I was long looking forward to making this anchovy recipe of rice coated with anchovy fillets (hamsili pilav). For starters, I was waiting for the anchovy season to fully blossom. Piles of little silver-bellied fishes on the forefront of the fish stores at the Kadiköy market in Istanbul and dedicated fishmongers orchestrating the humming anchovy trade to the Istanbulites queuing for the 5-lira-a-kilo goodness.
November 2011
Baking is just like your boyfriend going for a boys’ night out. In baking you can only hope you have picked a reliable recipe and measured your ingredients right. Stove top cooking always gives you a chance to open the lead and fix things going wrong. Not the baking: once you send your creation to the oven you can’t control the outcome anymore. Same with the boys’ night out. If you pick the right guy in whom you trust and if you have enough self-confidence you can wish him a great boys’ night out with a light heart.
I am little nervous every time I am cooking something new for somebody new. Which happens all the time. Because I think it is boring to cook the same thing over and over again. And I always find new hungry people to feed. My nervousness grows as I cook in different settings too: what works at the professional kitchen of Zeliha Hanım in Sapanca may not suit my home kitchen in Istanbul. So every time I keep thinking: Will the recipe (that I tested five times in other settings) work? Will people (who approved on many other occasions) like the dish?
I wrote about our delicious road trip along the Turkish Aegean coast earlier this week and it seems only right to continue. Right after Ayvalik which won our hearts and stomachs we ventured to another culinary destination - Cunda island.
I love traveling off season. Locals unburdened by the crowds of customers are happy to chat with you. And you are not destructed from the main purpose of traveling and simply being - eating.
In October when the summer is long gone you can still enjoy Turkish seaside. Ayvalık, a town on the Aegean coast is a great choice if you travel for the same cause as I do. Located right one the shore and overlooking Greek Islands Ayvalık is renown in Turkey for the finest olive oil. Hard to go wrong with food if olive oil is good. Good olive oil obliges: its making is a family tradition of paying respects to the mother earth and knowing how to make good sense of its produce.
