Cognac and Cake

This is a typical night for me. I have some kind of plan, say to finish prepping for my 9am Monday class before 10pm on Sunday night, when there’s a knock on the door. It’s Fielding, the American Fulbright teaching assistant who’s staying in my guesthouse and will be my roommate when we move into our new home.

“So, that guy that always talks to us at breakfast…” she begins, “I can’t remember his name…but it’s his birthday and he wants us to come have some cognac with him.”

I’m in the middle of prepping for class, and it’s 8pm on a Sunday night, but of course I can’t miss celebrating a birthday with one of the other residents at our guesthouse. Stefan (whose name I conveniently remember right before we head into the dining room) is a Moldovan professor who guest-teaches in the agricultural department. He and I shared several breakfasts together since his English is pretty good and he’s very kind. He’s lived in Turkey off and on for years, and he misses the wife and family he had to leave behind to take advantage of the financial opportunity teaching in Turkey brought for his family.

Five of us gather around one of the many tables in the dining room: me, Fielding, Stefan, Ramazan the hotel clerk, Umit, a doctor, and one of the security guards who stopped in to visit while roaming the campus grounds. There’s a small plate of Turkish peynir (cheese), some cherry tomatoes, and olives and olives to pick at, as well as a towering stack of bread in front of Stefan. Typical Turkish fare.

“Is this your cake?” I ask Stefan as I point to his bread stack. He laughs.

“I’m sorry I didn’t plan this better…” he says in his thick, near-Russian accent, “Usually we plan our birthdays…”

“Hey,” I say, “You’re not allowed to apologize for anything on your birthday.”

Stefan smiles and pours us the cognac (I had to switch glasses with him when he poured me too much) and we toast in Turkish: şerefe!

We sip our cognac. Someone brings out a container of chocolate paste that looks like nutella. After Stefan mentions that cognac goes well with chocolate, I go grab the half-bar of dark chocolate I have in my room, then pass it around. Ramazan, the hotel clerk, runs out into the lobby, then comes back with a cake he’d had delivered at the last minute. He goes into the kitchen and lights a candle, and we sing him “Happy Birthday,” American style, before we dig into the cake.

As the group of us foreigners and locals sit around and chat about English, about how we celebrate birthdays in our native countries, and about traveling around the region (Stefan acting as the primary translator between us), I remind myself that I’m not just here for teaching and lesson plans. In fact, it’s the small, random moments that often enlighten me the most.

I found an incredible cappuccino!

I don’t drink coffee very often, but every once in a while, I like a good cappuccino. Anyway, I tried all kinds of coffee shops in Istanbul, looking for a good cappuccino without any luck, and then today, randomly tried a little coffeehouse in our downtown student area, and voila!

An amazing, cappuccino that’s not a latte! (You know what I mean, coffee drinkers! There’s a difference!

Anyway, I had to document the moment.

Istanbul: The First Night–Meyhane Meyhem

I first read about the meyhane tradition in a book on Turkish history and culture called Crescent and Star. (Side note: Is the title devoid of articles (as in “the” or “a”) because Turkish doesn’t have articles either? Who knows?). Anyway, the writer, Stephen Kinzer, wrote about the meyhane experience with such poetic rapture, that I found myself reading it to my dad (a chef) in a near frenzy, unable to contain my excitement at the culinary experience I hoped to have once I arrived in Turkey.

In what I’m finding to be a common experience here, I ended up having this incredible meal simply by following a bunch of people around on some unknown adventure. Leanna, the colleague I stayed with in Istanbul, took me to meet some Turkish friends of hers who were graduating from a CELTA program. The twenty-or-so of them were having a graduation dinner and invited us to join. The cost was 50 lira (about $36) for unlimited food and alcohol. It was a bit pricey, but we decided to join.

It wasn’t until a half an hour later, after winding our way through the loud, crushing crowds of the Taksim area of Istanbul, after climbing seven flights of stairs and ending up on a roof-top terrace, that I found myself getting served plate after plate of meze (like Turkish tapas) and realized I was living out my little dream.

An evening at the meyhane is centered around the Turkish drink, rakı, a kind of anise-based drink that is a mix between sambuca and diesel fuel. I don’t drink much at all, but a lot of people find it quite intense (not just me!), with a heavy burn on the way down. At the same time, this is what people also love about the drink as well. For my first foray in the world of rakı, the waiter filled my glass with a third full of the potent alcohol, then added water to the rest to make the drink suddenly milky and opalescent. You can see me having my virgin sip of rakı the picture above, shortly followed by only a few more sips, then a request for white wine. Sorry, Turks, I guess I side more with the Italians when it comes to my preferred alcohol with food.

To describe the meal that followed, I have to include the passage from Crescent and Star that originally worked me into such a frenzy. Forgive the lengthy post.

“Meze usually comes in waves. The first will include salad, thick slabs of white cheese, smoked eggplant purée and honeydew melon. What comes next depends on the chef’s whim. There might be a selection of cooked, cooled vegetables, or small dolma, which are peppers stuffed with rice, currants and pine nuts, and their close cousins, sarma, made from grape or cabbage leaves. After the next pause might come spicy red lentil balls, mussels on the half shell, mashed beans with lemon sauce, puréed fish roe, yogurt seasoned with garlic and dill, raw tuna fillets, poached mackerel with hazelnut paste or an explosively flavorful dish made of baby eggplants stuffed with garlic cloves, tomatoes, sliced onion and parsley. The last is called Imam Bayıldı, meaning ‘the Imam fainted.’” (Jennie: I had this and it was AMAZING.)

“After this comes piping-hot börek, delicate pastries filled with feta cheese and sometimes also spinach, diced chicken, ground lamb or veal, pistachios, walnuts or whatever else is lying around the kitchen…Turkey’s ethnic vitality shines through as the evening proceeds. Kebabs and other meze made from meat recall the Central Asian steppes from which nomadic Turkic tribes migrated to Asia Minor, now called Anatolia, a thousand years ago. With them come hummus from Arabia, shredded chicken with walnuts from Caucasus, diced liver from Albania (Jennie: YUCK) and cooked cheese thickened with corn flour from coastal villages along the Black Sea. Then comes the crowning glory, the seafood, a gift from the Greeks, who for millennia did all the cooking along what is now Turkey’s Aegean coast. Rakı sharpens the taste of all food, but its magic works best with fish. An old proverb calls rakı the pimp that brings fish and men together for acts of love.

“…Such a meal is a microcosm of Turkey. It is an astonishingly rich experience, but yields its secrets slowly. Patrons at the meyhane, like all Turks, confront an ever-changing mosaic, endless variations on a theme. Each meze tastes different, has its oen color, aroma, texture, and character. The full effect is comparable to that of a symphony, complete with melodies, different rhythms, pacing and flashes of virtuosity, all contained within an overarching structure.”

See a short clip of our meyhane meyhem here, accompanied by local musicians, and later, lots of dancing.

Istanbul: The Preface

Most of you probably didn’t know it, but until Saturday night, most of your Islamic neighbors were fasting for Ramazan. At sundown in Turkey on Saturday night, the last night of Ramazan, all practicing Turks broke their Ramazan fast with the three-day Bayram holiday. Most cities closed up shop, restaurants closed, people left town to go home to be with their families and celebrate. Since I knew nothing would be going on here, I headed up to Istanbul to spend time with a friend of mine who was staying there.

I’ve decided to make my trip to Istanbul into separate posts by day, with separate slide shows. I took the overnight bus to get there, a ten-hour trip, broken by two stops where they forced us to wake up and walk around in a rest stop for a half hour. The rest stops are pretty cool though, I must say, because they have little cafes to eat at, lots of locally-crafted food like honey, preserves, and dried fruits, and people making fresh Turkish delight. They’re also clean and very well-lit, which is always fun when you’re stumbling out of a bus and your eyes haven’t adjusted to light.

But I digress. I stayed in Istanbul with my friend Leanna, one of my American counterparts, who is based in a much more conservative city in the east called Ezurum. She decided to stay in Istanbul and study Turkish before she began her second year at her post, and so I came and crashed in her itty-bitty little apartment. Another counterpart, Patreshia from Denizli, came as well, and we all enjoyed the weekend together. Here’s a picture of the three of us (Patreshia, Leanna, then me) at our first dinner in Istanbul, a very special meal I’ll tell you about in the next post.

Turkish breakfast

Hey there, all you foodies, it’s time for some food posts. Let’s start with Turkish breakfast, or kahvalti, which literally means “before coffee.”

Every morning in my guest house I wake up and enjoy this tasty Mediterranean meal. A typical Turkish breakfast will have some variation, but here are some of the basic ingredients.

There’s always some kind of tasty cheese, usually beyaz peynir, a salty white cheese made from unpasteurized sheep’s milk that reminds me of feta, and/or kaşar (also: kasseri), a medium-hard yellow cheese also made from sheep’s milk that reminds me a bit of provolone. It is also unpasteurized and needs to age for at least four months to develop a good flavor.

In addition to the cheese, you’ll typically have olives, cucumbers, tomatoes, green peppers, hard boiled eggs, then butter, honey, and fruit preserves for the heaps of bread you would normally eat if you weren’t me (though I confess to eating a slice or two with breakfast just so I can eat the honey). All this is most commonly drank with Turkish çay (pronounced: chai) or Lipton tea.

But this isn’t what everyone eats. One of my colleages just eats a packaged cupcake and a cup of tea for breakfast. Turks also eat soups and Turkish breads (one in particular, simit, is sold by vendors like jumbo pretzels all over Istanbul…they kind of taste like them too). Another common specialty is called menemen, a preparation of roasted tomatoes, olive oil, green peppers, and eggs, which I haven’t tried.

For your viewing pleasure, see the kahvalti above (iStock photo, not mine), and a picture of simit (also iStock) to the right. And a word to the wise: I’ve been instructed not to eat the simit from vendors (not that you should each much vendor food anyway), because these guys don’t use gloves, and a friend of mine once saw a vendor picking his nose and then serving simit with the same hand…hey, I’m just saying. You can buy them in the perfectly sanitary cafes that are everywhere, or eat them from a vendor at your own risk.

Would you like a faggot with that?

So, there are many meanings for faggot/fagot around the world. In the U.S., it’s known most commonly as an offensive slang word for homosexual men, but it can also mean several other things: a bundle of sticks or branches, slang for a cigarette in the U.K., a kind of stitch for fabric (as in “he fagotted a blouse for his wife”), or a method of tying together steel or iron rods for welding.

But did you also know that it means a kind of meatball (typically pork)?

Well, I didn’t know that until I Googled it today, so imagine my surprise when I saw the bottom item on the menu in a restaurant in Istanbul! The only meanings I knew were a bundle of sticks, a homosexual man, or a cigarette, and none of them sounded too appealing.

Let’s see YOU try to be wheat free in Turkey. Seriously.

To my left, witness the fabulous women making gözleme in a village just outside of Eğirdir (or maybe it’s in Eğirdir province? I don’t know how this all works).  Whats gözleme,  you ask? It’s a handmade fresh pastry–made from wheat, of course–that’s made by rolling out wheat dough really thin, then putting yummy ingredients inside (like potatoes, onions, spinach, mushrooms, feta cheese, or some combination of the two) and then heating it on a griddle. You get a large, crepe-like flat pastry that tastes unbelievable. This is what I ate tonight, along with a cucumber, tomato, cabbage, lettuce salad; bulgur pilaf; yogurt soup; and ayran, a yogurt drink made from yogurt and water. Oh and grapes fresh from the vine in the back yard, watermelon, the most delicious honeydew I’ve ever tasted (it actually tasted like honey!), and did I mention several cups of tea?



What’s funny is that most men have no idea what ingredients go into their favorite dishes. My colleague and local guide, Vançin (pronounced Vahnchin), didn’t know that bulgur was wheat (he called it rice, which I ate heartily until I asked him what it was, suspiciously, and then slowed waaay down). He also didn’t know (and neither did the other four men we asked) that one of Turkey’s favorite treats, helveh (not the tahini version, which is also served here) is made from glutinous semolina flour. Hours later, when my stomach was feeling super fabulous, I googled the ingredients and told him what they were. Surprise!

But the thing is, it’s all so darn tasty! (And I love that word, despite those who might hate it–you know who you are.) YOU try not eating this yummy dish, helva…oh my gosh, it’s like sweet honeyed heaven! Once I get my flat and a kitchen, things will probably change, but for now, I’m eating up some serious Turkey goodness and lovin’ it. It may not be good for my stomach, but sometimes you have to indulge, you know?


Photo on the right of Turkish helvasi taken from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halva