Food!

As always, İstanbul deserves a whole post - or more realistically maybe two or three - of it's own just for the food I ate there. This particular post is just for what I ate at other places - Antalya, Silyon, Selçuk, İzmir and Edirne.

In Antalya, I stayed with my friend's grandparents. Her grandmom makes just the bestest food ever and we almost never at out the whole stay - because, really, why bother? Below, some of the yummy fare she cooked up for us...


Sucuklu yumurta - for breakfast the day we arrived after a 12 hour bus ride from Istanbul. Best breakfast ever. And we would just dip our ekmek in the pan and clean up the yolk. Yum.

In addition, there were also olives, tomatoes, jams and ufff, the yummiest peynirs.

Yayla Çorbası might just be my favourite of all Turkish çorbas - probably even beating the other favourite - mercimek çorbası.

Below - other very delicious meals eaten.

One evening we sat and made sigara böreks stuffed with cheese and potatoes. Amazing fun.

The best parts were laying out yufka bread and then rolling the böreks up. Ideally one should be as careful as possible to avoid tearing up the yufka. We, however, didn't mind the occasional tear since it meant we got to eat the torn piece of yufka - which is just amazingly delicious. We also, of course, drank copious amount of çay throughout. The böreks were piled up, frozen and then fried and eaten the next day. Very satisfying to eat them, I must say.

Perhaps the most satisfying meal, however, was at the village of Silyon, about 30 kilometres from Antalya. The village has some ancient ruins but we had not gone sight seeing, but rather on the invitation of my friends grandfather's (who is an advocate) client. (They were fighting some land related case). Anyway, Ferit (the client) was wonderful and drove us all around showing us sights in his battered car in the heat and then invited us to his house for lunch and to see his farms and animals.

The lunch was amazing - the table literally grunting under the weight of the dishes. Fresh bread, salad, bibers, çorba, yoğurtlu patlıcan and amazing pilaf with free range chicken. I haven't eaten chicken like that, well, in eons if not ever. We all ate from the same plates and had soup from the same bowls - it was truly delicious.

The first day in İzmir we went to Topçu'nun Yeri - something of a local institution apparently - to try their very famous çöp şiş. Very, very good it was.

As was the accompanying bread and the very refreshing salad with an excellent nar and olive oil dressing.

In İzmir, I also had what must be one of the best junk foods ever - kumru. It's a specialty of the region and made with a special bread - it's a sour dough, if I remember correctly - stuffed with sausages, tomatoes, pickles and a huge thick slab of melting peynir.

Best eaten with pickled chillies for that added punch.

Also eaten in İzmır - excellent, excellent midye dolması. The ones I ate in İstanbul just didn't measure up after those.

After a well spent (and tiring!) morning of exploring the ruins at Efes we returned to Selçuk completely ravenous. Our dolmuş driver had told us to try the Selçuk köftecisi, which turned out to have a long que. Totally worth the wait, though, for the extremely delish (and cheap!!) köfte.

From İstanbul, I travelled to Edirne for a day to explore the old Ottoman capital - the first in Europe - and of course, see Mimar Sinan's masterpiece. After a morning of mosque visiting, I went hunting for lunch and settled for Edirne's specialty - ciğer, fried liver.

I am not one of those people who are put off by the taste/ smell of liver - I actually really like it - and really enjoyed the meal. Especially with those fried chillies that came as an accompaniment (along with fresh chillies, tomatoes and, of course, bread).

This was, of course, not all - quite often I was too hungry or impatient or both to bother photographing what I was eating. Other things eaten - karnıyarık, many sorts of excellent pilafs, yuvalama çorbası, the Jewish pastry boyoz (an İzmir specialty again) with soft boiled eggs, excellent incir dondurma and that perennial favourite fırın sütlaç among others. And I haven't even gotten to İstanbul yet!

*Food post on İstanbul from last year here.