I was thinking the other day that if I wanted to give an accurate glimpse of life in Turkey on this blog, I should at some point write a bit more about Turkish food and the typical food that can be found here. I have to admit, this was partly inspired by a friend visiting Istanbul and realising that I had to rein myself in from giving her far too many suggestions of food to try.
I was pondering this the other day whilst doing my online food shopping order at the same time (because when I discovered online food shopping in Istanbul, it was a gamechanger. While we still go to the supermarket or greengrocer to buy nearly all of our fresh food, with no car, two small children and a flat that is not on the ground floor, having someone deliver the heavy and bulky items to your doorstep is so worth it. Although I'm pretty sure they've got my name on a list somewhere after my last order, which weighed about 20kg...).
Anyway, I was thinking "oh, maybe I'll mention yoghurt and how Turks love eating yoghurt alongside their main course and how crazy it is that I even found myself contemplating buying the 2.5kg carton of natural Turkish yoghurt rather than the 1.5kg carton but decided in the end to stick to 1.5kg."
Then my online order arrived and I realised that I'd made a mistake and ordered 2 lots of 1.5kg yoghurt cartons! So now I'm racking my brain trying to work out how we are going to use up 3kg of yoghurt. I made this cake yesterday, I've got my eye on this muffin recipe (although no blueberries here unfortunately), we'll have curry soon so we can have yoghurt alongside it, L's been dolloping it on his muesli, I'm planning on making some granola for a yoghurt/granola/fruit breakfast combo, we'll be having it for dessert with fruit and freezing it as home made "ice cream" for J.
Moral of the tale: always check your quantities while shopping online!
As an aside, did you know that the Turkish word for yoghurt is yoğurt and the the English word 'yoghurt' (or 'yogurt' if you're American!) derives from the Turkish word? The funny looking ğ in the middle is a slightly strange letter that doesn't really have a sound of its own but affects the letters around it. It always follows a vowel, is never found at the start of a word and usually lengthens the sound of the vowel immediately before it.
