I am used to being a foreigner. For the past 10 years I am. Through my travels and living abroad. Even in my home country. “You speak Russian without an accent“, - a Moscow taxi driver notes. “I am a native” - I murmur.
Being a foreigner is always discriminating - in a very cool but also very annoying way. On the one hand you get a license to do outrageous things that violate local customs. Yet on the other hand you are never given full excess to the local living. And you are constantly balancing between keeping your identity (and sanity) and yet integrating.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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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.
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I have spent a good part of Sunday helping with the breakfast at our countryside restaurant in Sapanca. You would get surprised how much attention it takes to do an open buffet for 40 people over 4 hours. I was only helping with refilling the buffet, bread basket and stock of tea glasses (imagine a Turkish breakfast without the properly brewed strong tea!). Couple of times I went down to the kitchen to speed up dish washing. In between I edited a post, sorted some photos and replied to a couple of emails. Then I spent the afternoon running between the computer, supervising hotel room cleaning, doing our own laundry and ironing restaurant table clothes. The day has passed like that - in the errands of the family business and little chats with the family members in between.
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Winter has arrived to Istanbul unannounced. It has been in an agony of suspense the whole summer so it decided to deprive us of any autumn. From late summer we have transited into early winter. Fashionable wellingtons, practical Timberland boots, cozy berets and warm winter jackets - kept at the storage or thoughtfully bought a week ago - have flooded Istanbul streets. As if the streets were not already flooded by the tons of rainfall which poured on Istanbul all at once.
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I have been an exemplary of perfectionism: I take ages to share photos and publish posts because I believe they are not good enough. Yet. I am a baker who kneads her dough for a bit and then sets it aside to rest and grow. But I get to the actual baking much more seldom than I wish to. Because the dough has not risen well, I reckon. That’s been my social media strategy in a nutshell too and social media doesn’t have much in the store for the long-taking bakers.
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My customers are a constant source of inspiration and thoughts for me. Especially the couples: it is amazing how much of relationships dynamics you can grasp by spending 5-6 hours with people. Especially if you cook together.
The other day I had a cooking class with a lovely couple, T&A. As we toured the Kadıköy market to get ingredients A was talking about their passion for cooking and division of labor at the kitchen, “T cooks and I bake“. “What a great arrangement!” I replied. It was T who did the booking and whom A allowed to do most of the cooking too. Every time A would emphasize, “I am T’s sous chef: I am happy to do chopping and cutting”. Things turned interesting few hours later.
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