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I am Olga from Delicious Istanbul. Most of the time I eat, cook and shop for food in Istanbul and show others how to do that with gusto.
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Tag Archives: Our Sapanca farmhouse
Authenticity vs. Productivity
I have spent good part of this 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.
Decent End of The Turbulent Week: Rice Casserole
We have had a turbulent week here in Sapanca. On Monday we witnessed a family drama of a Georgian helper whose daughter did not pass an entrance exam to the university she wanted to get into so the girl was about to take a veil. On Tuesday Özgür’s Blackberry reformatted itself and deleted all the contacts - all of them. On Wednesday parents’ furniture arrived from Istanbul and the house got filled with boxes packed with memories, five male movers bustling about and a sharp smell of their sweat. On Thursday one of the dogs broke the chain and went wild around the estate. On Friday we went to Istanbul to rewind over great food and drinks and meet a few friends: too much rewinding is worse than turbulence, let me tell you. By the weekend it felt only right to withdraw myself from much of the public life and resort to reading and catching up with family over skype.
Setting Personal Boundaries, Keeping Love and Sharing
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.
My Turkish Potluck: Turkish Boyfriend, Turkish Mother and Turkish Zucchini Fritters
One of the greatest food excitements I have experienced in Turkey was introduction to the local food which real people eat at home. You don’t think people in Turkey survive on eating kebabs 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 “mama”- run places found aplenty in 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.
My Istanbul Food Walks Started at a Sapanca Farmhouse
So here I am in the midst of my 3-month sabbatical. For starters I wanted to discover the Balkan region I had been itching to see for too long, to find out vegetarian origins of some of the most meat-reputed national cuisines, to share food and stories with like-minded foodies and yet more importantly - to give myself space and freedom and define the exact place that food has got to take in my life. Quite a mission!
