EatingAsia

Fourty-Four Hands. Twelve Hundred Udders.

    We heard it before we saw it, a high-pitched whine originating from somewhere a mile or so up the road. On a cloudless evening Dave and I were driving back to Van after a day exploring back roads to the south of the lake. It was mid-June, the start of yayla season, when villagers take their sheep and goats -- or send them with hired shepherds -- to high pasture. Earlier, descending from a craggy peak where we'd hiked through new grass and skirted clumps of leftover snow we saw signs of a shepherd's camp: upturned milk pails left to dry on the banks of a stream. Further on, we'd pulled off the road to give way to an elderly man, his wife and their son leading a hundred or so sheep, a few goats and several dogs to their summer camp.

    As we dropped to lake level there was a hum, then a whine, then a piercing vibrato that shimmered on the air. We stopped the car and stared hard out at the foothills across the plateau. Ever so gradually small shifting shapes came into view. We realized that we were hearing the bleets and blehs of many sheep and goats.

    We left the car, and after picking our way across a boggy marsh we were in the thick of it: sheep and goats and a dozen beautiful loping kangal dogs and what seemed to be an entire village, all assembed for the task that bookends the days during cheese-making season.

    Twenty-two women sat facing each other on low stools set three yards apart, forming a chute or tunnel into which four shepherds wrestled and herded twelve hundred animals. Astride a boulder in the middle, his head barely cresting the sea of jostling woolly beasts, a herder grabbed necks and horns and ears and shoulders, pulling and pushing the animals to his left and his right as he steered them to their owners.

    Splashes of green, purple, red, yellow and blue paint on the animals' backs told to which woman they belonged, but the milkers kept up a chorus -- Mine! Mine! Here! Here! — as sheep and goats streamed through the chute. They clamped their fists around legs and haunches and tails, roughly pulling their animals to them and bringing them close over pails set between their ankles.  A few deft squeezes of each teat and it was over, the animals jumping and springing away to their escape. When a woman ended up with a sheep or goat not her own she released it with a shout to the three young shepherds standing at the tunnel's exit; it was their job to wrestle the poor animal back to the starting gate.

    Milking is exhausting work and in most eastern Anatolian villages it's done by women. As these women worked, their daughters, daughters-in-law, sisters and elderly mothers stood behind them, ready to pour the fresh milk through cloth-lined syphons into 5-liter metal cans.

    The milkers' necks were thick, their shoulders broad, their wrists and forearms hard and muscled. Their hands were black from the mud beneath them and the dirt and oil on the animals’ fur. They sweated and grunted with their labors. They joked and laughed and razzed each other too.

    Each day during cheese season, the muhtar (village headman) told me as we stood watching this incredibly physical endeavor, the village's combined animals -- 1200 to 1300 in all -- yield a little over 250 gallons of milk (sheep produce much less milk than cows, and their milk is higher in fat).

    Each woman milks her animals twice a day, and then carries the milk across the marsh to the village, where with the help of other women in her family she turns it into an especially prized version of otlu peyniri, Van's famous sheep's milk cheese (with a little goat milk mixed in) threaded with pickled wild fennel, onions and other leaves and shoots plucked from the foothills that rise behind the milking ground.

    Cheese season lasts about five months, from May through September or October, and after it ends most of the animals are sent to slaughter. I asked one of the women: What do you do in the winter, when the days are short and the animals give little milk?

    "We sleep."

Since 2010 we've driven over 18,000 kilometers across eastern Turkey seeking out recipes, stories and images for a cookbook. Go here to read here about how a 16-year obsession with Turkey, its food and its people led to Istanbul and Beyond, forthcoming in 2016 from Rux Martin Books/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

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).

How to Seed a Pomegranate, Courtesy of Centuries of Tradition

    How long have villagers in Hatay province, southeastern Turkey, been transforming pomegranates into the sticky sweet-sour heavenly nectar nar eksili, known in English as pomegranate molasses? I don't know, and they don't either, but it's a fascinating process to witness.

    That's all I can say about it here, because we were in Hatay on assignment. But I can't let pomegranate season (in the United States, at least) pass without sharing the village women's technique for seeding the notoriously hard-to-seed fruit. It's easy and fast and works brilliantly.

    (Pomegranate stains, so wear an apron!)

    Cut a pomegranate in half horizontally. Holding one half in your palm, cut end out, squeeze gently enough to avoid wholesale juicing but firmly enough to loosen the seeds -- do this over a large bowl set in the sink. As you squeeze, rotate the fruit (actually, it's technically a berry) with your other hand.

    Now turn the pomegranate half upside down, so the cut end is facing your palm. Hold your hand and the fruit over the bowl and tap it firmly (you really do need a firm hand here, so don't be afraid to whack -- just don't break the skin) all over with anything tubular -- a thin rolling pin, the handle of a wooden or other spoon, etc. -- letting the seeds fall through your fingers into the bowl. While you're tapping rotate the fruit in your palm to expose all the seeds to the tap pressure.

    When you're finished have a look to see if you've gotten all the seeds -- if not just tap some more. You'll end up with a little juice and a lot of seeds, which you'll want to sift through to remove any bitter pomegranate membrane. It will be in fairly big pieces, so this isn't a major hassle.

    Do this a few times and you'll be a master, able to capture the pomegranate membrane in your fingers before it falls into the bowl and seed on average 1 pomegranate every 2 minutes. Do it long enough and your hands will begin to turn black (don't worry, it washes off eventually).

    Want to make it easier on yourself? Use fresh pomegranates -- they should be plump and heavy, the skins firm, not dry and shriveled.

 

Cook, Photograph and Eat with Us in Turkey this September!

This space has been quiet, and finally we can tell you why. We've been working on some Turkey projects. 

The first is a collaboration with Istanbul-based cooking instructor and food tour leader Olga Tikhonova Irez, publisher of the blog Delicious Istanbul: a 5-day food and photography workshop this September in Sapanca, a lovely small town two hours by car from the big city.

Our partner Olga's story is compelling: Russian, well-traveled, multi-degreed with extensive experience in the consulting industry, Olga visited Istanbul a few years ago and fell in love (as so many of us do) with the city, its people and its food. So she quit her high-level job, left her home in Moscow and moved to Turkey to make a new life and career in food. Determined to learn everything she could about Turkish home cooking Olga talked her way into an apprenticeship to the female owner-chef at Zelis Ciftligi, a family-run lodge in Sapanca. There she met her future husband, son of said master chef. Now fluent in Turkish, Olga splits her time between Kadikoy, Istanbul where she introduces travelers to the delights of marketing and cooking Turkish-style with her tours and classes, and Sapanca where she helps her family run their business.

When I first stumbled across Olga's blog about 1.5 years ago I spent hours stuck in the archives. I was struck by her honest musings on topics like adjusting to her role in her Turkish family's business and the challenges of finding her place in her mother-in-law's kitchen. I salivated over her descriptions of home-cooked meals at Zelis and found that we share preferences for certain Istanbul restaurants. I found too that we share a dismay at the fact that Turkey's cuisine is little known and underrated.

So when Dave and I were in Istanbul last November we met Olga for coffee. The three of us clicked, and the seed of this workshop was planted.

Earlier this month Dave and I visited Olga and her husband at Zelis. Right away we knew we'd found not only the perfect partners for such an enterprise, but the perfect place: a comfortable, family-style lodging in a beautiful, quiet setting. A casual place where guests could truly feel relaxed and at home. A lodge large enough to easily accomodate a group but small enough to maintain intimacy. A kitchen equipped for a restaurant but homey enough to be right for a small group of people learning and cooking together. Lots of windows and beautiful light for photography. Proximity to great markets. Access to local producers. Gracious and friendly hosts. Even an adorable cocker spaniel named Bakir ("copper" in Turkish).

And the food? Spectacular. We've been eating in Turkey since 1998 and we have never eaten such delicious, lovingly prepared meze. We were served liver that turned me, a liver-hater since childhood, into a liver lover. Breakfast was an orgy of gorgeous fresh baked goods (Best. Borek. Ever.), cheeses, a killer menemen, too many made-on-site jams and preserves to name, fresh yogurt, an intriguing cheese salad that is a specialty of Olga's mother-in-law. It was hard to leave. We wanted to move in.

The four of us ate and visited a market and walked around Sapanca and brainstormed and took notes. Dave and I left excited for the workshop that he and Olga will lead in September.

So here's the deal: 5 nights, 4 full days and two half days of cooking, eating, marketing, photographing, with one long excursion further afield, to a sweet little Black Sea town, for a bit of street, architecture and nature photographry. We'll visit a local farm and meet a cheesemaker. Olga will lead in the kitchen, where you'll get your hands dirty (or dusty) baking bread, making borek and traditional cookies, crafting meze, patting together kebabs, seasoning soups, and more. She'll draw on the sort of deep knowledge of Turkish home cooking and food culture that can only be gained by immersion in a Turkish household -- and she will share it with you. 

Meanwhile Dave will be there to coach you to great photography. He's been shooting for international publictions for a few years now, off next week for his fourth Saveur assignment in 6 months. Dave's also been teaching individual and small-group photography workshops since 2010 -- he loves it, and he's good at it. In Sapanca you'll tell Dave about your goals for the week -- whether it's getting comfortable taking photos of people, maximizing your time at markets to walk away with great images, or using light and shadow to bring out the best in a plate of food, whatever -- and he'll help you get there with plenty of one-on-one coaching time.

This has been a long time coming; we've wanted to offer a workshop marrying the two major elements of EatingAsia -- food and photography -- for a long while. But we're picky about who we work with. Olga is good folks. We're on the same wavelength. We enjoy her and her Turkish family and we learned so much during our brief stay at Sapanca. We certainly did eat well.

If this sounds of interest please hop over to the workshop website [here], read the detailed program, learn about the venue and see Olga's and Dave's bios. If you're interested, head to the sign-up page. We're limiting participation in the workshop to 9 individuals -- first come, first served. There is also room for 3 non-participating partners at a reduced rate.

I'm not teaching (nor am I photographing) but I'll be there, along for the ride. Dave and I hope to see you in Sapanca in September!

 

 

 

In Istanbul, a Market That Brings a Taste of the Black Sea to the Big City

It kind of blows my mind that residents of Istanbul, one of the world's busiest, most densely-populated metropolises, have ready access to fresh unpasteurized milk straight from the cow, bread baked in a single village's community oven, pear molasses produced in small batches year after year by the women of one family and fruit harvested from one farmer's orchard before being dried in his garden.

These are truly "artisan" foods, rare and small-batch, of the type fetishized in America. But in Turkey, a country still largely agricultural, they're not all that unusual. Labels and signage don't declare foods like this "artisan" -- it's taken for granted because so many foods here still are. In fact there are few cities in Turkey whose residents can't lay their hands on small-batch, small-producer, single-farmer goods if they're willing to make a minor effort.

This isn't to say that big ag doesn't exist in Turkey, or that mono-cropping isn't a problem (see kiwi orchards on the Black Sea). Yes, pesticides are over-used here, people buy sub-par ingredients in chain stores and battery-raised, plastic-wrapped chicken on styrofoam trays is sold at Migros and Carrefour. But to an extent that is perhaps difficult to imagine unless you get out into the hinterlands and do some serious road tripping, much of Turkey is still a land very much the Land of the Small Producer.

If you are planning a trip to Turkey that doesn't include time beyond Istanbul and you're even remotely interested in knowing how much of the country still eats you owe it to yourself to hit up Istanbul's weekly Kastamonu market, which is named for the province from which most of its vendors come.

Just a few hours' drive east of Ankara airport, Kastamonu registers on the map of few visitors to Turkey -- perhaps because it lacks an airport of its own, or maybe because its Black Sea climate (gray, rainy) puts off potential tourists. That's a shame, because it is spectacularly beautiful.

Kastamonu's capital (also called Kastamonu) is an intriguing if slightly brooding city chock full of photogenically crumbling Ottoman mansions. Ninety minutes away on the Black Sea coast is Inebolu, an exceptionally lovely hill town. Kastamonu is blessed with an extravagant amount of of natural beauty; think conifer-clad mountains, rivers winding through dramatic valleys and stretches of pretty pebble beach backed by rocky crags and lush green hills that plummet to the sea.

And then there is the food, born of microclimates that endow Kastamonu with a wealth of gorgeous produce. In autumn its markets overflow with all manner of leafy greens, fruits, nuts and mushrooms both farmed and foraged. From the Black Sea come fish, kalkan (flounder), hamsi (anchovies) and palamut (bonito), among other varieties. Hectares of velvety pasture provide nourishment for herds of beef and milk cattle (lamb is less often on the table here than in some other parts of Turkey). The province is known for its excellent pastirma (salt-cured, air-dried beef), luscious cheeses, yogurt, kaymak and fresh milk.

During three sojourns on the Black Sea we've been lucky enough to hit up many of Kastamonu's weekly markets, which are attended by vendors bringing fresh produce and prepared goods from their homes in small and often remote villages. In fact we've trolled Inebolu's twice-a-week market so many times that some vendors now recognize us (or maybe it's Dave's camera they recognize). We never fail to come away from each visit to the province envious of Kastamonulu and their ready access to such marvelous ingredients and laden with kilos of edible souvenirs to pack back home to Malaysia.

On this last trip to Turkey, despite almost three weeks on the Black Sea and several days in Inebolu, we still hadn't had enough. So last Sunday we set off to the Kastamonu Market in Kasimpasa, an Istanbul neighborhood on the Golden Horn just north of Tarlabasi (home to another great market). Kastamonulu make the long slog to Istanbul overnight by car (and truck) and set up around 6am. When we arrived late at 10:30 or 11 there was still plenty to see and buy.

First up, the essentials: dairy and bread. A table at the market's entrance displayed cow's milk kaymak -- 3/4 inch-thick shards stacked in plastic containers at 5 Turkish lira (about U$2.90) for enough to generously garnish four to six desserts -- as well as six types of cow and goat's milk, salted and unsalted cheeses. There was fresh, unpasteurized milk in plastic water bottles to take home and drink hot (or cold) after boiling. Along with kaymak, some milky semi-soft cheese and a 250-gram bag of suzme (drained) yogurt thick enough to stick to an upturned spoon we purchased grassy, tasting-of-the-beast butter at 7 lira a kilo, 

to slather thickly on köy ekmeği or "village bread", a massive crusty loaf made with unbleached flour.

Pazı ekmeği, bread made with chard and herbs (scallion greens and parsley, usually), was also out in force at the Kastamonu market. We know this bread well from Inebolu and to tell the truth this version was a pale comparison of that made by the talented baker woman we usually buy from there. That said, it was one of maybe 10 loaves left for sale in the entire market -- early risers will probably score a tastier loaf.

On the Black Sea autumn means apples and pears and persimmons. As we road-tripped along the coast we ate dozens of the latter, ripened until sugar oozed from the cracks in their skins, which were covered with so much black we would have sworn the fruit was rotten. It was anything but; sliced open, flesh scooped from skins like pudding, these persimmons were the sweetest, most delicious that we've ever eaten, something like a honey-enriched fruit jam.

There were also plastic water-bottle punnets of what might be Myrica rubra or Chinese bayberry, small nubbly fruits in pretty fruits sporting sunset hues. These we didn't try; vendors were not offering samples (in most market you can taste almost everything, cheeses included) of this relatively pricey fruit and, with only a couple of days in Istanbul, we feared we wouldn't finish a punnet full. Next year. 

In addition to fresh fruits there were plenty of dried specimens as well. In Giresun we purchased little pears sun-dried whole, chewy as Milk Duds, molasses sweet and ever so lightly bitter, like Vietnamese caramel. We saw the same shriveled pears at the Kastamonu market, along with sweet and sour dried plums and quartered apples dried with their skins on.

Giresun is also known for its hazelnuts, but further west towards Kastamonu walnuts and chestnuts rule. At village markets on the coast single vendors might display as many as ten grades of either or both, divided by size and quality. The smaller chestnuts, called kuzu kestane (lamb chestnuts), are for eating raw -- their skin is easily broken with a fingernail, they're slightly juicy and taste like raw mature coconut -- while the larger are meant to be roasted.

The market offers much treasure for vegetable lovers in the form of several types of pumpkin and winter squash,

leafy greens like chard, sturdy lettuces, young leaves of rocket and tere (a jagged-edged leaf that tastes a bit like wasabi) and collard green-like kara lahana or "black cabbage". There were even collard green roots for sale, massive specimens weighing half a kilo and more. Several vendors recommended making soup with these roots. We purchased one and snacked on it raw. It's a wonderful vegetable, super crispy and sweet with no cabbage-y funk. This vegetable, grated, would make a wonderful salad with olive oil and lemon and it would be super stir-fried with garlic and finished with a bit of sesame oil.

Cooler temperatures and autumn rains bring mushrooms to Kastamonu's copious forest land and there were no shortage of these at the market, both farmed and foraged on the coastal mountains. We bought a kilo and a half of several types and cooked them simply, sauteed with loads of that fresh butter and dusted with finely chopped parsley. Outside of Italy during porcini season, I've never eaten tastier mushrooms in my life.

Any Turkish market worth its salt has a mobile tea stall or two; most (especially on the Black Sea) hang photographs of Ataturk.

Turks are great picklers and preservers and both tendencies were well in evidence at the Kastamonu makret, at stalls offering any and everything brined -- including peppers, beets, turnips and carrots,

as well as all manner of preserves, jams, sauces and pekmez (fruit molasses) made from figs, apples, pears, grapes, cactus fruit, rose hips and mulberries.

There's no shortage of protein for sale at this market. We saw dainty baskets of school bus orange-yoked eggs cradled in straw, live turkeys (American expats in Istanbul, take note for next Thanksgiving!) roped to a truck wheel and freshly killed gangly free-range chickens. One vendor even had a few goose carcasses for sale.

The birds we had to pass on, for the cookware in our rental apartment wouldn't have been able to accomodate any of them. But we did return to our temporary home with bags and bags of goodies. That night we dined buttery stewed mushrooms ladled over pumpkin mashed with full-cream milk and yet more butter. Dessert was fresh, milky "village" cheese and apples, and a syrupy compote of orange peel-scented dried apples and plums with a generous -- no, make that HUGE -- crown of rich kaymak.

Our stay in Istanbul came at the end of a road trip along the central Turkish Black Sea coast, during which we reported a story on one of our passions -- anchovies -- for the New York Times. Read it here. And Dave has put together a slideshow of out-takes from the trip, set to "Hamsi" (Anchovies) by the Anatolian pop group Mogallar. View/listen here -- it gives a great feel for this very special, and under-visited, part of Turkey.

Kastamonu Market, Kasimpasa, Istanbul. Every Sunday morning. True market hounds should follow a stroll through this market's aisles with a visit to nearby Tarlabasi for its own (admittedly more wholesale but nonetheless good fun) Sunday market.

Dinner Number One

Note: The photos here may be pretty but unfortunately we can no longer recommend this restaurant. Datli Maya's ownership changed at some point in early 2013; so too the food and vibe, and not for the better. But all is not lost: just a half block up the street, Mucver still serves great Turkish homecooking with a twist.

Yes, we're back in Turkey, in Istanbul for now, and we ate our first proper dinner at Datli Maya because it's become habit and it's good to be recognized and -- most of all, absolutely most of all -- because we always leave satisfied, rubbing our bellies and lamenting that we ate too much but, if we were to be honest, not regreting a single bite.

What we like about the place: the wood-fired oven that you can't miss as you walk through the door. The casual friendliness of the staff. That you have to walk through the teeny-tiny kitchen to get to the just-as-tiny dining room. Sitting by the window, right in sight line with the minaret of Firuzaga Mosque, and watching the sidewalk traffic as we wait for our order. Self-service tea, as strong or as weak as you like, pulled from an old samovar on a little table in the corner of the dining room.

And the ever-changing menu. There are always lahmacun and pide and desserts, but what is cooked long and slow in the wood-fired oven revolves according to what's in season, what's good, what's at the market, what inspires the cook. Today's specials are displayed on the counter, there for your perusal when you walk in the door.

Tonight we ate woodsy, meaty mushrooms with bits of strange but deliciously bitter green chilies, blanketed with mild, oozy cheese and reheated in a guvec (a clay baking dish) in the wood-fired oven. Also, "village chicken", a lovely stew of a zucchini-like summer squash, potato and chicken in what tasted like the richest bird broth ever (enriched with butter, perhaps?), and a guvec of sweet pumpkin stewed with red peppers and onions. There were chickpeas stewed with onions and peppers, and a salad, always a salad. Datli Maya excels at them -- they're generously proportioned, include a variety of greens and usually house-pickled beets and just-sprouted mung beans, and are dressed with a lemony pomegranate molasses and cumin "vinaigrette". We often end up ordering a second salad to avoid fighting over the first one.

Mung beans? Chickpeas? Is this really Turkish food? some may ask. Let's call it Turkish with a twist. The ingredients are good, the execution is inspired and the result makes us happy.  We are quite happily off to other parts of Turkey in less than 36 hours but, for now, it's good to be back in Istanbul

Why the Silence? This.

It's certainly not for lack of material. We still have lots to share from our June sojourn in eastern Turkey ... and our winter trip before that and our fall travels before that. And from Kelantan and Penang and Chiang Mai and, and ...

But Dave's been preoccupied this last week with the likes of that gorgeous specimen above. He's shooting a food story in Mexico City (which you may know from some drool-inducing photos we've recently added to this blog's Facebook page).

I know from experience that he's the kind of photographer who never takes a break -- out before dawn and not back to his hotel till well after dark. So when he says he's too tired and busy to process even a few photos for a post, I believe him.

Hard as it sometimes even for me to accept .... shooting food really is work.

I did cajole him into sending one last image. "Blue corn tortilla, fresh squash blossoms and a bright tomato and red chili salsa at a stall off Reforma Avenue," is how he described it.

Regularly scheduled programming resumes later this week, after Dave returns from Tortilla Heaven.

The Cheese Makers' Breakfast

This afternoon, deep in a jet-lagged comatose slumber, I dreamt of cows feasting in a flower-filled spring meadow, and of cheese made from their milk.

In actuality this wasn't so much dream as memory. A little over two weeks ago Dave and I were in Bogatepe, a village set on a high plateau in Kars, northeastern Turkey. Kars is known for two cheeses: gravyer and kaşar. Bogatepe is one of the province's two main gravyer-producing villages. We'd driven some 70 kilometers from the provincial capital to learn about the cheese and its history, and to see how it's made.

Forget everything you think you know about Turkish cheese. Gravyer isn't white or soft or feta-like. It isn't fresh and it isn't aged in a hide. Gravyer would be at home on a northern European table -- not a coincidence, because it was introduced to Kars over a hundred years ago from Switzerland via Russia. Though its name suggests gruyere, gravyer cheese is actually closer to emmental in appearance, texture and flavor: palest yellow with large irregular holes, medium soft, savory, not too salty and mildly nutty.

We spent a long evening and a morning at Koculu Gravyer Zavotu ("zavotu" is derived from the Russian for factory) which, like Bogatepe's other mandira (cheese workshops) -- there are seven in all, and the majority produce not gravyer but kaşar -- uses milk from cows in Bogatepe and a couple of nearby villages. During the three-month cheese-making season Koculu, which dates back to the early 19th century, produces on average three truck wheel-sized rounds of cheese a day, usually two at night and one in the morning. The entire cheese making process takes over five hours, from the time the peynir mayasi ("cheese yeast", or rennet) is poured into huge copper cauldrons of milk taken from the animals just hours before, to the initial pressing of the cheese wheels under a stone-weighted wooden beam.

After 24 hours the peynir ustasi (cheese "master") and his helpers remove the press and peel the rough fabric "clothing" from the new gravyer wheels. Before sending the cheeses off to the depo where they will bob in a salt brine, sweat in a hot room and ripen in a cool room for months, they smooth the surface of each by scraping with the side of a spoon and trim its edges with a sharp knife.

Nothing goes to waste in a mandira. Leftover whey, thick and milky, is turned into food for livestock and given to the village's dogs. The oil that seeps from the cheeses during their weighting and while they sweat in the hot room is collected and distributed to villagers; the women, we were told, apply it as a cream to their faces and hands. ("That's why women in Bogatepe look younger than those in other villages," our host Ilhan Koculu told us.)

And after a long night (the usta and his staff were still working on their second wheel when we left the mandira at 1:30am) followed by an early rise to make yet more cheese the cheese makers take a breakfast that includes those super-young gravyer scrapings and trimmings, all fried in a shocking amount of fresh village butter.

Beyond giving nourishment and energy (and to us gravyer nugget newbies,unspeakable pleasure), those cheese crisps help the cheese maker to predict the quality of his product. After frying up a batch Ilhan demonstrated a test by pulling one apart. He was pleased. Its crackly, deeply browned exterior and long, unbroken string predicted a sufficiently oily cheese of just-right softness.

"This will be a delicious gravyer," he said, pleased.

And then it was time for breakfast -- not just butter-browned cheese, but ethereally rich and thick kaymak, pekmez (grape molasses), helva, bread, olives and -- of course -- tea.

Cheese makers' breakfast: crispy cheese nuggets and kaymak with bread and pekmez

As the cheese makers sat down to eat scrapings from one of the season's earliest cheese, cows gorged on early wildflowers in a pasture just across the road. That evening, their milk would make another wheel of Bogatepe gravyer.

From Dave and I, many thanks to Ilhan Koculu and Cat Jaffee.

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.

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.