Turkey's For Life First Birthday - Part 2

Well, I know the first anniversary of Turkey's For Life was a couple of days ago but the post was getting too long...and then I didn't post yesterday...and so here's a slightly later than planned Part 2. 



As it's the start of a whole new 'blogging about Turkey' year for us, we thought we should take this opportunity to point out some of last year's achievements and one of the changes we made to the blog to make it more useful to you in the future. 



The change...

New search boxes

To make it easier for you to find what you are looking for in Turkey's For Life, we have changed the search box again. In the past, if you typed a word into the box, you would have been shown all posts containing that word and you had to scroll through them all to find what you needed. A tad laborious if the post you were looking for was way down the page. Also, if we had used Turkish letters and you used English letters, the post would not appear. 



Hooray! All that has now changed! We've changed the search box to 'Custom Google Search' and there is one at the top and bottom of every page in the left hand column. So now, if you type in a word or words, you will be shown a list (exactly like Google search results) of all our posts containing that word. You can do a quick scan for the post you're looking for. 



For example, if you type in 'kayakoy cin bal', any post containing those words will show in the search results. Posts containing kayakoy or cin bal in the title will be displayed first, and kayakoy and cin bal will be in bold lettering. And, Google being Google, if you mistype a word or use English instead of Turkish letters (or vice versa), it's very good at working out what you are looking for, so the search results should still be accurate.

Fethiye - Our beautiful Turkey blogging base

Some Achievements

In our first blogging year, we...

• Took action to actually start Turkey's For Life and fortunately, you decided to read it.


• Set up a Twitter account; created a Facebook page; joined the food bloggers' site, Foodbuzz; joined the travel bloggers' site TBEX; joined the expat bloggers' site Expat Blog; set up a Flickr account and created a Turkey's For Life Flickr group, and as a result, communicated with countless people and ended up very busy on the laptop! (There are others but we'll be here all day...)

Achievements in themselves, but we are also very proud of...

• Our 'Lonely Planet Featured Blogger' badge. Some of you may have noticed that this has only recently appeared on the blog (it's half way down, on the left if you haven't seen it.) It should have been there since April but, well, it's there now. We applied to the Lonely Planet Blog Sherpa Programme in April and were really pleased to be accepted. Occasionally, we submit a post that we feel would be useful to people who are looking for information about Fethiye and other places in Turkey. Through Blog Sherpa, our post about Kayaköy was selected as a 'favourite' and featured on the front page of the BBC World website. Not bad!


• To top our first blogging year off nicely, we were voted into the daily Top 9 by other Foodbuzz users for my attempt at a Turkish dish; spicy cheese and spinach börek.

And for this year and years to come?

• Well hopefully, we will be able to keep posting and Turkey's For Life will keep improving and growing...inşallah!

Turkey's for Life is a Favourite Blog

Expecting a mushy disaster - we actually got rice fritters

Remember this photo? This is a photo of the outcome of a recipe we attempted (and then posted) for rice fritters. Afterwards, people said to us, 'Oh, we made those rice fritters. They're really good. Nothing like we expected.' 



They are fantastically good (I'm not exaggerating - they really are nothing like you expect) and the recipe was from Sarah at Foodbridge. Sarah was one of the first people we 'met' online (on Twitter) and we hope to meet her in person one day. Her blog is all about Middle Eastern and Mediterranean cuisine and travel. She recently travelled to the Republic of Macedonia and Sweden and is a bit of a champion of hunting out and exploring local food markets wherever she is (you can see why we like reading her blog.)



Anyway, why are we going on about Sarah and Foodbridge? Well, as we're nearing the end of this year, she's listed her favourite food blogs of 2010. There aren't too many in this list - just the ones she likes to read - and as you might have guessed by now, we've made that list. Woo hoo! Thanks Sarah. Of the other blogs she links to, we already subscribe to four of them so it appears we have very similar tastes. Click the following link to see all of Sarah's favourite food blogs of 2010 on Foodbridge.

Turkish Food - Lost In Translation

The photo you can see below is minced meat encased in a minced meat and bulgur wheat shell. In Turkey, this delightful little torpedo of tastiness is called İçli Köfte. If you're familiar with Middle Eastern cuisine, you could well be looking at it and thinking it's Kibbeh. Whichever name you choose to assign to it, it can't be any better than the one we knew it as when we first came to Fethiye...the English translation!

İçli köfte - the meatball with feeling

In Fethiye there's a row of lokantas (canteen/kitchen style eating places) all selling similar Turkish cuisine goodies - including içli köfte. As Fethiye receives many international tourists throughout the year, all eating places make an effort to translate their menus into English and parts of the menu are written on boards and placed on the street outside the restaurant. This means the other restaurants can see what's being advertised and they write exactly the same thing on their boards and in their menus...



...and so we had a full row of lokantas proudly advertising that tonight's menu included 'Sensitive Meatballs.' For months, we sat in these lokantas, looked at the Turkish - içli köfte -  looked at the English - sensitive meatballs - none the wiser. How could a meatball be sensitive? What was a sensitive meatball? The years have passed and the menus - we can't actually remember what it says anymore but it's not as good as 'sensitive meatballs,' that's for sure - have changed to a description that gives you a rough idea of what is going to arrive at your table.



I guess the moral of the story is, if you're dealing with an unfamiliar foreign language, maybe you shouldn't just open your dictionary and assume all words are suitable for your purpose - especially if this is being launched on your public. In Turkish,  'Iç' means 'inside' and 'li' means 'containing.' So içli köfte is a logical name. A case containing an inside. However, 'içli' can also be used to describe a person who is within themselves - someone who holds their feelings inside - a sensitive person. 



We've never looked at içli köfte in the same way since, lest we hurt their feelings. Handle them with care, love them, eat them and enjoy them. They're good!

The Turkey's For Life Giant Mixed Tost!

Tost: You can't come to Turkey - at least the west of Turkey - and leave without sampling tost. Tost is a big, tasty toastie and the Turks do a mighty fine tost! It's not two tiny slices of bread with a delicate filling and a dainty side salad (unless you're in an eatery trying to cater for foreign visitors). Instead, expect a half bread - a Turkish loaf cut in half - with your choice of filling. In  Fethiye, the fillings you're most likely to see on offer are variations of cheese, sucuk and tomato and if you're in Turkey on a budget, well, you need to hunt out the Turkish toastie. They'll fill you up, they taste great and they're cheap!



For those who feel like splashing out and treating themselves, you can order a karışık tost. This is a mixed toast and means you would like all three fillings (our favourite tost). When we make our own karışık tost at home in Fethiye, of course we have to add a couple of little extras and we use bazlama rather than the usual, equally good, Turkish bread. This is purely for the reason that we're slightly addicted to bazlama at the moment. 

Prepare your Turkish mixed toastie ingredients first

• Slice your tomatoes and sucuk (salami or pepperoni is fine if you can't get sucuk) and grate your cheese. There are no set amounts for this. We've called this a giant tost because we like to squish a lot of filling in between the slices of bread.



• You will notice some chopped fresh chillies in the bottom right of this photo. For us, these are an essential ingredient in any tost. You can ask for chillies in your tost in the Fethiye cafes. Sometimes, they will be added into your sandwich or you might get a small plate of pickled chillies if you are sitting down to eat. 

Your Turkish mixed toastie is ready to be eaten.

• Preheat your toastie machine.



• Cut your bazlama in half (ciabatta is a good substitute for bazlama) and then carefully slice it through the middle.


• Spread salça across one half of the bread and sprinkle some of the grated cheese on top.


• Add your chopped chillies, followed by the sucuk slices and tomato. 


• Sprinkle kekik (dried thyme or oregano) over the top, followed by the rest of the cheese and place your other slice of bazlama on top.


• (Carefully) place your future toastie onto the griddle and pull the lid down. Our griddle comes off its hinge. If yours can do this, take it off the hinge so that you can just rest the top of it onto the toastie. (More even coverage!) If you're using standard Turkish bread, press down onto the top of the close griddle so you can sqaush the bread down to make it as flat as possible.


• After 10 or 15 minutes, işte! A personalised Turkish karışık tost. Either wait a few minutes to let it cool down or do what we do and wrap a serviette round it so you can begin straight away and burn your mouth!

Turkish Food - Turkish Rice Recipe

We've been meaning to do a recipe for what we call Turkish rice for a long time now but it's taken till last night for me to get round to actually making some.(It's real name is şehriyeli pilav.) If you're familiar with Turkish food, you'll know that rice features quite heavily in many of the main meals. A lot of the Turkish recipes I follow usually end with, 'serve with rice' and if you go to a lokanta (a type of Turkish restaurant), whichever dish you order, it's highly likely that you'll be asked whether you would like a side serving of rice to go with it. 

A staple Turkish food - side serving of rice

Thankfully, Turkish rice is very tasty. Whenever our friends come over to Fethiye to visit us, they always say, 'I can't wait to have some of that Turkish rice.' (They must be sick of eating the 'quick cook' rice for sale in the British supermarkets!) One of our Turkish friends is an amazing cook (and loves to cook) but her husband says he's happy just eating Turkish rice with yoghurt - surely a good example of how rice is much-loved by some in Turkey (even if it does drive our friend round the bend!)



So, it was becoming increasingly difficult to live in Fethiye and not be able to produce a good bowl of Turkish rice for the table whenever we had friends round for dinner. A couple of years ago, I asked my friend how she made it and I've made it this way ever since. So here is our friend's recipe for Turkish rice - with a tiny little change by us.

• Heat a glug of olive oil in a deep pan on a low heat. (This is the change by us. The traditional way is to melt a knob of butter but I find the butter a little too rich).


• Next, add around 3 dessert spoonfuls of şehriye to the pan. (I had never seen this till we came to Fethiye. It's a type of pasta and if you're outside Turkey and can't find it, vermicelli can also be used.

 Şehriye is used in servings of Turkish rice.

• Stir the şehriye and watch it carefully, as you are looking for a change of colour. As soon as you notice the slight change in colour, add a cup of rice (we use a coffee / tea mug) and keep stirring for a few minutes. (Remember to keep it on a medium to low heat or else the rice, and particularly the şehriye, will burn.) 

The rice and şehriye is sauted for a few minutes

• After a few minutes, add 2 mugs of water. Use the same sized coffee mug as you used for the rice.



• There'll be a big sizzle and the water will bubble up. Turn up the heat and bring the water to the boil, fully.


• Give the rice a couple of stirs, cover and return the heat to medium / low.


• Leave it to simmer for 8-10 minutes, turn off the heat and leave the pan covered for another 5 minutes.

Lovely steamed Turkish rice

• When you remove the lid, fork through the rice to make it fluffy and then serve it with whatever exciting Turkish food you have made.

(This recipe makes enough rice to serve as a side dish for four people. However much you decide to make, the easy thing to remember is you just use twice as much water as rice and it should cook perfectly.)

Turkish Food - Pickled Red Cabbage Recipe

Today has been a 'getting organised for Christmas' day. We've done the Christmas shopping and the Christmas making. We like to feel we're putting the thought and the feeling back into Christmas (well, that's our excuse anyway) by not spending too much. Two of our Christmas presents for other people are made by us. Someone will be getting a jar of muhammara and another person will be getting a lovely big jar of pickled red cabbage.



We did quite a few posts last winter on the Turkish love of pickled vegetables and pickled red cabbage is included in that. These days, we struggle to get through a serving of gözleme without devouring a plate or two of pickled red cabbage and other pickled vegetables; peppers, carrots, aubergines, white cabbage.



Anyway, here is our pickled red cabbage recipe. I made it last Christmas and it went down very well with all concerned. It's actually an old Mrs Beeton recipe and I like it because of the spices in the vinegar.

Excess juices will leave the red cabbage because of the salt

• First of all, take all the outer leaves from a medium-sized red cabbage and cut it lengthways, through the heart, into quarters.


• Cut out the thick white stem, and slice the rest of the cabbage into thin shreds.


• Lay all the cabbage out onto a plate and sprinkle salt over it. The cabbage is supposed to be covered and left overnight like this but I just waited a few hours.

The spice flavours will infuse into the vinegar as it boils 

• Add some crushed black pepper, a pinch of freshly grated ginger and a little chilli powder to a pan. 


• Pour around 75cl of vinegar over the spices and bring to the boil.


• After the vinegar has boiled for a couple of minutes, remove it from the heat and leave to cool.

Glass jars are readily available on the Fethiye markets, maybe because Turkish people love their pickled vegetables so much. We usually use empty jam jars and the like but, well, it is Christmas so we splashed out 1 lira for a dedicated pickled red cabbage jar.

• Add the cabbage to your chosen jar (our jar holds about a litre) and then pour the cooled vinegar through a sieve and over the top of the cabbage.

 Festive pickled red cabbage

Seal the jar and leave it for a day or two before opening it. All ready for Christmas Day, Turkish pickled vegetables have made a decent Christmas present. It's the thought that counts!