Well, weve had some interesting days lately. A few days ago, I made some Zucchini Olive Breakfast Cake. Its quite good, but very rich, so I cant eat too much at any one sitting. I had to fudge a little, because of ingredients. The recipe calls for kalamata olives, which are unobtainable here. Also, one is supposed to slice them, indicating pitted olives, also rare here. I ended up slicing bits off the seeds of the ones in the bucket of olives that we bought. Yes, they sell them by the bucket here, since olives are one of the main ingredients of a traditional Turkish breakfast. Okay, I got the olives taken care of, then there was the zucchini. Occasionally one will see green zucchinis for sale, but mostly they are in home gardens. Anything in that family is called kabak, which just means squash. Fortunately, there arent too many varieties here, so if you ask for kabak, you will probably get the right thing. Anyway, what I had to use was the mottled pale green squash, which is very like the gray Mexican squash available in the States. I guess it is pretty much the same as zucchini. The recipe also calls for crumbled goat cheese. I dont think the cheese I got is goat cheese and, also, it is not as strong-tasting as feta. Anyway, its good. I also made an Apple Crumble. The recipe was from a friend, but it called for a lot of things I couldnt get here. Lots of fudging! It calls for a can of cranberries. The only cranberries I can get here are very dry, picked-green ones. I just dont think theyd be the same. I decided to use a jar of cherry jam (Ha! Ha!) instead. I laugh because jam here in Turkey is very runny, pretty much like syrup, and it is extremely sweet. People just eat it by the spoonful. Yuck! Anyway, I cut down on the amount of sugar added, so it didnt turn out too bad. My oven and I always seem to be at odds, so Im going to have to change things a little the next time I make it. I also got out the Christmas tree that I bought last year. There probably arent any real trees available here, plus they dont celebrate Christmas. However, some people do put up New Years Trees. My tree is about 3 feet tall and very scrawny. Here in Polatli, that is the largest tree I have seen. I bought garland and some decorations for it last year, but it was rather bare. This year, I bought a few more decorations and some lights. It looks much better this year! I took a little video of the tree and am attaching it. I hope you enjoy it. Actually, I hope it works! Now to get up energy to make some Christmas cookies!
Posted on: Fri, 12 Dec 2014 14:53:52 +0000
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