Turkish Food & Recipes Feature Week - Welcome!

Welcome to our special feature week on Turkish food and recipes. As usual, our summer in Fethiye has been a bit hectic and this has meant we haven't spent a lot of time in the kitchen. However, we recently had a Turkish cookery book called The Sultan's Kitchen delivered to a friend's house in the UK and, three weeks ago, they brought it to Fethiye for us. 

It's amazing what a bit of inspiration can do. Despite still having friends here - and more to come - we've waited a long time for this book and so, when it finally arrived, we couldn't resist leafing through the pages, getting to work with it and trying out some of the recipes. 

We love Turkish food - none of these dishes are on our menu, by the way

And that's where the idea for this week's feature on Turkish food and recipes came from. We've been given permission by the publishers of The Sultan's Kitchen to republish three of the recipes inside; an opportunity not to be missed for trying out something completely new. We've chosen a starter, a main meal and a dessert. (We're actually yet to make the dessert and it could be a challenge - neither of us have much of a sweet tooth so we're not too sure what we're looking for. Let's see what happens.) 

What's coming up this week?
A hefty portion of our blog is given over to Turkish food, whether that's recipes, photos and descriptions or our favourite street food. We want this week to be a celebration of Turkish food and we're going out on a limb here - usually, we write our blog posts on an ad hoc basis, writing about whatever takes our mood. This is the first time we have committed to a plan...we'll see how we go...

Shopping for ingredients at the pazar

Tuesday: Tomorrow is going to be a review of The Sultan's Kitchen which we have used to learn our new recipes. As we said, we've already attempted to follow a few of them so we'll tell you how we got on and what we think of the book. We may even tell you what's on the menu for the week... 

Wednesday: We'll kick off our Turkish meal with a starter. Despite it still being hot and sunny here in Fethiye, we know autumn is taking hold and so we've got a hearty soup lined up.

Thursday: Time for main meal. All we're going to tell you about this one for now is that it is an Ottoman classic and one of our favourite (if not the favourite) Turkish dishes. If you read this blog a lot, you may have guessed by now what it is. I made it for friends a few nights ago and, luckily, it worked! 

Saturday: A weekend treat - it's time for dessert. We've chosen the dessert we want to make and, according to the recipe in the book, we won't need any kitchen scales. That's useful as we don't have any! Sometime over the next few days, one of us (whoever is brave enough) will be making this dish in preparation for our Turkish Saturday Sweet. We're entering into the realms of the unknown on this one...

We're looking forward to the next few days and really hope you're going to enjoy the recipes we have lined up for you. If you're going to be attempting any of the recipes we suggest, let us say in advance, happy cooking and ellerinize sağlık (health to your hands).