Home Cookin'

Weekly Market in Urgrup

Fun day today. Enough of the rocks and churches - we got to focus almost exclusively on food and home life.

 

First off, the weekly market in Urgrup. Spectacular place with is proliferation of produce of all sorts - nuts, dried fruits, vegetables - especially tomatoes and peppers, great vats of farmer made cheeses and yogurt, raw chickpeas still on the branch (vine? bush?). Huey also sell clothes and housewares, potted plants and flowers, tools, farm equipment -almost everything you want for Cappadocian daily life.

 

 

Then off to the home of our driver. We got to meet his mother and his wife, see the pictures of one of his some off in military service (mandatory twelve months here). We "helped" make lunch - which essentially means we shucked some beans, tasted the tomato sauce and generally got in the way. Still, it was great to see the way things are made. We had some bulgur and minced meat Koftecisi cooked up in a tomato and oil sauce - slightly spicy and very good. We started with a really nice yogurt and rice soup (not what I would generally expect to like, but this was really good) with minced onion and maybe some cucumber and cooked rice heated up in yogurt with maybe some mint. There was a vegetable course with those beans cooked in a bit of cucumber, onion and tomato sauce - seasoned with some hot pepper and cooked in a stove top pressure cooker. The desert was a mild, soft and slightly sweet pudding/drought made from cooking flower in oil and then adding milk and grape seed molasses.a simple preparation but I could see things had to be timed just right to bring it all together.

Actually,what impressed me most was the kitchen and the garden. The kitchen was carpeted with an oriental carpet floor, but otherwise totally simple. Shelves were a few planks covered with a cloth curtain. Containers tended to be old plastic margarine containers. Completely basic, and the food was excellent. They even have a little bread oven out in the garden.

 

The home was also clean and simple. Really four rooms off a hall entryway. Nice view of the valley. Furnishings were a few couches pushed to the sides of the room, one television and a bowl of pet minnows. The gardens were great - some lettuce, tomato, basic herbs, a few plum trees and a big walnut tree and a little five by ten foot patch of carefully cultivates grass.

 

Most remarkable: there was a Hoopoe nesting in the garden wall. Amazing bird - brown and black barred feathers, some bright red accents, and an enormous crest behind its head - when folded about as long as it's beak making its head look like a pick axe. I'm neither talented enough nor equipped to get a good picture - but find it on the web. I remember reading a line about a Hoopoe in a Rumi poem last semester and had no idea about the reference.

 

 

 

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