When on holiday all I need is peace, space, good food and inspiring people. That’s why when choosing where to stay I prefer small family-run hotels with thoughtfully done rooms, enthusiastic owners and lovingly prepared breakfast. What could be better? Only a vacation house - your own or rented from a nice host. I found Sara’s house almost immediately when I was looking through the listings in the Aegean region where we were heading out with Özgür, my visiting parents and sister, and at once I knew we had to stay there. Our whole trip was planned in a way to make it to Köyceğiz by the time Sara had her house available.
Stunning Courgette Flowers Stuffed with Cheese and Herbs
Satisfying Winter Dolma Recipe: Stuffed Dried Eggplants
Making dolma (Turkish for any stuffed dish) calls for so many steps and so much patience that I like to keep it for the days when you cook for the whole week ahead. Waiting for your rice to soak, simmer, steam, cool down and then get cooked in dolma becomes less painstaking if meanwhile you are preparing meat stock to make a soup or pressure cooking chickpeas to turn them into hummus.
This Sunday could have been such a cooking-ahead-day but turned different: the snowfall closed the way up to our farmhouse at the Istanbul countryside. Which meant that early morning we put together a huge breakfast for the guests who arrived the night before and relaxed for the rest of the day as no one else dared the steep hill taking you 500 m above the sea level. Once the breakfast was over we were so happy with the sun and snow that immediately put the rice to soak and went out to made a snowman.
Fresh Stuffed Vine Leaves with Cherries: Ottoman Summer
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.
