I saw this sign at the Shakespeare Bistro today:

What, the Los Angeles Kings? I think it’s unlikely they’ll be eating in Antalya anytime soon. But it’s good to know my meal would meet their standards.

Seriously though, this particular sign struck me as odd, because although Shakespeare Bistro is a Turkish company, they always go out of their way to print everything in English as well, and their English signage is usually perfectly worded. It’s rare to see them blunder, but it’s cute when they do.

Incidentally, I had a wonderful meal at the Shakespeare this afternoon, and the service was impeccable. Highly recommended if you’re ever in this neck of the woods and you’re having a day where you fancy something other than Turkish food.

I haven’t done one of these posts in a while:

Two boiled eggs, a kiwi/banana smoothie (homemade), and a simit with cheese. Now, the simit thing— every morning in every Turkish neighbourhood across the land, a couple of kids come around with huge trays of simit balanced on their heads. Think bagel-meets-croissant and you’ll be vaguely in the right ballpark. They also sell these little spreadable cheese triangles, which are particularly popular in Turkey, but I think you can get them in other countries, too (don’t Laughing Cow make them?). Anyway, the kids come around two or three times every morning, once about seven, and again about nine, and maybe once more at tennish. They walk through the streets shouting “simitçi!” at the top of their lungs, and if you want some simit you just go out on your balcony and shout or whistle to get their attention.

Now, many people have a bucket on a string that they lower down from the balcony… when the simit boy gets to your building you shout what you want, he shouts the price, you lower the money down in the bucket, he puts your order in the bucket, and you haul it back up. We need to get a bucket, because I feel really bad that every time we order from our simit kid, he has to come all the way up to the ninth floor with that huge tray. Granted, we do have an elevator, but it would just be easier for everyone if we got a bucket like normal people.

Not sure why, but the buckets always seem to be either red or blue.

Anyway, you’re either a with-cheese person or not, and I am definitely a with-cheese person. Also, sometimes when Emirhan’s not looking I’ll do a very American thing and toast mine and put butter on it, or strawberry jam. I only do it when he’s not here, though, because it’s sort of un-Turkish to eat it any other way than plain or with cheese, and he gets panicky when his heritage is challenged and I blaze through with total disregard.

So that was breakfast this morning.

Guys guys guys, look what I found:

I know, right? It’s lemon poppyseed cake, and it comes from Cenk Sönmezsoy’s Café Fernando. Now, you guys know I’m a foodie; I subscribe to many many food blogs, including several Turkish ones, and this blog is just the best thing I’ve ever seen. There’s also a Turkish version if you swing that way, and of course any blog where The Honourable Sir Ralph McPuppersons gets his own category is 100% sure to gain the melissamaples.com seal of approval.

How come none of you told me about this blog before? I guess we’re just lucky that Cenk’s a friendly guy and got in touch, eh? link

One of the first things I like to do when I visit a new country is head to the grocery store and see what delights or surprises me, what is different from other countries. When I first came to Turkey on a group vacation with five of my friends (the vacation from which I sorta kinda never returned), we giggled with shock at the shelves of yogurt buckets— literally buckets of yogurt, 3kg each, with a handle on top like a container of paint. I thought, how on earth could anyone, even a family, consume that much yogurt?

Fast-forward three years.

In our little home we now regularly buy the 3kg bucket-o-yogurt, and it lasts maybe a few days at most. Turks use yogurt for everything, and I’ve picked up the habit. I come from a culture where sour cream is a common condiment, and I quickly discovered that Turkish yogurt is not a bad substitute. Also, Turks are not big on fresh milk; they tend to drink that boxed UHT stuff that tastes like it’s a month old, and on the rare occasions when you can find fresh milk it generally expires the next day and already smells a bit sour when you buy it. So if you live in Turkey and you’re concered about calcium intake (I suppose this is more of an issue for women than men), yogurt quickly becomes your friend.

When I first moved here, I used to buy a 350 gram container of yogurt, and it would pretty much last me forever. I’d eventually throw half of it away because it would expire before I got a chance to figure out how I was going to make use of it. As I became more familiar with and started to adopt Turkish dietary habits, however, I graduated to buying the 650 gram container, and when Emirhan and I moved in together we upgraded to purchasing a kilogram at a time. It grew from there, and now we can go through a 3kg bucket in less than a week, no problem.

Turkish yogurt has a fantastic flavour, and my favourite part of it is the crust. Yogurt forms a crust on its surface as it settles, which most if not all Western yogurt manufacturers scrape off and throw away during the packaging process. This makes me sad, because since moving to Turkey I’ve discoved that the crust is the best part (those who live in England will understand what I mean because clotted cream has a similar crust). Give me a bowl of yogurt crust drizzled with honey… heaven. Why yes, I am the girl who likes edge brownies and the corner piece of lasagne, why do you ask?

I wonder if there are any American or European yogurt companies that leave the crust on the yogurt— anyone know of any?

This is what my housemates surprised me with this morning— an amazing Turkish breakfast on the balcony. We’ve each got a little omelet with chunks of sausage (chicken sausage, of course— it tastes a lot better than it sounds), there’s a salad for the table to share, a bowl of olives (my favourite), and of course plenty of fresh bread with stuff to put on it: chocolate cream, butter spread, honey, and cheese. To drink, there’s your choice of Turkish tea or freshly homemade ayran, which is a yogurt drink, but not sweet like the yogurt drinks we get in the West.

Needless to say, breakfast was great.

As for lunch, I’ve been eating a lot of salads lately because, well, it’s summer. I’ve been craving avocados— we only get them seasonally here, but when they finally start showing up at the bazaar they are unbelievably ripe and soft and flavourful. I searched and searched on Thursday and finally found one man who had a few avocados at an exorbitant price (it’s still very early for avocados here— another month or so and they’ll be much cheaper). But a craving is a difficult thing to overcome, so I paid the 4YTL and went home with two of the most delicate avocados I’ve ever held in my life. In fact, they were so delicate I could barely handle them at all, which means they were perfect. I cut one up at lunchtime with some locally-grown tomatoes and olives, and as a special treat I chopped some of the chicken sausage into teensy little pieces and fried it until it was crispy. Voilà bacon bits substitute! Normally I’d just drizzle some olive oil and a bit of salt and pepper over the whole thing, but since I was already going the decadence route with the baconesque bits, I decided to splurge and make a dijon-mayo dressing (I love mustard on anything, but especially on salads). I served the salad with toasted bread, and it made an extremely tasty and surprisingly light lunch. I’m looking forward to having the other avocado tomorrow, and if the bazaar guy has more next week, I’ll probably buy enough that I can have an avocado everyday. We only get them for a couple of months a year, so I have to take advantage.

I nearly got kicked out of the house today for calling this a “Greek salad.” But that’s what we call it! Well, apparently around these parts it’s called a “Mediterranean salad” or even a “Turkish salad.” Tomato, tomahto. Normally I would make this salad (from wherever) with black olives, but one uses what one has in the house.

Anyway, this was my lunch today, and whatever you call it, it was awesome.

After talking down the lime/lemon situation the other day, I thought I’d say something positive about Turkish produce. My housemate just brought me this bowl of fruit he assembled from stuff he bought down at the bazaar this afternoon. That’s ice on the top— bazaar fruit sits in the sun all day, of course, and so it needs cooling down before eating (unless you enjoy eating warm fruit in the summer, which I don’t).

The fruit in the photo is actually quite pretty as Turkish fruit goes. One of the things I noticed when I first moved across the Atlantic is that the fruit and vegetables are ugly on this side of the world. Fruit in the United States is very uniform and plasticky. Produce sections in supermarkets look like they were constructed in a wax factory. Oranges are all the same shape, size, and colour, as are apples, lemons, and every other kind of fruit. So when I first moved to Europe, it was a shock to see lemons that were twisted and bulbous and unevenly coloured. Strawberries were particularly mutant, coming in all shapes and sizes and looking like they had horrible birth defects. For a long time I didn’t really partake of European fruit because I was scared of it.

But as it turns out, the fruit over in this hemisphere tastes wonderful. It’s twisted and deformed because it’s natural, and the flavour is heavenly. It wasn’t until I went back to the United States for a visit that I was shocked to be re-introduced to cosmetically perfect fruit; I was impressed by the looks and bought a huge bag of it, only to be disappointed to find out that despite the vivid colours and beautiful shapes, it all just tasted like watered-down nothing. Blah.

A lot of our fruits and vegetables here in Turkey look nice by coincidence, but my favourite Mediterranean produce comes from Italy. When I first saw Italian produce markets I thought they had been attacked by some kind of plant version of bubonic plague. Produce in Italy is incredibly freeform— huge, twisty vegetables and fruits with bumps and knots and all sorts of other malformations. If you’re not used to natural-looking produce it can appear horrible at first, but in my opinion Italian produce is some of the best in the world. If you live in the United States and can find a farmer’s market or somewhere other than a supermarket to buy your fruit and vegetables, I encourage you to try that out and see if you can’t taste the difference, despite having to get used to the visual aesthetics. I’ll never buy produce in a supermarket again.

Which reminds me, it’s that time of the week and I should head down to do the shopping— those bazaar goodies don’t find themselves.

Here’s a mystery perhaps one of our Turkish friends can solve: I’ve never, ever, ever seen a lime in this country. My guess is they just don’t have them here, which hardly makes sense because Turkey is a huge citrus producer. But if you order a shot of tequila, it gets served with salt and a wedge of lemon. Wrong. I asked the bartender, “can I have a slice of lime?” He looked at me blankly. I tried to explain about limes. Same shape as a lemon, but green, and tastes different. He just continued on with his blank look. I finally gave up and reluctantly drank my tequila with lemon.

That incident happened a long time ago, and to be honest I’d forgotten about it until about a week ago when we bought some henna and lime shampoo. The label was written in English, with a Turkish translation below. I noticed the Turkish text said “henna and green lemon.” No, no, no! Not the same thing at all. To say that a lime is simply a green lemon is like saying that a grapefruit is just a big orange. No!

So I asked Emirhan, and he didn’t seem to know what a lime was, either. We looked it up in our Turkish-English dictionary, and the respective translations for “lime” and “lemon” were exactly the same— both are called “lemon” in Turkish. I’m frustrated about this, because a lime is certainly not a lemon, though many Turks have looked at the photos of limes I’ve shown them and said, “that’s just a lemon that’s not ready yet.” Sigh.

The reason this annoys me is because in almost every instance that one might use a lemon for something, I would prefer a lime. This is particularly true in the summer— almost every summer of my adult life I’ve made watermelon with lime syrup as a light snack or dessert. Lemon syrup is not the same; it’s like eating watermelon with furniture polish. But I can’t find limes here.

I know some of my readers are Turks who have moved abroad to Europe or the United States, where limes are in abundance, so for those of you who know what a lime is: is it possible to find them in Turkey? I’m pulling my hair out here, because the watermelon season is upon us (as is the tequila season), and it’s just not the same with lemon. I also like lime in my Coca-Cola, and on certain types of fish, and in countless other dishes. I’d also be interested to know if readers in surrounding countries (I know a few of you are reading from Arab nations, and also some from Israel) have limes in their local markets. Perhaps it’s just a conspiracy to keep limes out of Turkey. Maybe I’ll have to smuggle a lime tree in and grow some myself.

Back in May I made public the formula for TurboCoffeeWOOWOOWOO, my homemade rocket-in-a-cup recipe for getting yourself launched during bouts of overwhelming laziness. Problem is, summer is here now, and I don’t care how much the Turks argue that hot drinks are refreshing in this weather, there’s no way I’m going to sit here in the 38-degree heat and drink a cup of boiling anything. That’s just insane, and it’s not gonna happen. We need cold drinks, people— stuff with lots of ice in it! Caffeine the volume of which would fall under “intent to distribute” probably wouldn’t hurt, either.

So without further ado, I bring you TurboCoffeeICEICEICE:

• Got a cocktail shaker? Yeah, I thought you might.
• Start by spooning a single serving amount (or double, what the hell) of some sort of iced coffee or chocolatey drink powder into the shaker. I personally use Nescafé Ice, but I’m vaguely aware that this may not be available in your area unless your area is here. I’m sure you can find some substitute— they must have these sorts of things everywhere. If necessary you can use Nesquik or even pre-mixed bottled cold coffee drinks. Be creative, think of something.
• Add three heaping spoonfuls of instant coffee (the kind you would normally use for instant hot coffee, Nescafé works fine but there are dozens of others)
• Scoop in as much sugar as you dare (for me, this means about eight sugars). If you’re using sugar cubes, you might want to dissolve them in cup first with a tablespoon of hot water and then pour the solution into the shaker.
• Fill the shaker to the top with cold milk (not necessary if you started with a pre-mixed coffee drink, obviously), shake vigorously for about a minute, and pour over copious amounts of ice.

This makes a nice (albeit bracing) summery drink that will get you going no matter how terminally sluggish you are. As usual, I’m keen to hear and see your remixing efforts, so please feel free to share your favourite variations with the group. I’ve been known to throw the whole mix in the blender with a banana, but I’m crazy like that. Enjoy!

When you live your life moving from country to country, the longer you’re nomadic and the more places you go, you start to forget which place has which things and which place doesn’t. So it was in the interest of pure scientific research that I felt the need to buy one of these new Chocolate Disc Cornettos, because I honestly can’t remember whether we had Cornetto in the United States or not. They have them in England, certainly, and all over Europe and the Middle East, but it’s been so long since I’ve bought ice cream in the US that the only thing I recall is that I loved Blue Bell (and those of you who aren’t from Texas won’t have a clue what I’m on about with that).

In any case, for those of you who haven’t seen a Cornetto before, for whatever reason, this new Chocolate Disc variety is a fine specimen indeed. On top is the chocolate disc (natch), which has some kind of nut pieces embedded in it. Below that is chocolate chip ice cream with a thick rope of caramel running straight through the middle from top to bottom. The whole thing sits inside a chocolate sugar cone, and inside the bottom of the cone is a solid inch of chocolate, which serves the additional purpose of blocking the ice cream from dripping out. All in all it’s a master piece of engineering. I only bought it because I felt it was my duty to report it to the masses, just in case you hadn’t seen one before.