How To Make Coffee and Tea

We learned how to make Turkish coffee tonight. Our language tutor went to a store and got us finely grounded coffee, a coffee pot (cezve), and cups and saucers (fincan). He was pretty enthusiastic about getting us the coffee cup set and teaching us to make coffee. You can see in the pictures below how tiny the pot is and also the coffee cups. The coffee cups are generally small and decorative. Can you see the legs on the cups? 

Let's say you're making coffee for two. You take a teaspoon and put two heaping spoonfuls of coffee grounds and two of sugar in the pot. You fill a coffee cup (fincan) with water and pour it into the pot and repeat since you're making coffee for two. Heat the pot slowly until it boils but don't let it boil over. The coffee pot has a lip on it for pouring so pour into each cup about a third of the way so each drinker gets equal amounts of foam. Then fill both cups up. I read somewhere that after you boil the coffee the first time, you fill the cups with a third of coffee and then return the pot back to boil. When it boils the second time and it will boil quickly, you fill the cups with the remaining coffee which will have extra foam. How you boil the coffee can make a difference in the taste. 

And no, there is no filter. The grounds go into your cup. You simply wait for the dregs to float down to the bottom before drinking the coffee. This is why Turkish coffee is grounded into very fine powder. 

Some coffee connoisseurs will argue that boiling coffee is the worst way to drink coffee. Percolators basically boil coffee, too, although grounds are filtered. Drip coffee is acceptable but French press coffee is best. I take it however I can...

Tiny coffee pot

Teensy coffee cups and saucers - cups are about 2.5 inches tall

This country is supposedly famous for its coffee and style of making coffee but oddly enough, it's not as popular as tea.

Teapots and loose tea leaves

Tea cup and saucer - cup is also 2.5 inches tall

Tea is served in glasses like above. They're about 2.5" inches tall and you may also see some tea cups slightly bigger. They're generally glass and can also be decorative with gold filigree or etched glass. Some have handles. 

Did you notice two tea pots stacked up? Here's how you make tea. Put water in the big teapot to boil on the stove. Once it's boiling, fill the little teapot with boiling water from the big teapot. Fill the big teapot with water again and set it to boil again. While the big teapot is warming up to a boil, fill the little teapot with loose tea leaves (a packed teacup of leaves per person drinking) and let the tea leaves absorb water and settle. Set the little teapot on top of the big teapot so it will continue to be heated by the boiling water below. This creates a "tea concentrate." When the big teapot has come to a boil again, take the little teapot and fill each cup about a quarter or third full of the tea concentrate. Then fill each cup to the brim with boiling water from the big teapot. You might get a little bit of tea leaves at the bottom of your cup but that's normal. Add a cube or two of sugar as desired - or a teaspoonful if you only have loose sugar. As people get refills, they pour a little tea concentrate from the little teapot and then fill up the cup with hot water from the big teapot. 

In the South, you would put a pot of water in the stove (or a cup in microwave) and drop in a teabag or two to boil. That's your tea concentrate. Once it's ready, you pour the tea concentrate into a pitcher and fill it with water to the brim (and add enough sugar to make tea more like syrup). It's the same idea as above.

We all drink tea but we drink it and make it differently in all parts of the world....

My Life Just Got Easier

Have I mentioned that I love my parents? I love them because they're my parents and I really appreciate their love, generosity, and support. One of the best things they can do from long distance is to send me gluten-free stuff, which they have done and they continue to do so as I am expecting packages any day now. I really feel loved when they do that for me because they ease my life here in a substantial way, all the way from the other side of the ocean.

So far, I've gotten GF Bisquick mixes for waffles, GF rolled oats which I use for granola, sorghum flour for baking sweets, brown sugar, dried herbs and spices, Crystal Light, M&Ms for A, etc. Somewhere over the Atlantic, a package is making its way to me, full of sweet rice flour, coconut flour, tapioca starch, potato starch, and xanthan gum (which replaces the gluten as acts as gluten does in baking). My pantry will be very well stocked and complete for all the GF cooking and baking that I need. I only need to grind my own brown rice flour and almond flour, for which I am on a hunt for a coffee bean grinder. Here, you can buy almonds in bulk, which is cheaper than in the States. I can make my own almond milk (great flavor to replace cow's milk with in baked goods), almond butter, and almond flour. Yep.

I found a magazine website called Vegetarian Times, and it has an excellent recipe search engine with several search options such as gluten-free, egg-free, dairy-free, etc. I can search by ingredient (for example, zucchini) and click on "gluten-free" and get plenty of recipes that are pretty simple (not requiring a lot of pre-made stuff from the States which may or may not be available here). My life just got easier! Whew.

I'm slowly learning how to substitute and make from scratch. For example, I have been wanting to learn how to make chickpea vegan burgers since there are chickpeas aplenty here. I also found a chickpea chocolate cake (very simple, no flour) recipe. G accidentally poured an entire kilo bag of dried chickpeas (2.2 lbs) to soak. I didn't think about it either until I realized that we were soaking more chickpeas than we needed. SO, it looks we'll be eating a lot of chickpeas this week! At least, it's healthy. Chickpea burgers, chickpea chocolate cake, and homemade hummus are on the menu this week. I hope we can use it all up.

Back to my original point about my learning to substitute and cook from scratch. Chickpea burgers require eggs and breadcrumbs to bind the burgers together. Since I am still waiting on the package that's somewhere over the Atlantic, I can't make my own breadcrumbs. The big supermarket may or may not have GF bread. So, I did research and found that I can use rolled oats as a binding agent to replace the breadcrumbs. Score! I have GF rolled oats! My life just got easier. 

I don't like to cook but I don't hate it either. I like to eat delicious food so that's what makes me cook. One thing I really hate is to think up what to cook every night. Doing meal planning for the week really saves me of the nightly hassle of staring into the pantry and refrigerator without a single idea of what to cook. Now, I'm trying to save myself even more hassle by planning for the month. It seemed really daunting until I found a tip on a random blog for planning a month of meals -  do themes. For example, salad every Monday, soup every Tuesday, ethnic every Wednesday, and so on. You only need to find 4 recipes/ideas for each theme. My life just got easier.

You can probably see the recurring theme here: my life just got easier. I am celebrating this. I am thankful for my parents who help me by sending packages and for the Internet for tips and recipes. Very thankful...

By the way, I posted on A's blog about her going off to preschool on her first day today. Check it out!

My Purse Is Famous

Two meetings got canceled this afternoon so I took a little time to browse different Christmas sewing ideas so I could go ahead and order Christmas fabric and still have time to make the stuff before Christmas. Then, I started getting sidetracked and looked at other sewing stuff. I stumbled onto a site that had a picture of my purse. I was so surprised to recognize my purse on a random site. So, what? you might say. See, my purse is an original. I designed it with my friend's Carrie's help or, rather, it's probably more accurate to say that Carrie designed it after I told her what I wanted. I ordered the bright green fabric and matched hot pink with it and begged Carrie to make it for me as I was in the throes of selling most of my worldly goods and moving to a faraway land. So, she did, and she posted it on her blog (www-dixiemango-com) with a free tutorial and called it "The Olivia Bag." A pretty name for a pretty bag. See the picture below:

It turns out that my purse appears on several websites. Carrie is now famous for her mad design skills. Now you can picture me gallivanting around the city with this purse.

Okay, I'm done wasting time. I made no progress on choosing Christmas fabrics today but hopefully soon. Then again, I have a list of sewing projects a mile long and have only sewn once since arriving here so maybe getting Christmas fabric is pointless....

Where We Live and Shop

I thought I would post a couple of pictures of what our immediate area looks like. Below in the picture, the tall building is our apartment building. It has 7 stories and we live on the 4th floor. Businesses typically occupy the first floor of apartment buildings and a luxury car dealership has the shop right below us. You're looking at the back and side of our building and it faces a side street off the main road that I was standing on when I snapped this picture.

In the foreground of this picture is a market where we shop. It's a small but pretty complete store and I like to run down for fresh produce whenever I need it. We also shop at a big supermarket chain about a 15-minute walk away for anything that is cheaper or what this little market lacks.

The picture above is our front door, on the side street off the main road. There's not very much green in these pictures, is there? Some buildings will have a patch of grass around it, a courtyard, or a pretty stone-paved driveway and parking lot (which may only hold about 4 or 5 cars). Sometimes I get some pangs of wishfulness for a patch of grass for A to play on. We have to walk about 20 minutes to the nearest park with all the greenery that we can handle. 

Well, there you go!

Mommy's Day Out

G was gracious enough to take care of A while I had about half a day (6 hours) to myself. I needed major alone time - a mommy's day out. Anyway, this post is about my day out and I've posted lots of pictures so click on each if you want a bigger and closer look at them.

First, I started off with coffee at Starbucks with a fellow mommy and dear friend, M. We met about 8 years ago overseas while serving in the same country but different cities. We became friends, eventually roommates back in the States during grad school. We each got married the same summer and had our first babies within 9 months of each other (she is now expecting their second!). Now, we're serving with the same company as 8 years previous and remarkably, of the entire world that we each could've been sent to, in the same city!

Me and M

I said goodbye to M and took the ferry to the Europe side of the city (we live on the Asia side).

Ferry

I like riding the ferry with the water, the views, and the breeze. Here are some pictures of the view:

You can just barely see the suspension bridge

After I got off the ferry and headed to the Spice Bazaar, I walked by this, one of thousands in this city:

Washing for prayers

Spice Bazaar

In the Spice Bazaar, there are tons of different delicacies, treats, herbs, and spices, dried fruit and nuts in bulk, and many different types of loose, fragrant tea leaves. Just walking by each shop treats you to an aroma of a candy or spice or flavored tea leaves. 

"Egyptian Bazaar." Sign above the entrance to Spice Bazaar

Spices

The Spice Bazaar is the oldest bazaar in the city and the center of the spice trade, built between 1597 and 1664. It was built to rent out shops and collect the rent for the upkeep of a mosque. It was called the Egyptian Bazaar back then because the spices were originally imported from Egypt.

After I left the Spice Bazaar, I started walking towards the Grand Bazaar and stopped for lunch on the way. I had a lamb kebap with fries and it was nothing to write home about. I've had better but it at least filled my stomach. Below, you can see a hunk of meat in the center of the picture, which is basically slices of lamb meat stacked up on a rotating spit, roasting. Meat is sliced off and served on a platter or in a pita wrap or in a sandwich; basically, any way you like it.

It's hard to see but I love the bright blue and green ceramic mosaics on this building 

I meandered through streets, heading in the general direction of the Grand Bazaar, window shopping. The Grand Bazaar was built and then opened in 1461. It has over 4,000 shops; in other words, it's pretty big and easy to get lost in - in a pleasant way with all of the interesting things to look at. It's a maze of shops selling a wide variety of things like lamps, candle holders, rugs, pashmina (fine cashmere shawls), colorful silk scarves, embroidery, pillows, decorated and painted pottery, carved things, wooden boxes with shimmery in-laid oyster shell, jewelry, etc. I can hardly list every single thing they sell here but that seems to be the majority. If it's pretty unique to the region, colorful, and shiny, they sell it here.

See the lamps in foreground, colorful lamps in upper right, Persian rugs in background

Lamps - tabletop and ceiling fixtures

One of many ceramic shops - the bright blue in upper left is my favorite

Hand painted pottery

Ceramics come in many shapes - plates, tiles, ashtrays, vases, pitchers, bowls, trivets, coasters, etc

Framed tile: I really coveted this for a wall in my apartment and had to tear myself away.

Pashmina and embroidered zipper pouches

Amulet against evil eye - see below

More pashminas

A shop entirely devoted to buttons.

After I came out of the Grand Bazaar to make a slow trek back to the ferry, I came onto this shop. It only sells buttons. Period. I was amazed; there must've been hundreds of different buttons! Then as I continued to walk down this street, I saw more shops with the same idea: a shop with only zippers, a shop with only rhinestone-studded notions (like buttons, bands, strips - anything that can be sewn onto clothes), a shop with only threads, etc. It seems to be a street for dressmakers although I didn't see any fabric shops.

So, I did come away from the Grand Bazaar with some loot. I bought two pillow cases which I immediately covered pillows with when I came home. Our couches are a taupe (warm gray-brown color, depending on how you look at it - it looks gray to me most of the time) and the pillows cases have a gray background so they go perfectly with the couches. I'd been looking for bright turquoise or teal for accent colors in the living room and fell in love with these pillow covers. They originally had tassels at each corner and I'm not at all fond of tassels so I snipped them off and you can see one resting on the couch in the picture.

I wanted to explain a little about the blue eye (scroll up). They're generally glass and come in every form - jewelry, keychains, eyeglass chain, accessories, pinned on babies' clothing, etc. It's printed on napkins, playing cards, cups, etc. Large ones are hung in homes - on the front door, welded into balcony ironwork, pressed into concrete such as thresholds or walls, etc. It's supposed to be a pretty ancient superstition that the evil eye wards off harmful, destructive forces. If you ever come here, you'll see it everywhere.

On the ferry ride back, the water was pretty sparkling in the sun and I snapped the obligatory sailboat picture.

My day out was too short and I already have plans for next time. Hopefully G will have a daddy's day out and take his big honking camera and take better pictures than me. I hope you enjoyed a bit of virtual sightseeing and shopping through these pictures :-)

Roasted Tomato Soup

Balsamic vinegar is one of my top favorite ingredients to cook with. The recipe below is one of my perennial favorites. I don't like sweet tomato soup or tomato soup that tastes like spaghetti sauce but the tanginess of this soup makes it a big hit with me. I got this recipe from someone else so I don't know who the original creator is. I made a minor modification in the recipe: it originally called for 1/2 cup of olive oil divided (for tomato mixture and for cooking onion) and I found that to be too much and reduced it to 1/4 cup, sometimes less.

12 large, ripe tomatoes, about 4 lbs (2 kg) total or 3 large (28oz) cans whole tomatoes, drained.
1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil
1/4 cup balsamic vinegar
12 large garlic cloves, peeled but left whole
kosher salt and ground pepper
1 cup finely chopped yellow onion
2 cups water
1/2 to 1 cup lightly packed fresh basil leaves (based on how much basil you like)

1) Preheat the oven to 500 F (260 C)
2) If using fresh tomatoes: core the tomatoes and quarter them lengthwise. If using canned tomatoes: drain the juice and slice in half lengthwise. In a large bowl, mix the tomatoes, oil, vinegar, garlic, 1 teaspoon salt, and 1/2 teaspoon pepper. Spread the tomatoes on a nonreactive baking sheet (a glass casserole pan or stainless steel pan is fine). Roast the tomatoes in the oven until there are very dark spots, about 35-40 min. Remove from heat and let cool.
3) In large saucepan over medium heat, cook the onion in 1 tablespoon olive oil until very soft, 8-10 min, stirring occasionally. Raise the heat to high and add the roasted tomatoes and water. Bring to a simmer and adjust the heat to maintain the simmer, and cook 5 minutes. Season to taste with salt and pepper.
4) Remove from heat and let cool slightly. Put in the basil leaves and puree in the pot with an immersion blender (or work in batches with a blender). Wear an apron!

Eat with croutons, side of salad, or grilled cheese sandwiches. Yum!

Note: I tried this with basil leaves one time and omitted it the next time and we prefer this soup without the basil leaves. It's up to you. The recipe says to spread the tomatoes in the pan to roast but I dump the entire mixture in a pan with sides so as to cook in the balsamic vinegar. I did say balsamic vinegar is one of my favorite ingredients, right?

Taking The Wrong Bus is Normal

I was chatting with my cousin, Wendy, online the other day and mentioned an ordinary foreigner experience, which she encouraged me to post online. I was hesitant because I didn't want to appear as if I was complaining. Today, I had another similar experience so I decided to go ahead and write about both.

When G came home from being out of the country, I took the opportunity to go to Ikea (an international chain Swedish home furnishing store) as a family. We needed some things for our apartment and I needed G's input. The last few times that I'd been to Ikea, people took us in their cars. This time, we took the bus but it was the wrong one. The only reason we knew was because we'd taken the correct bus for Ikea (but for a different destination close to Ikea) previously. Once we realized our incorrect bus was not making the turn it was supposed to, we got off at the next stop and walked.....and walked.....and walked back. A, who generally doesn't ride the stroller anymore, which is a pain to get on and off the bus anyway, was uncooperative and wanted to mosey along while we were all business. I wasn't in the mood to coax her so I carried a screaming pre-schooler down a busy street, sweating as we went. G's jaw was clenched in frustration because an irritable preschooler on top of a...what do you call taking the wrong bus? A mishap? So, an irritable preschooler on top of an annoying mishap was enough to get anyone in a bad mood. Just multiply that by 2 because we were also hot.

We finally got on the right (hot and stuffy) bus and it took about an hour until our stop. I had the job of containing A and sweating some more. She eventually settled and relaxed in my lap. Now, I was told that we would get off at this stop but not be able to see Ikea from there. I was to "walk over this hill and then you'll see it." Fine. After we got off at the stop, I led us on our merry way (ha!) in the wrong direction. G was sinking further into a foul mood and I wasn't doing so great myself because we were hot, hungry, tired, and A was being uncooperative -- of course -- and stopping at every flower, every tree, every ledge to walk along, etc. I asked G to stop someone on the street to ask for directions but he was busy keeping A out of trouble. That fell to me (it's hard for me to understand English with thick accents) so I asked a lady who ignored me completely. The next pedestrian spoke English and was kind enough to direct us in the right way. We followed the directions, sweating in the sun and A wanted me, and not her father, to carry her. Ikea was like an oasis in the desert when we saw it. What a relief. We eventually pulled out of our bad mood only to fall back into it when A got tired and fussy and I wasn't done with shopping yet. It took a tremendous effort to get there and I wasn't about to stop shopping; I wanted to get everything on my list and be done with it. Suffice to say, the next time someone offered a ride to Ikea, I took the offer and shopped alone. It was absolutely wonderful.

Another experience that happened today involves a taxi. A and I went to a bazaar near my home in a taxi which is inexpensive when it's close (I didn't know how to walk there yet; after today, I now know). When we arrived, the enormous lot was empty. I realized - duh, it's called Tuesday Pazar, meaning it's open on Tuesdays! Today is Monday. We sat in the taxi looking at the empty lot and I made a spur of the moment decision: go to a hardware store where I'd spied some brightly colored braided rugs that I liked. So, I told the driver to take us there and man, I didn't realize it was so far! The fare was high. I wanted to kick myself but again, chalk it up to being new. A and I shopped and I picked up some pretty braided rugs, which I have to say was almost worth the high taxi fare. I might take a picture of them for you.

That's not the story, though. This is where it starts: after we were finished, a customer service lady helped us into a taxi and told the driver where to go. This lady spoke some English and she understood where we lived (I know hearing people can butcher a foreign language when they speak it but I do it worse so I was glad she could understand my pronunciation of my destination). It turned out the taxi driver spoke English also but his accent was too thick for me to understand. After riding along the highway, the driver took a different exit than the customary one. I was concerned and told him; he said, "Yes, yes, this is (name of my area)." I didn't recognize it so I sat back and waited. Then he came to a stop in front of a building and looks at me expectantly. I was like, "NO!" Long story short, I was in an area that I didn't recognize with a taxi driver who thinks we are at the correct address. I had no idea how to direct him back so I started naming off names of things close to my home. He started driving slowly and took a turn that didn't seem correct. I stopped him, called a co-worker and handed my phone to him. After a minute or two on the phone, he handed it back and got back on a road (which eventually came to my apartment - only I'd never been on this part of the road) and dropped me off at the right location.

This wasn't an awful experience but imagine your taxi driver thinking he knows where you need to go and takes you somewhere else. Imagine not being able to speak the language and not being able to tell him how to get there because you don't know where you are yourself! It wasn't scary but I was just at a loss at how to tell him where to go until the idea of calling my co-worker popped into mind, who could explain better the location where I lived.

I'm a foreigner. These experiences are the ordinary part of a new foreigner's life.