EatingAsia

Real Nuts

"Milky" almonds and walnuts for sale on a stretch of highway north of Aksaray, Turkey

    Each time we come to Turkey I'm more and more convinced that most Americans (and probably many folks in the rest of the world too), have never tasted a proper nut or piece of dried fruit. A walnut straight from the shell, not more than a month off the tree, so fresh it almost oozes oil when crushed between the your teeth. An apricot dried whole in the sun, brown because it hasn't been treated with the sulfites that prevent the fruit's orange from leeching out with its moisture. Shriveled purple plums dried with their pits unremoved, so different from the sticky glyceride-plumped "prunes" we Americans buy in zip-top bags and cardboard canisters that it's hard to imagine the two are the same fruit.

    Last autumn at a market in Gerze, on the Black Sea, we bought raisins -- big, almost black, half-shriveled, with their stems still attached. We ate them by the handful, marveling that something we used to eat out of a box, something that required "plumping" in water before adding to bread or cookie dough, could be leathery yet soft and chewy, with a depth of flavor approaching something like burnt sugar. Another surprise: they crunched. Those raisins had been grapes with seeds -- unheard of in the States (elsewhere? I don't know). Those seeds, tiny and no more consequential than a poppy seed after drying, added a wonderful texture.

   Last month in a guest post for Istanbul Eats (read it here) I wrote about one of the pleasures of road-tripping in Turkey: stockpiling a backseat larder of market finds and then stopping between here and there, when the stomach calls, to cobble together a meal.

    This is another: pulling to the side of the road when you spy a stall in front of a cherry orchard selling the fruit at 3 kilos for 5 Turkish lira (on the road to Van, 1 hour west of Bitlis). Or, in today's case, stopping at the stall pictured above on our way from Aksaray, on Cappadocia's northeastern edge to Cankiri, a town about an hour and a half east of Ankara. The vendor on the left and his son, on the right, were selling almonds, walnuts, raisins and dried apricots. The almonds were lightly salted and roasted in their shells, which were cracked just enough to enable easy liberation of the nut; we bought 250 grams. We skipped the walnuts (no nut cracker) but bought 250 grams of raisins and half a kilo of apricots. Total damage: 13 lira (about U$7).

    The vendor's fruit is from his own orchards and vines. He dries them himself, in the bahce (garden). The almonds are indeed "milky", as advertised in his sign, moist in spite of their roasting and touched with the taste of wood smoke because of it, nothing like the packaged roasted almonds I grew up eating nor the expensive blanched almonds my mom hoarded for baking. The raisins are black and delightfully crunchy, not seedless, almost juicy.

    The apricots, dried on their pits, are terra cotta brown and tough. But put one in your mouth, allow it to soften in the heat and moisture of your saliva for less than a minute, and the flesh slips from the pit with barely a nudge of the incisor. And the flavor! Honey and fruit and hot dry August days exploding all at once from nothingness. I wish that everyone could taste a dried apricot like this (or a roasted almond like that).

    Given their imperviousness to casual nibbling I suspect that these particular dried apricots are meant to be cooked with meat in a stew or plumped in a compote. But we'll carry them home to Malaysia to eat out of hand there, a reminder of what real dried fruit (and nuts) tastes like to hold us till our next trip to Turkey.

More images from the road in central Anatolia: the very picture of cold, somewhere on the road between Kayseri and Aksaray, here; followed by the bluest blue-sky morning in Aksaray, here.

In Istanbul, an Exception to the Brunch Rule

Menemen worth suffering a traffic jam for

When it comes to Brunch (organized brunch, eating-out brunch and -- especially -- Brunch as Buffet) we have one rule: we don't. Ever, anywhere. It's a tenet we've hewed to for decades and have no expection of straying from. Except in Istanbul.

Our Brunch turnaround happened on a sunny Sunday morning last November. It was the last weekend of a wonderful month in Turkey. We were in Istanbul, spending the day with a good friend who suggested starting with breakfast -- which ended up not happening till late in the morning, which technically made it Brunch. Uh-oh.

What's more, said Brunch happened in the vicinity of Rumeli Castle, which is surrounded by a slew of tea gardens and Bruncherias with almost too-picturesque Bosphorus views. On fair weekend mornings the promenade teems with Brunchers, Strutters, Yachters, Preeners and Trophy-Dog Walkers.

It's really not our scene.

But our friend Evren, whom Dave was lucky enough to land as an assistant when he worked on an Istanbul ferry boat photo project a couple of years ago, grew up in Istanbul, in a family that loves to eat. He has a healthy obsession with deliciousness. It was Evren who led us to our now-favorite Istanbul kaymak-erie and bakery. He's never let us down. We couldn't say "no" to Brunch with Evren.

True to form, when we stepped off the bus just past Rumeli castle Evren led us past the flashier Bruncheriasto Rumeli Kale Cafe, a skinny three-story structure opposite Iskele restaurant (where, ten years ago, Dave and I endured a meal of passable fish accompanied by the snootiest service imagineable).

We slipped in the back door, climbed a skinny flight of stairs and entered a narrow dining room lined with banquettes and fronted by an un-paned picture window. It was packed, but the crowd was unpretentious, the vibe low-key, the view lovely.

Evren did not order sparingly. The cafe is a favorite Sunday haunt, he told us as he picked and chose from the menu on a first pass, then picked and chose some more 15 minutes into the meal: a full Turkish breakfast (cheese, olives, tomatoes and cucumbers, raisin preserves). Eggs two ways: fried with sucuk (sausage) and semi-scrambled with tomatoes and peppers (menemen). Bal kaymak (heavenly Turkish clotted cream in a pool of honey). Crispy rolled borek oozing kasar cheese. Haloumi fried in butter.

Rumeli Kale Cafe has two upper floors, and each floor has only two window tables; most customers make do with views marred by the heads of fellow diners. Its long narrow dining room offers little See-and-Be-Seen opportunities. People come to Rumeli Kale Cafe to eat.

And we did. "Eat the borek while it's hot," Evren urged, and we obliged.

Then we moved on to the rest of it. We slathered kaymak and honey on sheets of steaming lavash periodically added to our bread basket by the waiter, broke perfectly wobbly egg yolks onto slices of sausage, forked up bits of crusty haloumi and used spoons to devour the ethereally light menemen.

In between bites of everything that was bad for us we drank tea ("It melts fat!" Dave kept insisting) and nibbled on tomatoes and cucumbers and green cayenne peppers. We chatted. We looked out the window. We idled. Over Brunch. Brunch!

And it was good.

Afterwards, we needed to move. So we joined the Preeners and Trophy-Dog Walkers et al on the promenade. Stumbling along in a Brunch-induced fog, we vowed to never again do Brunch. Istanbul being the exception.

Rumeli Kale Cafe and Restaurant just past Rumeli Hisar (coming from Istanbul). There are two Rumeli Kale Cafes -- aim for the three-story structure further along the road (away from Istanbul), across from Iskele Restaurant. While the cafe serves breakfast till late in the day during the week, aim for a Saturday or Sunday (or holiday), when the kitchen is geared up. And arrive by 10 if you want to be sure of a table upstairs, earlier if you hope to sit by the window on the second or third floor. Be forewarned: the flow of traffic back into town will be glacial.

[Note: We revisited Rumeli Kale Cafe last Monday morning. We're now in Anatolia, in the little-touristed city of Kayseri. Dave recently posted some moody black-and-white shots from the last few days, here.]

The Ambar

We began noticing them on the drive from Inebolu to Sinop: single-story timber structures raised from the ground, supported by what look like rough-hewn cocktail tables of the sort you might find in a Wild West-themed cowboy bar.. Storage facilities of some sort, we reasoned, something along the lines of the rice barns that dot the landscape in Thailand and Indonesia.

Turkey's Black Sea coast is corn country (though plenty of wheat is grown there too). In autumn almost every rural house is festooned with bunches and garlands of drying cobs. These "corn barns", which we later learned are called ambar in Turkish (a generic term for "storehouse"), were used by farmers to dry and store their harvests of corn (and other crops) while waiting for their turn at the village mill. Set up high above the ground, their crops were safely out of the reach of the wild boar and other  animals that roam the Black Sea's pine-carpeted hills. Now most of them sit empty.

We were bug-eyed after days of gray skies,confined by unceasing rain to our hotel room or one or another of Sinop's harborside teahouses. When we finally woke to a weak, tentative sun we dressed and hurriedly breakfasted, jumped in the car and hit the road.

We drove inland, away from the sea we'd been staring at for the better part of a week, and traced a two-lane blacktop deep into a bucolic valley. Here and there were the tiniest of villages comprising a single bufe (always well-stocked with freshly baked bread) and a handful of cottages. Plumes of smoke rose from roadside gardens, signalling pekmez in process. We pulled off the road not once but four times, to find mothers and grandmothers hovering over mammoth metal kazan (cauldrons), cooking down kilos and kilos of apples, pears, mulberries, figs and grapes into liters and liters of fruit molasses over wood fires.

Alongside a river slicing through a not-quite mountainous range trees were hinting at autumn, flashing bare limbs and spots of saffron and yellow. We breezed by a mid-sized town and kept on, beyond the point at which the road became a pitted dirt track. Lured by the vista around the next corner and the next we climbed and climbed, cautiously negotiating hairpin turns, always on the lookout for heedless Turkish drivers.

There were ambar, plenty of them, and we slowed and gawked at each one; by now we were a bit obsessed with these structures. When the road narrowed to nearly impassable we stopped at the base of a hill crowned by an especially handsome specimen and got out of our car to take photos.

While Dave was shooting a window on the facade of what we'd taken to be an abandoned farmhouse opposite the ambar a shutter banged open and a red kerchiefed head popped out. We were assaulted with a half-growl, half-shout: Kimler? Kimler? Ne yapsiniz? "Who's there? What are you doing?"

I shouted back that we were just taking photographs of her ambar. She looked dubious and slammed the window shut. A few moments later she popped out the farmhouse's entrance and, puffing loudly with arms swinging, toddled over to the gate.

"It's gorgeous! He's a photographer," I said, indicating my husband and the corn barn, trying to explain why we'd hiked up a hill and onto her property. She glared at me from beneath thick formidable brows, scaring me a little. My Turkish is no match for an angry teyze. But then suddenly the clouds parted. Her face didn't soften, exactly, but she invited us in for tea.

She invited us into her beautiful beautiful wooden house. Later her husband told us it was built of beechwood by his father, over 60 years ago. We entered from the dim ground floor layed with stone, a storage area for tools and bags of recently harvested walnuts and hazelnuts and, long ago, cattle and sheep and chickens.

Ladder stairs -- the steps, made of 2-inch thick boards, so solid underfoot -- led to an entry area. To the left was a curtained kitchen nook recently updated by the woman's son, with a marble countertop, new sink and taps and a handcarved wooden bench. Two bedrooms lay straight ahead. One was empty save for a cloth spread over the floor covered with drying corn kernals. The timber walls were hung with old kilim and thick cotton cloth.

Habiba -- after a while I gained the courage to ask her name -- led us into a sitting room brightened by two windows -- one with a fine view down the hill up which our car had just snaked -- and directed us to a low cushioned banquette running along one wall. Outside it was cold enough for gloves and a hat and heavy wool socks. Inside, the room was toasty warm from a wood-fired stove set within a five foot-high blackened hearth. She left us there to admire the timber walls, gleaming from age and smoke, and returned with a metal canister of water and a container of tea leaves.

Habiba told us about her family, three sons and a daughter, all grown and married and living in Istanbul. Grandkids too, and they all converge on the village every summer to take in the fresh air and cool temperatures. As she talked Habiba loosened up a bit. She was 64 or 65, she said, she couldn't be sure. She'd grown up in the area, she loved these hills: "Allah allah, you should see it in springtime!" 

We must eat something, she insisted, even though it was past lunchtime. We danced the dance of Turkish hospitality, declining while she insisted, and finally giving in. While Habiba was in the kitchen her husband Kazim returned home. Opening the door to find two yabanci drinking tea in his sitting room he stopped short, then graciously and quickly regained his composure. He offered us more tea.

Kazim and Habiba set up a low folding table in front of us, laid it with a flowered cloth and set it with plates of food. Kazim ate with us (Habiba demurred, saying she'd already eaten): tomatoes, long green mild chilies, fresh cheese and gently pickled romano beans that Habiba warmed in oil over a burner on the wood stove. Tea for Kazim, orange Fanta for Dave and me.

As the three of us ate Habiba pulled hunks of bread from a big loaf she kept in a plastic bag on a shelf near the door. She carefully peeled warm hard-boiled eggs and placed them on our plates.

Kazim told us about growing up in the house, how he was seven years old when his father built it with his own hands. He described a village more populous than it is now, the mosque just minutes from their door crowded with the faithful every Friday afternoon; it's closed now. He described the mill down by the river where his father and the village's other farmers took their corn to be ground into grits and flour. How his mother made meals in the hearth that now houses the modern wood-fired stove, and how as a boy he listened to the family's cows and the sheep and chickens moving beneath the floorboards as he drifted off to sleep. Every autumn, he said, the ambar was stacked to its rafters with corn and other fruits of the harvest.

He and Habiba adore each other. It's lovely to see. When she checked his watch and pulled a sack of pills from beneath her sweater -- ''I was in the hospital last month, for few days," she murmured -- Kazim watched her worriedly. When we heard the clank of a jerryrigged oil can bell, hung just outside the house to scare animals away from the garden, Habiba shook her head, smiling sideways at Kazim, and said "That's his work." He shrugged his shoulders, hung his head, then smiled and winked at her. They both laughed.

Every year in late autumn the Habiba and Kazim slaughter their few chickens, pack the carcasse up along with bushels of hazelnuts and walnuts from their own trees and board an overnight bus to Istanbul. There they stay for the winter, shuffling between their children's houses. Not willingly -- when they were younger, Kazim told us, they stuck out the cold and snow in the old house. But it's impossible now. "There's no taxi, no bus to go into town. Sometimes no electricity. It's too isolated. We enjoy Istanbul but ...."

After finishing our lunch we stayed for two more glasses of tea. Habiba looked tired and Kazim began clucking after her; it was time to leave. The couple walked us downstairs, Kazim taking quiet but obvious pride in the fact that Dave stopped every step to photograph his house's wooden beams and planks and its storage area, where the baskets Kazim and Habiba use to collect walnuts and apples hung on hooks jutting from the walls. He understood why we'd been drawn to the ambar. "Yes, it's beautiful," he agreed.

Neither Kazim nor Habiba wanted their photograph taken. "We're too old and too ugly!" she cried, shooing Dave away but laughing when he tried to convince her otherwise.

"Come back in the spring, in May, after we return from Istanbul," Habiba said us as she urged a bulging bag of black walnuts into my hands."This place in the springtime, oh! You can't imagine how wonderful. Like heaven on earth."

Missed Opportunities and Pide

You certainly wouldn't call Saray the friendliest pide salonu in Turkey. When we walked in, hungry after a morning of shopping on empty stomachs for edible souvenirs like rough bulgur pasta and split fava beans, the owner looked up from behind his desk and fixed us with an unsmiling stare, heaved a deep sigh and went back to his newspaper.

But the place smelled good, too good to walk back out of, like yeast and browning meat and cheese melting under a grill. A welcoming warmth (the weather had turned overnight; the previous day's harmless puffy clouds were now charcoal gray and what had been a cool breeze had morphed into a cutting wind hinting at snow) emanated from the wood oven on the back wall. And pide, lots and lots of pide were being made.

So we ignored the owner's diffidence and grabbed a couple of seats. A delivery order of 90-plus pide was being assembled on the table behind us. We took this as an encouraging sign.

It was our last morning in Tokat, a town in the southern reaches of Turkey's mid-Black Sea region that doesn't see a lot of tourists but should. Not necessarily because of its beauty -- Tokat is your average Anatolian town -- or because of its sights, which are relatively few, but because of its welcoming populace. When you first arrive Tokat feels closed and conservative. Give it half a day and the city opens its arms wide.

Regrets brought us back to Tokat, which we first visited eleven years ago. On that trip, in which we'd driven from the Mediterranean city of Antalya to Camlihemsin on the Black Sea, we'd squeezed too much into too little time. We hadn't yet learned to make room for serendipity by scheduling in plenty of slack days or to be willing to jetison a planned destination if a tempting alternative intervened.

That trip we met a smart, funny 16-year-old who walked us around town and invited us to his high school to sort-of teach an English class. The next morning we went and had a blast. All the kids wanted to invite us home for dinner. If we hadn't been so insistent on getting to Amasya before we hit Trabzon before we visited Camlihemsin we'd have enjoyed a dozen home-cooked meals in a dozen Tokat homes over the next few days. Instead we took to the road shortly after the class.

Stupid, stupid. STUPID.

This time around we half hoped we'd bump into our young friend, perhaps married now. Surely he'd recognize us (we yabanci don't all look alike, do we?) even if we probably wouldn't recognize him. That didn't happen of course, but we're nonetheless glad that the memory of meeting him all those years ago lured us back. On that first trip Tokat intrigued us. It still does. We know we'll return soon.

Tokat may not be beautiful in the way that Istanbul is. But it is ruggedly handsome, ringed by rocky crags and real mountains further out; from high up the views are dramatic. Kids climb around on those crags after school, and shepherds tend sheep.

There's a crumbling castle too, and stone-paved streets that wind uphill from the bustling "modern" main street. This is Old Tokat, an area of wood-frame brick houses and mansions. Some bear massive double timber doors with a pattern of two side-by-side "Z"s, one flipped in the reverse. Everyone acknowledges this pattern is a Tokat thing, but no one could tell us how or why it came to be.

Agricultural land laps at Tokat's edges and in autumn strings of drying vegetables and fruit festoon windows and walls and women in the Old City, many of whom belong to families who work their own farms, gather on a raised concrete slab at the upper reaches of the neighborhood, where they turn stalks of wheat into wheat berries and bulgur.

Tokat boasts a wonderful twice-a-week market with a koy section where village women sell pekmez and cheese and huge piles of herbs foraged in the hills. And craftsmen making saddles and harnesses by hand and blacksmiths who still pound shoes for horses and donkeys.

In Tokat everyone has time to talk; Dave and I must have drunk gallons of tea between us during dozens of conversations with Tokat-ans on everything from home cooking to the layout of traditional Tokat houses.

So by Day Three, our last day, we felt a warm friendly glow that enabled us to ignore the non-welcome from Saray's owner. We ordered our pides and a couple of chopped salads and admired Saray's lavender and yellow color scheme while we waited for our food.

Which was exceptional, really. There are pide and then there are pide and these pide bore the imprint of years of experience, good ingredients and a master's control of the wood-fired oven.

One arrived oozing scallion-flecked cheese, another spilling tender lamb minced with onion, tomato and long green chilies. Upper crusts were slicked with butter, bottoms were lightly scorched from the hot stones. Every bite held crispness and chewiness and the flavor of good fresh wheat came through. Indifferent ownership or not, we'll return to Saray.

After lunch we left town with regret, though this time it wasn't the sort of regret that comes from missed opportunities.

In case you missed it, Dave has put together a short multi-media on Istanbul's iconic ferry boats. Hop over here, click "play" and take a 4-minute vacation.

Datli Maya: Tradition With a Twist in Istanbul

The Istanbul-bound flight out of Singapore arrives in the wee hours. Even after we've hit up airport Duty Free, fought the traffic to Beyoglu and dropped our bags in our usual stay in Cihangir it's still early. We know a long nap will assert itself eventually but on a morning like this -- turquoise skies, birds chirping, a light breeze -- going straight to bed is out of the question.

So we walk a little, poking around the neighborhood, tallying the changes since our last visit: a few sleek restaurants, a new bar or two, a couple boutiques. Cihangir doesn't have Galata's dramatic architecture or its historic charm, but its hipster factor has risen dramatically. We're happy to see Mucver is still there; we know it even before we climb the hill outside our door to the corner because we can smell lunch being prepared in the garden-level kitchen just a few doors away.

But wait ... the postage stamp-sized wood-fired bakery where we always buy simit from a sometimes friendly, sometimes grumpy hoca, we see as we approach, has been re-painted. He is gone and -- we roll our eyes -- the place is now a cute cafe called Datli Maya. There is cheesecake in the window.

Oh dear. There goes the neighborhood.

Still, it's open, we're hungry, and jetlag is closing in. We step inside and find that the wood-fired oven is still in use and simit are still for sale. And when we inquire about the hoca the new owner tells us that he taught her to use the wood-fired oven, and the simit recipe is his, and he lives upstairs on the third floor. We feel better.

The cafe is in early days, she says. They're still testing, getting a feel for the fire. Would we like to try a dish of lor (ricotta-reminiscent fresh cheese) and Spanish quince paste warmed in the oven? We would, so we head upstairs, through the teeny-tiny kitchen, and take a seat at one of three tables in the even smaller dining space. In the corner by the door there's help-yourself tea in a big old-fashioned samovar. The wall shelves by our table hold jars of dried herbs, a few books, some knick-knacks. The chairs and tables are mismatched but the place feels comfortable, not twee. Personal, not self-consciously shabby chic.

The cheese and fruit paste arrives at our table drizzled with good olive oil and garnished with two black olives. The lor is unsalted and uber milky, nicely balanced by the sharp olives and sweet quince paste. As we're fighting over the last bite the cafe's energetic owner pops upstairs and, plucking twigs and leaves from the jars on the shelf, offers us herbal tea.

As we drink  I read a framed newspaper clipping hanging on the wall. It turns out that our friendly host is Dilara Erbay, a not unknown quantity in Istanbul's culinary world. (Read more about her career, and Datli Maya, in a typically authoritative Istanbul Eats write-up here.)

Dilara was last associated with Abracadabra, a big beautiful restaurant with a view in Arnavutkoy. One Sunday morning last January we and a couple chef friends went to Abracadabra for what is yet one of the best breakfasts we've eaten in Turkey. Dilara wasn't around, but her commitment to sourcing the absolute best regional ingredients was evident in the kaymak, honeycomb, eggs, butter and cheeses on our table. Yet despite the deliciousness and the welcome given by the Abracadabra staff we knew we wouldn't return; the vibe was a little preening, a bit too see-and-be-seen.

What a lovely surprise then to find that a not-new talent, but a new-to-us talent, was working magic in a place without attitude, a cafe we'd be eager to return to. Three weeks later, after a spell on the Black Sea and inland, we did. It was all good.

The traditionalist in me sniffs at a menu that puts lahmacun side-by-side with cheesecake. But why not, if both are done well? Datli Maya's lahmacun hoca brings his talent for taming the wood fire all the way from the southeast;, our thin-crusted pekmez specimen was memorable, our garlicky sausage and cheese pide delicious. Dilara knows a thing or two about baking; the cheesecake is seven-spiced and lovely, a cross between hefty New York-style and fluffier versions.

Turkey boasts amazing regional ingredients that should be getting more play outside traditional kitchens. Our kudos Datli Maya for going there in a way that feels honest, not gimmicky.

And as a curious cook who enjoys talking with other cooks I like the idea of a place where I can walk through the kitchen and see what the staff is cooking up for the lunch special. On our last morning in Istanbul we found Dilara and her colleagues wrist-deep in wild mushroom and bulgur pilav. Are those dates? I asked, and Dilara pulled a package of floury red Chinese dates from the counter. "A friend gave them to me," she said. "I think they're Vietnamese. But we're using them in this pilaf. Why not?"

Indeed.

Datli Maya, 59/A Türkgücü Caddesi, Cihangir (across from the mosque). Daily 8am-midnight.

On the Turkey's Black Sea Coast, Autumn's Bounty

No doubt about it, we are very, very behind. Behind in posting from our autumnal travels in Turkey and from our rainy season time in Chiang Mai. And in posting from Hanoi, and Kelantan before that, and from Taiwan before that.

Where have the last five and a half months gone?

It's almost Thanksgiving (we'll be spending it in Chiang Mai, where we find ourselves once again). To make up for our absence, we're offering a great recipe for Turkey Day leftovers, and a story and slideshow to go along with it. Autumn's abundance on show in markets on Turkey's eastern Black Sea coast, and comfort food from Sinop: islama, an over-the-top dish of butter and broth-soaked lavash (or yufka) topped with turkey (or chicken) and crushed walnuts.

Jump to the story and slideshow, our latest for food and wine website Zester Daily, here.

(And it's still a great dish, even if Thanksgiving isn't in your near future.)

Kastamonu: Here's the Beef

Last January, en route from hamsi (anchovy) node Sinop to Ankara we made an 18-hour pitstop in Kastamonu, capital of the Turkish province of the same name. The sky was dull gray and the sub-zero wind unrelenting; by necessity our explorations were punctuated with stops in tea houses where we could thaw our frozen feet. Coal smoke hung in the air and soot coated buildings. Early Sunday morning, when we ventured out in search of caffeine, the streets were all but empty.

Still, there was something about Kastamonu that made us know we'd be back. Maybe it was the city's trove of crumbling old konak, or mansions, or its romantic situation on the slopes of two hills separated by a river, one hill crowned by the ruins of an 11th-century castle and the other by a late 1800s tower with a still chiming clock.

Perhaps it was the chorus of calls to prayer that we heard at dusk fas we watched a nearly full moon rise from the the courtyard of Ismail Bey mosque, high up one of Kastamonu's slopes. Or the thousands of starlings that appeared in the sky over the crest of the opposite hill right after, swooping and diving in wildly shifting formations.

It could have been dinner: superb kebabs that in their charred glory tasted all the better for being our first bites of meat after more than a week of eating primarily fish.

At any rate, we did return to Kastamonu last month, driving straight from Ankara's airport after a flight from Istanbul. We returned to the same Sunday market that we briefly lighted on in January -- and were treated to our first taste of this fall's hamsi catch -- and feasted on spit-roasted lamb in the nearby town of Taskopru, known for its garlic. We poked around the brick-paved streets in Kastamonu's market neighborhood, and found a good restaurant serving local dishes, including a version of etli ekmek ("meat bread") very different from the etli ekmek we ate last year in Mardin, in southeastern Turkey (a town which, coincidentally, is also built on a hill).

And we ate enough meat to fortify us for the self-imposed nothing-but-seafood diet we had planned for the next two weeks, which we would spend on the coast.

When one thinks of Turkish food it's lamb that most readily comes to mind. But in many parts of the country (like Kars) beef is the preferred red animal protein. Most of Kastamonu's kasab, or butchers, display not sheep but cow carcasses. And pastirma -- cured, air-dried beef -- is a local specialty.

In Kastamonu, beef, pastirma and garlic from Taskopru

Pastirma is usually associated with the eastern Anatolian city of Kayseri, where it is heavily flavored with garlic. Kastamonu's pastirma is also garlicky but less so. We know this because we carried some in our car for most of a day with minimal stink. A decade ago we bought some pastirma in Kayseri and attempted to do the same, but after two hours the interior of our car was so heavy with garlicky-ness that we were forced to pull over and eat the culprit.

In Kastamonu pastirma is preserved with and without an orange coating of ground seasonings -- garlic, fenugreek and paprika -- called cemen. The former is eaten as is while the latter is cooked into etli ekmek (which is then known as pastirmali ekmek), stewed with vegetables, or pan-fried with eggs.

Monday is beef delivery day in Kastamonu's pastirma/butcher area. Early in the morning we spotted men dressed in blood red uniforms unloading huge sides of beef from a truck. We followed them through a maze of passageways to a butcher shop, where we drank tea (of course) and chatted a bit with the shop's owner..

Kastamonu native Bayram Sari has owned his butcher shop, where he sells beef and his own pastirma and sucuk (sausage), for a little over 15 years. The enormous sides of beef hanging in his window are from Simmental, a breed of dairy and beef cow that can weigh up to 400+ kilos.

Bayram Bey makes his pastirma in a "secret" location about 45 minutes from downtown, he says. Curing is done from September to November, after summer has well and truly finished but before the worst of Kastamonu's bitter winter begins. To make the pastirma, beef loin and flank are rubbed with salt and air dried it for one to two months; the cemen coating is added after the meat is dried. Kastamonulu love their pastirma -- Bayram Bey figures he sells about 1.5 to 2 tons of the cured meat every year.

"That's no good," he said, pointing to a bag in my lap bearing the name of a pastirma shop next to the truck from which Bayram Bey's carcasses were being unloaded. "You have to try my pastirma!"

He had his shop assistant shave us a couple hundreds grams off a hunk in the display case. It was indeed delicious: not quite as dry as bresaola, supple and rich in flavor, tasting of beef first and then of garlic and spices. He also gifted us a few links of delicious sucuk which, with their hit of cumin, had me wishing for a soft corn tortilla. Go figure.

It's fair to say that when it comes to curing meat Bayram Bey is a maestro. After bidding him "Gorusuruz" (See you again -- and we will) we headed back to our hotel and packed our car for the drive to the coast.

We tucked the pastirma and sucuk into a bag with other edible souvenirs of Kastamonu -- sour plum fruit leather, "black" bulgur (coarse bulgur made from emmer, aka farro -- one of the province's specialty crops) and freshly harvested walnuts. Halfway to Inebolu the sun came out and we made an impromptu pitstop at cafe perched on a hilltop, where we refueled with tea, bread and Bayram Bey's pastirma (opening photo).

Suitable for Framing II: Famous Garlic and a Market

Famous Taşköprü garlic, Turkey, October 2011

Market in Mardin, Turkey, June 2010

This is the second post in a series that we're running every Tuesday through early December.All images in the series are for sale, via Photoshelter or directly from Dave.

To learn more about the series visit the first post, here. Images can be viewed full screen in Dave's Suitable for Framing gallery, here.

About the photographer:

David Hagerman is an editorial and commercial photographer specializing in food, travel, portraiture and street photography. His work has appeared in the New York Times, Saveur, Food & Wine, Travel+Leisure Southeast Asia, Wall Street Journal and other publications.When not on assignment or otherwise gainfully occupied Dave offers private photography workshops in Penang and elsewhere. Contact him at drhagerman@gmail.com.

Well Hello, Hamsi!

We love hamsi. If you've been a visitor here since last January you know this. You know that we journeyed to Turkey's Black Sea coast in the middle of winter just to eat hamsi -- anchovies -- at the source.

We're back in the region but still inland, in Kastamonu. Yet we've already had our first taste of the Black Sea's beloved cold season bounty, thanks to a few generous balıkçı (fish sellers).

What is it with Turkish guys who sell fish? They see you snap a photo or two of their product and they want to feed you.

When this bunch at the Sunday market in Kuzeykent, just outside Kastamonu city, saw Dave photographing the basket of beautiful hamsi perched over the grey coal ash in their grill one of them grabbed a thick piece of bread, loaded it up with cooked specimens from the pile on their dining table (opening shot), squeezed over some lemon juice and handed the lot over.

The fish were delicious, perhaps better even than those we ate at our fish seller friend Mert's shop in Sinop nine months ago. It's early in the season and hamsi are still small; these specimens were no longer than our little fingers. Their bones are still tender -- entirely, easily edible. We popped the fish into our mouths whole, though our new balıkçı friends carefully stripped the backbones from theirs.

After we finished our first shared slice of hamsi bread (köy ekmeği or village bread, from a dense, chewy wheat flour -based loaf baked in a wood-fired oven) the cooks threw strips of roasted red peppers onto a second open-faced hamsi sandwich. When a third was offered we had to beg for mercy.

This man, a regular at the market who -- like us -- was drawn from a far corner to this fish stall by the scent of hamsi cooking over an open fire, was happy to take up the slack.  

In Istanbul, A Perfect Lunch and the Call to Prayer

Eating seafood by the water in Karakoy, Istanbul -- such a cliched tourist experience. But Istanbullu eat seafood by the water in Karakoy too. And because of these fish, these fried hamsi (anchovies), we found the best spot in the city from which to listen to the call to prayer.

On a gauzily bright afternoon last January we walked through the small fish market at the northern end of the Galata Bridge. We like the little restaurants there. They tout a bit and a menu may be waved in front of your face, but there's nothing overly aggressive about the salesmanship.

Prices are clearly marked, and reasonable -- especially if you stick to what's in season (and avoid prawns/shrimp). The service isn't to white tablecloth restaurant standards, but if you've dined at white tablecloth restaurants in Istanbul you might think that's not a bad thing. (Our tolerance for snooty waiters is pretty low).

The food is basic, and good.

We walked to the "restaurant" at the very end, the one with tables right on the water. We sat in the sun and drank in that view that's impossible to tire of. We ordered hamsi and a mackerel-y type fish and a salad. After many trips to Turkey we still marvel that a beautiful salad is so easily had no matter where in in the country you find yourself.

The fish arrived griddle-fried and crispy outside, moist and sweet within, accompanied by big fleshy leaves of peppery rocket and wedges of lemon. Our salads (greedy for the tangy pickled red cabbage that's a component of this tri-color assemblage, we ordered one each) were dressed with a drizzle of olive oil and the lemon juice we squeezed on top.

We ate whole anchovies, leaving aside only bits of head, and picked flesh from mackerel bones and soaked up lemony olive oil with chunks of bread, and felt absurdly lucky to be there, dining outside comfortably in the middle of January and drinking in one of the world's most beautiful skylines.

After lunch we hopped on the small ferry we'd watched chug back and forth between our "restaurant" and Eminonu, on the opposite bank. We could have easily walked across the bridge, or taken the train. We could have stayed in Karakoy; we had no reason or desire to be in Eminonu.

But it seemed right, after a simple meal of fish and salad by the water, to ride close to its surface on an old-fashioned ferry. So we paid the ridiculous foreigners' price, equal to almost half the cost of our cheap lunch, and climbed aboard.

We sat outside and let the wind slap our faces as we listened to the ka-chug ka-chug of the motor and the hollow punch of waves against the boat's wooden sides. It was a short ride, less than five minutes, and if we'd had the nerve we would have asked the gruff boatman if we might stay on board for a few more back-and-forths.

But we didn't, so we didn't. Instead we alighted in a parking lot with a perfect vantage of Galata tower just as the loudspeaker of a mosque nearby began to crackle.

It started there, and then marched up the hills behind us as muezzin at other mosques joined in. Then morefrom the opposite side of the bridge. We by the shore as the call to prayer bounced and echoed all around us, a cascade of rising and falling male voices.

When the last bit faded away we walked to Eminonu pier and caught a ferry to Kadikoy, just to be on the water.

Fish restaurant at the Karakoy fish market: if you're at the Galata Bridge facing Eminonu the fish market is on your right. Walk through it to the very end, to the tables on the water. The menu is basic: fish and salad. About 20 Turkish lira for two fish plates and a big salad.