September is a good time to get nostalgic about the passed summer. There are certain seasonal imperatives for spending your time in Istanbul. Things to do in Istanbul in summer would be revolving around lingering in one way or another by the Bosphorus or the Marmara Sea. This year I have missed most of this delights having been busy with running food walks and settling our two new houses in Istanbul and its countryside, Sapanca. I can’t say I am sad about it but it’s the purslane recipe that bothers me most.
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.
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.
If there is a traditional Turkish food item that leaves neither room for polarized opinions nor doubt about having the second helping it is definitely sigara böreği, cigar-shaped pastry of paper-thin dough (yufka) stuffed with cheese. It has also been a hit on my cooking classes always resulting in the discussion on how to organize yufka export to the sigara böreği craving foodies outside of Turkey.
