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.
Turkish husband
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.
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.
“He has got interesting relationships with food, my brother. He needs to find something beautiful that would be worth eating” - Özgür’s sister Özge says.
Is not that interesting that some people are more fussy about their food then the others? It does not take much effort to figure out good food and become reasonably fussy, if you ask me. We all practice eating three times a day for many years which gives a natural ground to develop substantial expertise in food. Yet, some people are happy with any food they get and some are very particular about what they are eating.
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.
