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| My breakfast and sleeping place in Fethiye. Not too shabby. |
I'm pretty sick of this heartbreak crap
right now, and you can be honest, you are too. Unfortunately it still
colors nearly everything I see and do, so I'm going to take the easy
way out. No, not drugs, nothing so prosaic as that. I have this
addiction under control. Usually.
I'm talking about food.
(That's the original version of the old
Salt n Pepa song. “Let's talk about food baby, let's talk about
bread and meat, let's talk about all the spices and the delightses
that fill me...” But they just couldn't stomach the word
“delightses”. You're welcome for the pun.)
I have to start with one of the new
loves in my life...one I miss dearly. I miss you yemek!
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| Good morning, Diyarkabir! |
Yemek is Turkish for “food”
(looking up the Turkish word for breakfast feels like cheating) and
the breakfasts in that land are second only to Portland, Oregon in my
mind right now.
Turkey put me on the road of eating
twice daily that I am (usually) still on here in Sri Lanka, with
12-hour portions of sliced cucumbers and tomatoes, slippery armies of
black and green olives, and enough feta to build a house (or at least
an igloo), usually served with about 12 slices of bread.
12.5 if you count the heel.
In Fethiye the olives came from
Grandma's farm. In Istanbul there was thick yogurt with optional
ladles of peanut sauce, fruit jam, or molasses. Molasses! I had only
ever been slow as, never eating. I took to it as quickly
as...molasses (it's much faster than I was led to believe).
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| There were more cheeses in Mardin than I led you to believe. |
In addition to the feta, they often had
braids of a very firm white cheese, like a salty mozzarella, chopped
into pieces. In Antalya they had börek,
the cheese-filled fried pastry that is a cousin of the meaty version
in Bosnia that gave me food poisoning. (Predictably, I liked the
Turkish one better.)
In the Kurdish areas they switched the
French bread for pita-like flatbread, which was fine with me. In
Diyarbakir they added a slowly colonial pond of honey with hunks of
the comb riding around like warships. Alongside the honey was a slice
of cheese that was crazy-smooth, and whose taste was sweet and silky
beyond my imagination. It took me a minute to realize it was homemade
butter.
Everything seems more exotic when you
have a mouthful of deliciousness.
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| Father and son bakers, I like knowing they're out there. |
In Hasankeyf I agreed to a tour by the
hotel owner's awkward friend, and before we started we waited,
chatting in Arabic, while the baker and his son cooked a round of
bread for us in a wood-fired oven. Then we went to what looked like a
hardware store, chatted in Kurdish, and bought cheese so fresh it was
still warm. I didn't even know cheese was made warm. Finally we got
olives from a little old man, chatting in Turkish, and took them to
eat in a spare cafe where flies buzzed in front of windows looking
over the ruins of a Roman bridge across the upper Tigris River.
I can't remember the hike, but I
remember the breakfast. Shukran, spas, and teşekur
ederim for the breakfast, Hasankeyf.
Well shucks, I was going to tell you
about Sri Lankan curry, but that will just have to wait.
Sounds delicious!
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