Nohut

It's good to know from where our food comes.

On my way to work at the hotel, I saw piles of a kind of straw on the sides of the streets. Because I am nosey, I picked one up to see what was inside a sort of thin-walled pod. I discovered a single chick pea (nohut in Turkish) inside. Now I know.

Dried Apricots

Across the street from the Post Office in Uçhisar and overlooking Pigeon Valley, an elderly man has laid out his apricots to dry in the sun. Knees bent on the concrete, he arranges the fruit to look like little dessicated soldiers lined up in rows. Every day, their colors change, from bright to burnt orange.

Tandir Bread

Şerife Anna and I don’t share a mother tongue, but we do have a common language of the stomach. Every other day or so, Şerife Anna makes tandır bread. A tandır is a simple traditional oven. It’s nothing but a cylindrical, flat floored hole in the rock. All cave homes have them.

Şerife prepares the oven by burning twigs and branches until sufficiently hot coals remain at the bottom, then places several metal plates in the tandır to absorb the heat.

Then, she coats rounded dough with an egg mixture, forms a hole in each piece of bread, and sticks them to the side of the tandır The oven is covered with a large metal plate until the bread is golden brown on the top.

Şerife then removes the bread with a kind of hook.

I prefer to eat tandır bread when it’s warm. The crust is chewy-crunchy, the interior soft. It’s best with lots of butter or crumbly village cheese that has been stored in clay pots.

Please note: My original intention was to place the above text next to the appropriate photographs. After fighting with and losing to Blogspot, I am settling for this compromise.

Mulberries

The mulberries are in season in June. When I lived outside Philadelphia, I was the only person I knew who ate them. Between here and there, next to sidewalks and on lawns, huge mulberry trees drop their fruit to leave purple splotches on the concrete. The birds and I are the only ones I’ve ever seen eat them. I used to sneak onto lawns, grab as many berries as quickly as I could, and walk down the street with stained fingers and lips.

In Turkey, there are both white and black mulberries. You can buy dried white ones in the stores that sell nuts, dried fruit and leblebe (roasted chick peas. Yum.) There is a very small ice cream shop in Bebek, about the size of a closet, that sells the best black mulberry ice cream. When they’re in season, you can buy mulberries from the markets and even on the street. Since they are fragile, you have to carry them carefully. More than once I have arrived home with a soggy paper bag of mulberry juice.

Between my apartment and work, there are several white mulberry trees. The fruit is not too sweet and very refreshing. Every day, I stop and eat them. I pull the branches to reach as many as I can. More often than not, the perfectly ripe ones drop to the blacktop before I can pick them. Sometimes, I interrupt another person guiltily involved in the same sport. Sometimes we ignore each other, at other times we help each other. I’ll pull the branches and point while a stranger picks the fruit. Then we give each other moist towellettes from the bottom of our handbags and say “thank you.” (Always have a packet of moist towellettes handy, especially in the summer heat.)

The ripest, plumpest and juiciest berries, the size of half of my thumb, are always out of my reach towards the top of the tree. They taunt me.