This is what my housemates have for breakfast most mornings, and it’s pretty standard Turkish fare. I don’t normally have this much food so early in the day, but today I was pretty hungry and Turkish breakfast sounded great.
- Salami: I know the salami meat is pink, but I assure you it’s made from chicken (as are a majority of processed meats here— Muslim country and all that). We even get chicken sausages and chicken ham, and the flavour is amazingly accurate to the real thing.
- Olives: yes, that is a large amount of olives for such a small plate, and I’m ashamed to admit I went back and got some more out of the fridge when I finished these. I have something of an olive… issue, if you will. Okay, it’s a problem. I have made myself physically sick before from eating too many olives. If no one takes the olives away from me I’ll eat all of them— it doesn’t matter how big the container is. You may have to stage an intervention.
- Eggs: Turks tend to serve these hard-boiled, but I like mine medium-soft, not quite runny.
- Tomatoes: usually there would be cucumbers, too, but I like tomatoes so much that I’d rather have double the amount of tomatoes and no cucumbers.
- Cheese: this is where you can get into vocabulary trouble if you’re a foreigner. Despite the mild flavour, crumbly texture, and ultra-white colour, I assure you this is not feta, it is Turkish white cheese. Those who call it feta get expelled from the country or somesuch. Turkish. white. cheese. Actually, in all fairness the flavour is not exactly like feta, and there are different varieties of Turkish white cheese (but having said that, there are also different varieties of feta). I learned this nomenclature lesson the hard way when I first moved to Turkey— I went down to the corner market and asked for “some of that fantastic feta you guys have”; the market owner told me she didn’t know what I was talking about, and then she asked me to leave. It wasn’t until a Turkish friend explained the terminology to me that I understood what the problem was.
Anyway, that was breakfast this morning, quite a far cry from any breakfast I ever ate back in the United States. Try it sometime and let me know what you think.