On food and drink
Well! Who woulda thunk it’d be so hard to blog about vacations while on vacation? In between getting up at 6:30 a.m. to beat the crowds at the Forum and the Vatican, wearing out the soles of our shoes trudging around cobbled streets, posing for the Camera Nazi, and then downloading and editing photos at the end of the day, I have no energy left over to give my dear readers a peppy recap of the day’s travails and adventures.
Yet before our culinary discoveries fade completely from my mind, here’s a quickie entry to speak to our wonderous meals and help explain our expanding waistlines.
Turkish food is all about meat. Grilled, cooked in tomato sauce, braised, roasted: lamb, chicken and beef. Occasionally, especially if you’re in Istanbul or near some other body of water, you will get seafood. But since I do love a hunk of meat, we had meal after meal of it in our 7 days there. Here’s a guy kebab-ing our lunch midway through our week in Turkey.
And here’s the spread at a turo-turo type of restaurant. The food was fantastic, but don’t let the simplicity of the setting fool you - eating out is expensive in Istanbul.
Over a dinner of grilled beef patties, lamb skewers, chicken breast, beef skewers, sirloin and some other chunk of beef — all grilled in front of us by an attentive waiter — Grumpus and I had the following conversation:
Maya: I have found my cuisine of choice, and it is meat. Sabi siguro ng waiter na ‘to, “‘Tang ina, lakas kumain ng babae!”
Mickey: Don’t let this little lady fool you. She eats like a man, and she’s all mine!
Turkey is also where Mickey and I discovered the joys of well-made Turkish coffee. It took him some time to warm to its rough, gritty flavor, but by the time we got to Cappadocia, he had to have one after every meal. He took his with lots of sugar, while I liked mine barely sweetened.
I spoke about our Turkish ice cream experience earlier. According to Suleyman, what makes it so special is some native plant that makes the ice cream sticky and pliable. They actually wholesale it by length, and the ice cream vendors have a special routine involving turning the ice cream cone upside-down that pokes fun at unsuspecting tourists.
And what would a Turkish vacation be without baclava? Mickey went a little nuts at the Spice Market and bought a kilo of the stuff, thinking he could bring it back home with us. Then he found out it would go bad after a week, and tried to offload some of it on me, Suleyman, and Ismail, our driver. Unfortunately I couldn’t fit anything else into my digestive system after all that meat. Ismail doesn’t eat sweets. And Suleyman quit after two or three pieces. So Mickey had to plow through the box largely solo under the gentle ribbing of the group. After 4 days of this, he decided he’d fought the good fight and it was finally time to say goodbye to his sweet friends.
“I wish I knew how to quit you,” he said with tears in his eyes.
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As we all know, however, Italy is Mickey’s spiritual home. First of all, he loves him his Italian food:
I wonder who invented pizza. I’d like to shake his hand.
Then let’s move on to the caffe latte. It is impossible to get a bad cup of coffee in all of Italy, and for the price of 1 euro, it is one of the few bargains in the country. We like the ritual of standing at a bar and downing our coffee in one fell swoop. Here he is with his daily dose of coffee
Yeah, I know that last one’s a pastry, but we’d have one of those with our coffee.
Of course we also had to have our gelato
Thanks to Mickey’s tenacity, we also decoded the different restaurant categories in this city. Our favorite, by far, is the birreria that serves inexpensive food with, you guessed it, beer. Thanks to this pleasant discovery, I have spent many many evenings in a state of mild-to-moderate intoxication. Thank you, Nastro Azzuro and Baffo D’Oro!
Okay so that’s all him. What can I say? He’s cuter than I am.
Update:
Because you asked for it, here are some pictures of Grumpus’ dear wife.
