are no waiters, you take a menu, a piece of paper and a pen and write what you want, then take it down to the kitchen. The food comes on a dumbwaiter and it's your responsibility to watch out for your own order when it comes up. I came in just as they were taking their lunch break. In Turkey when you walk in on a meal, they say "Kaynanan seni sevecek!" or "Your mother-in-law will love you!" They make a very nice mixed cream of vegetable soup. I also had a few mercimek köftesi, or red lentil köfte. ("Köfte" is often translated "meatball" because that's the most common kind we see, but it really is a much broader term and refers to almost anything that's savory and shaped into one- or two-bite pieces like this. A specialty of Adana and the surrounding region, his one is made from red lentils that are cooked till soft, and mixed with fine bulgur, onion, tomato and pepper paste, parsley, mint, salt, pepper and cumin. The "sauce" is a finely chopped tomato, cucumber and pepper salad with pomegranate molasses. It's often also eaten wrapped in a romaine lettuce leaf and topped with a squeeze of lemon. I didn't have the yufkalı kebap, or "kebab with phyllo," but it looked nice, even though the white balance adjustment on my camera seems to have gone on a short vacation. It is a meat-filled pastry, deep fried till crips, then topped with yogurt and olive oil heated with red pepper. A word about the word "kebab" (or, under the effect of Turkish phonology, "kebap"): Because şiş kebabı (shish kabob) is generally the only kebab known in the west, it is usually assumed that "kabob" refers to a skewer. This results in all sorts of dishes being named things like "fruit kabobs," "marshmallow kabobs," etc. Kebab doesn't mean skewer: the skewer is the "shish!" Kebab/kebap means "cooked over flame," or "roasted." There is a large variety of kebabs (which I'll highlight another day) to be had. Even roast chestnuts are known as "kestane kebap." The sellers cry out, "Kestane kebap, yemesi sevap!" or "Roast chestnuts, eating it is a good deed!" Actually, though grilled lamb on a skewer is, technically a "şiş kebabı," it's only called that (or "shish kebob") for tourists; Turks generally call it "kuzu şiş," simply "lamb skewer." One dish almost ready to go into the oven (It just needed a little water mixed with tomato paste) was the "tepsi köfte," or pan köfte. The köfte are alternated with sliced potatoes, and topped with tomato and sivri ("pointed") peppers. These can range from sweet to evilly hot...you never know till you bite into it, though when you cut them the smell does give it away. But they have a very distinct and full flavor; nothing else quite substitutes for them. The restaurant doesn't make a lot of sweets but one that has been popular for a long time there is their çikolata soslu muhallebi, or muhallebi (milk pudding) with chocolate sauce. It's a typical "home" muhallebi, thickened with wheat flour rather than cornstarch or rice flour, and one of the better ones I've tried. I can post the recipe if anyone's interested.

I do. Your landlady gave you burners? Lucky you! Here an unfurnished apartment is really unfurnished. You bring your own refrigerator, stove, etc. Many people do without ovens; much home cooking doesn't really depend on it, and some use separate plug-in electric stoves big enough to hold a single round pan.

All this talk about kitchens reminded me - I do plan to actually cook something this week! I thought I'd share a view of my kitchen (a typical "designed by a man" kitchen here). When I came, it had a tile counter with a sink, that's it. No cupboards, nothing. Actually old houses don't have closets either, people bring their own wardrobes; this is the case in the apartments buildings that most people live in. The double teapot on the stove (which in retrospect I could have turned to make it more visible) is the typical fixture here. Water is boiled in the bottom part and the tea is slightly moistened and put in the upper part to expand. When the water boils it's poured over the tea, the heat is turned down to a minimum, and it's left to steep. Usually a lot longer than we would - however long it takes till the tea sinks. Also no heating system; Like many folks still I heat with a soba. Not a constantly hot bowl of buckwheat noodles, a soba is a wood or coal stove. Mine uses both, and is relevant here because it's the "kuzine" type, meaning that it has a regular "stovetop" and an oven, which is great for cooking börek and baked potatoes. It's best to burn wood if you are using the oven; coal gets very hot and can heat the oven to over 500 degrees! The bottom oven is for keeping food warm, and for making yogurt. Which I never do. In the villages in Turkey and Greece, many people still cook in such ovens. Not so great for things like delicate pastries but fine for things where temperature doesn't need to be exact. The aluminum pitcher on top of the soba is called a güğüm. With its wide bottom and narrow closed top, it's designed to heat liquids fast. It's my hot water source in winter. (I do have a flash heater for my shower...) The stovetop is great in the winter for roasting chestnuts (just put them directly on), making toast (I lay the tongs sideways on the top and arrange the bread along them; it's toast in a minute or so) and keeping the tea kettle warm. Also for long-cooked things like soups and stews; you are heating the house anyway so why use up your gas canister by cooking on the regular stove?