At the change of seasons I am often confused about what to eat. On a chilly morning when you can still feel the breath of the rain that had been pouring the whole night I open the fridge stuffed with tomatoes, cucumbers, herbs, eggplants and other summer goodness while the only thing on my mind is red lentil soup. The day warms up towards the noon suggesting that something cooling and yogurt-based may be a good idea. But if I continue along with those lines in the evening and - out of my summer habit - make a raw salad, it hardly feels as satisfying as it was on a balmy evening just a few weeks ago.
I got to know muhammara, Middle Eastern dip of roasted red bell peppers and walnuts, as a signature dish of my mother-in-law. Her muhammara is legendary. Ask anybody who ate at the mom’s restaurant. Daughter to an Egyptian immigrant settled on the Easter Mediterranean coast of Turkey, she is from the lineage of the people who consider dishes such as hummus, falafel, kibbeh (aka içli köfte), muhammara and alike to be their own. And as this Middle Eastern heritage food is rather exotic to the rest of Turkey, the complexity of flavors wows the local eaters as they get initiated into this culinary tradition, even if only through eating muhammara.
I spent half of this week in Tarabya, a village on the Bosphorus, so remote that after reaching there one gets surprised she has not left city limits yet. But then it is Istanbul, possibly the most spread out city in the world. You get on a boat along the Bosphorus and keep marveling the villages with grand mansions that Istanbul does not run out of until the very Black Sea.
It took me two hours to get from my house in Moda to the Grand Tarabya hotel by public transport. In the same two hours I could have ended up at our countryside property in Sapanca. But then it is Istanbul where you change from a ferry to a tram, then you get on a funicular and finally hop on a taxi constantly wondering why the city authorities keenly introduce new modes of transportation instead of connecting the dots of the existing ones.
