Our place in Sapanca is a food heaven: with 5 fridges, 3 freezers and 2 wall-size shelves refilled twice a week it is hard to think of a food item that Zeliha Hanım would not have in her professional kitchen pantry. Yet a day comes and I get Istanbul-seek and start longing for my own fridge stuffed with very particular food I pick from very particular vendors at the Kadıköy market in Istanbul.
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Being a child of the Eastern European Terrain I got excited beyond limits when first introduced to a variety of vegetables and variety of a given single vegetable in Turkey. Last year in Sapanca a mind-boggling range of species and assorted operations that they could be subjected to was revealed to me. Late afternoon Zeliha Hanim would come back after a day of shopping with dozens of bags of fresh produce and we would be sorting them out, placing in the dedicated storage spots or processing them immediately. August was about the pepper work.
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Here in Sapanca I am learning to appreciate the beauty of humble food cooked to perfection. I am grateful for that opportunity as otherwise I am hungry for complications at the kitchen: recipes that take hours to make, ingredients that are many, tastes that are not so straightforward.
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One week has passed since I have arrived to Sapanca and it seems like ages : you will not believe how busy life can be on a hilltop in the middle of nowhere. Major renovation of the hotel was finalized followed by a massive cleaning and preparing the rooms for the guests. Then receiving the guests over the weekend. Somewhat settling ourselves (if putting a bed in the middle of an empty room can be called settling). Cleaning the rooms after the guests and helping parents to settle down. Finding out a million of small things to be taken care (like we ran out of water last light and Özgür joked that he would write in his blog how I washed my foot in the toilet - he thought I would not mention it in mine, ha!). And the new week starts like that.
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In summer the sky over Istanbul is the clearest, the Boshorus is the bluest and the days are the longest. Who would not want to be here on such wonderful time? Only that the brightest sun and the temperature hitting 35C usually come as a part of the tour package. Feeling hot and tired hardly encourages cultural and culinary explorations of the city. A good news is that hot summers have been in Istanbul for thousand years and people have developed strategies to cope with the heat. One of them is drinking right and here is how.
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Ottoman in Turkey is like Soviet in Russia or Berber in Morocco: sells well to tourists and has got little to do with the present life of the country. What looks like a wonderfully intriguing story to the outside world appears a complex matter of pride and shame for the locals.
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I entered the atelier of half-a-teaspoon: millions of sunbeams gathered in the room with white bricks, a bunch of young ladies in summer dresses seated at the large table, lemonade and freshly baked quiche invitingly placed in the middle of the action. The atelier was hosting a meeting of the Moscow Startup Women club and by pure coincidence I joined.
Earlier that day I was sitting at home and grieving over my miseries with the painstakingly long UK visa application which kept me stuck in Moscow away from my Istanbul kitchen, its bustling markets, the blue Bosphorus and the lush green hilltop not far away from it. In a wonderfully serendipitous way a long-time-no-hear friend showed up in my inbox with a rescue plan. I was going through the newsletter from Masha Kicheeva, inspiring entrepreneur who elegantly turned the idea of baking boxed cookies into the out of the box corporate presents. Among the other upcoming events at her atelier she mentioned the meeting of Moscow Startup Women Club. That very night. “I am coming” - I shot. “You are in Moscow? Hurra!” - Masha replied.
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One of the greatest food discoveries in Turkey for me has been the introduction to the local food which real people eat at home. You don’t think people in Turkey survive on eating kebabs and baklava all the way, do you?
As a visitor to Istanbul you can get a flavor of homemade Turkish food if you venture into one of ev yemekleri, or “mama”- run places found aplenty in the neighborhoods like Moda. Moda feels old Europe with its culture, education and class which all have conditioned the abundance of matriarchal food institutions instead of the men-run and men-frequented kebab shops dominating the rest of the Istanbul food scene.
My luck got me beyond Moda though: when I first came to the farmhouse in Sapanca and got “adopted” by the farmhouse owner and talented cook Zeliha Hanım I realized what it means to have a Turkish mother and eat excellent homemade Turkish food.
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From the first sight of its busy streets Istanbul presents itself as a kebab capital of the world steering away vegetarian foodies. This impression is deceiving. Do not despair neither sheer number of kebab shops made even more noticeable thanks to the stentorian cries of the vendors. Do not take seriously locals fainting after you declare your meatless agenda. Instead, get ready to fetch finest local flavors from the menus of best Istanbul restaurants.
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If there is an iconic food that many Istanbulites would swear by, it is menemen, scrambled eggs cooked with tomatoes and green peppers and traditionally served in a tin-lined copper pan with two handles (sahan). The eggs are a bit undercooked: there is a definite joy in breaking a large piece off the white bread, dipping it onto the moist eggs and munch this deliciousness enriched by the tomatoes and crunchy peppers.
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