EatingAsia

In Southeastern Turkey, One Thousand Miles of Deliciousness: Part II

    Hatay province (its capital city is Antakya -- ancient Antioch) was the last stop on our southeastern Turkey road trip this last April. We weren't strangers to Hatay, having journeyed there last autumn to see pomegranate molasses being made (and to eat some terrific wood oven-fired kebabs), but this was our first trip specifically for our book. 

    Find Hatay [hah-TIE] on a map and you'll see that it lies in Turkey's southeast, a region we'd been eating in for three weeks. Yet when I began eating and cooking in Hatay in April I realized that the province's foods are not wholly of the region. Hatay has a cuisine has all its own, one that's probably closer to that of its southern neighbor Syria than to that of the more well-known (and visited) Turkish province of Gaziantep, to its northeast.

    Hatay has a long Mediterranean coastline. It's lush, not desert-like. Olive oil, pomegranate molasses, incredibly fragrant dried mint, fennel, zahter (a variety of thyme that looks and smells a bit like rosemary, in season in the spring) -- these ingredients say "Hatay". Fiery red peppers (fresh and dried) are a pantry staple; it's the only place in Turkey where I have eaten dishes that, to me, really and truly merit the descriptive "spicy" (granted, having honed my oral heat receptors in Sichuan and lived in Thailand I am an extreme Chili Head).  Meals are served with plates of undressed greens (mint, parlsey, rocket, whatever's in the market) to be taken as bursts of freshness between bites of cooked dishes.

    We arrived in Hatay planning on three nights and ended up staying six. We left with a fierce desire to stay another week and plans to return ASAP. I left knowing that I have to rework the structure of our book to give this province's fabulous food the space it deserves. But that's what on-the-ground research is about: discovery.

    A few highlights from our time there:

a serendipitous find when were exploring the countryside (add this to the reasons we always self-drive in Turkey) -- a one-woman show of a shop selling homemade everything, each ingredient sourced from the farm on which the shop sits. Whey cheese, whey cheese with fresh zatar, every type of pickle you could imagine, bulgur, wheat berries, tomato sauce, tomato paste, red pepper paste, drained yogurt balls with thyme and chili, salted goat cheese, olives, pekmez made from several fruits and from carob, pickled zahter, two types of olives, preserved grape leaves ..... and that's just on the shelves shown.

    We arrived in time for a late breakfast of three types of olives, three cheeses, fresh mint and parsley plucked from a garden behind the shop, lavash. And then we lingered for hours, long enough to watch her boil milk over a wood fire to make salted yogurt as thick as putty (divine) and assemble, proof and roll out the dough for katikli ekmek, a cheese and spice-topped pide that is Hatay's answer to lahmacun.

    Antakya boasts a great covered market, where I pestered spice shop owners, butchers and kebab makers and bakers with questions, and where we drank glass after glass of refreshing, reviving salgam (pickled turnip -- black carrot, really -- juice).

    We cottoned on to one firin (bakery) in particular, 

where the owners took us upstairs to the proofing room to show me how to make a delicious savory coiled pastry and biberli ekmek ("chili bread" -- pide smeared with an addictive, and pleasingly fiery, blend of dried red chilies, thyme and other spices).

There we also watched the assembly of perhaps the world's largest hamburger -- actually a kagit kebabi ("paper kebab") slid onto a large pide, which was then folded in half to make a  portable, very meaty meal.

    But Antakya is about more than meat. In fact it's probably one of Turkey's more vegetarian-friendly cities thanks to a plethora of shops selling meze and nothing but meze -- a dozen or more varieties of snacky spreads, dips, salads etc to eat in or take out. Here, ezme (again, fabulously fiery), hummus heavy on the tahini and thick yogurt with chopped herbs, drizzled with fruity Hatay olive oil.

    And then there was surk, Hatay's iconic cheese. "But it's not cheese!" I was scolded on more than one occasion, when I described it as such. Surk is whey cheese (which I suppose is technically really not "cheese" because it is made by boiling the whey left from making cheese) mixed with a heap of spices and dried in the sun. It can be "young" (ie not aged), or "old" and wonderfully complex-funky, as in this specimen that a housewife pulled from her refrigerator, part of her own homemade surk stock. (I coveted the knife.)

We ate it spread on flatbread and drizzled with more of that delicious local olive oil.

Hatay, we love you -- and we shall return.

For edible highlights from Part I of our southeastern Turkey road trip go here. We hope these posts inspire you to consider road tripping in Turkey! See our tips on how to self-drive and survive in what we think is one of the most road-trippable countries on earth, here.

    

What a Food Writer's Fingers are Worth

 

    My right forearm began to ache in early March -- a vague throbbing at first and then an insistent pain that intensified when I raised my arm to shoulder level. My wrist began to hurt soon after. Classic carpal tunnel symptoms, known to many writers. I iced, ate ibuprofen and rested the arm as much as I could, adjusted my desk chair so that my wrist would be as flat as possible when I typed and, as Dave can attest, complained. But I was in a three-week window between trips, getting ready to head off to Turkey on our first with-contract book research trip and anyway, carpal tunnel is so common and self-diagnosable that I didn't seek treatment.

    Two days before we left for Turkey my right palm began to ache and I had trouble writing. A week later, as we readied to fly from Istanbul to the southeast, my right thumb stopped flexing. It is a very strange thing to look at a limb or a joint, will it to move and get no response. Try writing with a non-flexing thumb -- it's difficult. I spent the next 4 weeks taking notes by squeezing my pen into the junction between my thumb and forefinger, thumb standing up straight up like a soldier on guard duty. It looked strange, I know. My writing was slow and my hand cramped easily. I can hardly read some of my (usually very neat) notes from that trip.

    I was still thinking carpal tunnel when we landed in Adelaide for speaking engagements at Tasting Australia. I'd bought a brace in Sanliurfa and wearing it at night and in the car helped a bit with the forearm and wrist pain. I became mildly freaked out after an editor I met with in Australia told me of a former colleague, an editor at a publishing house, who got carpal tunnel in both arms so bad she eventually had to quit her job and change professions. But I assured myself that that was an extreme case; it wouldn't be me.

    It turns out that I was right, but not in the way I had hoped. When we returned to Penang in early May I visited an orthopedist. He sent me to a neurologist. And then he sent me to Kuala Lumpur, to consult with an orthopedic specialist and hand surgeon. An X-ray, two MRIs, a blood test and a medievel torture session (actually, a legitimate nerve test that saw the neurologist inserting needles deep into muscles on my forearm, upper arm and (!!!!!) the soft pad beneath my thumb (OW!) and THEN asking me to flex various muscles while he kept the needles stuck in me and sometimes wiggled them around) I had my diagnosis: anterior interroseus nerve syndrome (AINS). In layman's terms, a branch of the medial nerve in my forearm is compressed, and that's why I can't move my thumb. Given that the condition has not righted itself in going on 7 weeks my orthopedist advised surgery sooner rather than later, to cut the band of tissue between the two major muscles in my forearm that are entrapping the nerve.

    The surgery is not a big deal. One and a half hours, out-patient, I recuperate in a hotel overnight and then it's back to Penang. I've been given the OK to travel to Turkey 7 days after the procedure. (We were originally planning to head back to Turkey this Sunday.) I couldn't care less about the scar, 4 to 6 inches along the inside of my forearm. At the moment my main source of consternation is rather mundane: I'm trying to get three doctors to give me the paperwork required by my insurance company before next Tuesday, when I am scheduled to be sliced. (Pro tip: contemplating medical tourism to Penang? Don't. The hospitals -- or at least my hospital, which received an award last year from the state government for its contribution to the island's medical tourism industry -- are as chaotic as the roads).

    What is a big deal is that the procedure has a success rate of only 72 percent or so. If it doesn't work I won't get my thumb back, and AINS will eventually affect my forefinger too.

    On the one hand (TA-DUM -- get it?) it's just fingers. It's not the whole hand. It's not like I've got cancer of the tongue, or have lost my sense of taste and smell, or the ability to eat and drink. This is a Small Problem and, thinking about those Big Problems, I feel like a whiner.

    On the other, um, hand, these fingers -- the thumb and forefinger of the writing hand -- are important to a writer, especially a food writer who does research in often remote locations, taking notes in a notebook. I can't take notes on my ipad or a phone when I'm in a market, in a kitchen, in a bakery, on a farm, in a cheese workshop. I can't use a recorder. Recorders make people uncomfortable. And anyway I rarely sit down for interviews -- my "interviews" and recipe gathering are often on the fly, in snippets. I whip out my notebook all the time to write one sentence, two. Folks don't mind my notebook, often they don't even notice that I'm writing in it. Pulling out an ipad, even a mini, and firing it up and typing on it -- or doing the same with a smart phone -- announces: Here I am, taking official notes. Not cool. 

    So, yeah, I'm a bit worried. But as my Dad says, I've always been a Worrywart.

    To indulge my Worrywart-edness I've been thinking about other things I need my flexing thumb and forefinger for, things I wouldn't be able to do without them. So far I've come up with: using chopsticks, holding a fork so I don't look like a 1 year-old, properly gripping a curved knife for mincing, hooking my dog's lead to his harness, picking up a coffee cup or a glass.

    Typing properly on this computer.

    Did I mention that I have a book contract?

In Southeastern Turkey, One Thousand Miles of Delicious: Part I

     We're just back from Turkey and Australia. In the former, we formally (ie. with contract in hand) began work on our cookbook. In Oz, Dave and I spoke (separately) on food travel writing and food and travel photography (terrifying at first, absolute fun in the end) at the Words to Go bloggers' workshop attached to the annual Tasting Australia. It was an intense 5.5 weeks, every day filled with good food and new friendships. We managed to fit in a wee bit of vacation in Sydney in at the end. In just a little over 2 weeks we'll be off again, back to Turkey.

   Our Turkey time was spent mostly in the southeast. We've been before, but never for such an extended period, and never feeling the sort of pressure -- lovely lucky pressure, but pressure nonetheless -- that comes with a manuscript deadline hovering in the back of your mind. We worked as we usually do: mostly on our own, feeling our way, meeting people in markets and bakeries and restaurants and on farms and orchards and wherever else one meets perfect strangers willing to share time, a recipe, a story, their home, their workplace. There were ups and downs, but mostly there were high highs. My notebooks are filled with more stories and recipes than I can ever fit into a single chapter. (Some of them will end up here.)

   We're so excited about what we experienced and documented -- and ate! -- on this trip. This -- getting out there, meeting people, cooking and eating and photographing up a storm -- is what we live for. Those three weeks were a reminder that we really are astoundingly lucky to be able to call this work.  

    We flew from Istanbul to Gaziantep, where we picked up a car and overnighted before setting off. From there we drove a sort of lopsided counterclockwise almost-circle, covering about 1000 miles excluding day trips before we dropped the car off back in Gaziantep 22 days later.

    Our first stop was Sanliurfa, a bland-looking modern city with a lovely preserved historic core of sandstone houses and a fascinating covered bazaar.

    In Sanliurfa isot is king. You might know this pepper in its dried and ground form, when it's very dark, with a beguiling sweet-hot flavor reminiscent of Mexican ancho chilies. I'd never seen isot in fresh form but that was remedied in Sanliurfa, where it was everywhere, sold in markets and at small corner shops, skewered for grills, carried in tepsi, or pans, to the community oven for roasting. Sanliurfali eat fresh isot morning, noon and night.

     There is almost no time of the day when Sanliurfa doesn't smell like barbecue. A favorite kebab is liver. Before you turn your nose up, know that the liver is cut into small cubes that char and crust beautifully over the fire and that it's eaten wrapped in soft lavash with fresh parsley and mint, grilled isot peppers if you dare, and an addictive almost kimchee-like onion salad-relish flavored with pomegranate molasses and isot paste, among other ingredients. Fantastic.

     Even for breakfast, as in this photo above.

     When we weren't scoping out the bazaar or skulking about grill stalls so that Dave could photograph over the shoulders of diners we spent a bit of time with a woman who is committed to preserving local culinary traditions. From her I learned the recipe for several dishes, including a simple crepe with walnuts and a one-pot meal of baldo rice pilaf with small whole onions and chunks of lamb cooked for three hours with pepper and tomato pastes. The latter dish may sound laborious but, like many of the recipes I've collected in eastern Turkey, is deceptively simple, using just a few ingredients and requiring only 20 minutes, if that, of active time.

   
     We next drove north to Hasankeyf, an anient town on the Tigris River that is endangered by a really stupid dam project. But that's for another post.

      While eating breakfast at our guest house one morning (we arrived intending to stay one night and ended up staying four -- Hasankeyf is that kind of place) the daily bread arrived by red bike. The white sheet hung from a tree practically begged Dave to take advantage. 

    We spent a bit of time with a couple of households learning to make a lovely egg bread in the tandir (aka tandoor) oven. What's the best way to use up extra dough? Deep-fry it and salt it, of course, for a hot snack.

     Then we backtracked to Mardin, from where we reported a story on the city's first bienale almost four years ago, stopping en route for glasses of bracing, reviving ayran (salted and water-thinned yogurt) made with a mixture of sheep, goat and cow's milk. (As an aside, this salty-sour-milky drink has become my go-to refreshment right after we arrive in lstanbul from Malaysia. It's soothing to a jet-lagged stomach and the saltiness brilliantly combats the dehydration that hits on long flights.)

     Once we arrived, there was fragrant spice bread, meat, parsley and onion-filled hand pies, an addictive crepe-like concoction filled with fresh cheese and soaked in not-too-sweet syrup and, well, some of the finest meatballs I have ever eaten. Our stay in Mardin was very short, only two nights, but we can't wait to return and dig more deeply into the local cuisine.

     Our book will have a strong seasonal component, and so throughout this journey we had our eye out for what spring means for local diets. We learned that, to be honest, spring isn't as over-the-top bountiful as fall is. But I did gather recipes for some season delights like peas, young cardoons, otlar or wild herbs and greens (many of which are actually cultivated in the Unites States). The spring produce that showed up most often, everywhere we stopped, was marul or a type of romaine lettuce -- big, sturdy, flavorful-with-a-hint-of-bitterness heads of romaine lettuce. Would you stuff and stew romaine? Southeastern Turkish cooks do, and it is absolutely delicious.

     On to Diyarbakir, with its black basalt city walls and breakfast obsession. Most every Turk we know adores breakfast, and we've certainly eaten some fine ones around Turkey (especially in Van), but Diyarbakir breakfasts blew us away. Our favorite breakfast dish opens this post (see up top): a very simple fried eggs with sliced long green peppers and beef confit.

     Why we travel in Turkey by car: the ability it gives us to pursue not-pursueable-by-bus obsessions like cheese, even if it means driving, twice, to a village far from the city to observe milking, and the cheese making process, afterwards to be welcomed by the cheese maker's generous family with a lunch of cheese (of course!), charrred peppers and eggplants, spicy potatoes, cucumber and tomato salad, fresh melty butter and homemade bread.

    Another reason we travel Turkey by car: the freedom to take less direct routes between cities that reward the effort with views like this. We're quite partial to the northeastern provinces and the Black Sea coast, but on this road trip we took in some of the most spectacular scenery we've ever come across in Turkey. Spring had truly sprung, everything was green and the air was sparkling.

     Right in the midst of this undulating sea of green we stumbled upon a place Dave and I call Heaven. That's not the real name of the village, but it's how the village's residents (just seven households) described it to us. "We have everything we need here," one spry eighty year-old man told us. Indeed, as we sat down to this "snack" (whey cheese and fresh butter, meant to be smashed together, fresh cow cheese, yogurt mixed with young pistachio tree leaves, green almonds and green plums, bread from the tandir -- you know, just a little something you might throw together for unexpected guests, everything grown, foraged or produced in the village) in the late afternoon sunshine and drank in a view much like the one in the photo above, it was hard not to agree.  

     That road eventually delivered us, after an unplanned ride on a car ferry, to Adiyaman, where around 5pm seemingly every firin (wood oven bakery) in town turns out not only plain pide for dinner, but pide laden with bubbling cheese and sugar for pre-dinner snack. A bit greasy? Yes. Addictive? You bet. We skipped dinner that night.

     From Adiyaman we drove south to Hatay, which borders Syria on the south and is edged by the Mediterranean on the west, and where we found enough goodness to merit a Part II. Stay tuned.

For more food images from Turkey see our tumblr (heavy on photos, light on text) Eating Turkey and Dave's photo blog SkyBlueSky. When on the road in Turkey we post intermittently, but update our culinary meanderings with photos and a few words pretty often on Facebook, and Twitter (@EatingAsia).