[Living in Antalya - 16] ‘I suppose it’s aubergines and courgettes again?’

Rather sheepishly, I removed a large and varied selection of vegetables in various stages of decay. There were bags of soggy cucumbers, yellowing courgettes, some very strong-smelling cheese, a few furry tomatoes and various other unidentifiable objects I had long since forgotten ever buying. Luckily we have some tortoises living in our garden that are not too particular when it comes to the freshness of their breakfast and benefit from my “forgetfulness.”

Shopping

First there’s the shopping. In the UK I had spent many years dragging my three kids around the supermarket every week, filling the trolley to the very brim with a huge selection of packaged food. The fresh fruit and veg section in English supermarkets is positioned at the entrance, thus ensuring that the small amount of (expensive) fresh produce I had chosen would be sufficiently squashed by the tins and packets loaded on top, to render it particularly unappetizing. In every aisle there would always be an irresistible “buy two get one free” offer on crisps, biscuits, buns or bread, tempting us to increase our carbohydrate intake by about 100 percent. In Antalya, my trips to supermarkets are limited to a quick trip once or twice a month for a few essentials, and I do the majority of my food shopping in one of the many street markets around town. Despite having lived in Antalya for more than four years, I have singularly failed to curb my enthusiasm for these outdoor markets and go into shopping overdrive whenever I enter one. I am, thankfully for my husband, limited by time and can usually only make it on a regular basis to the Friday market, which is conveniently situated next to my crèche. So every Friday, without fail, I hit the market determined to buy only a sensible amount of fresh fruit and veg. And every Friday, without fail, I stagger back home burdened by enough fresh produce to set up a market stall of my own. I am unable to resist the huge piles of glistening strawberries, oranges, tomatoes, peppers, cheese and yogurt and so on. It doesn’t seem fair to buy anything less than a kilo; in fact, the stallholders are reluctant to sell smaller quantities. The prices remain ridiculously low, certainly when compared to the UK, and the taste of produce grown locally rather than being imported halfway across the world is beyond comparison. Early on, I bought a shopping trolley, but generally manage to forget to take it with me and instead have learnt the rather difficult trick of holding many bags in both hands while foraging through my purse for small change to pay for the next purchase.

The words “seçebilirsin” (you can choose) used to fill me with dread on my first visits to the market. How was I supposed to know how many potatoes or onions constituted a kilo? After all, back in the UK, we had only just got round to introducing the metric system, and anyway everything came conveniently pre-packaged in handy amounts. Now, with four years of experience under my belt, I am a dab hand at not only choosing the best produce, but also gauging with ever-increasing accuracy a kilo of anything. I think my most fluent Turkish happens in my regular exchanges with the sellers. The cheese and yogurt stall holder starts getting my order ready when he sees me enter the market, and if I miss a week, demands an explanation of my absence.

Since my fridge is constantly stocked with the results of my forays to the market, I only visit our local butcher sporadically, and on these occasions have had to learn the art of patience. Asking for a kilo of “kuzu pirzola” (lamb chops) the other day, I had to wait for a good 20 minutes while a whole lamb was produced from the fridge and hacked away at for some considerable time until my chops were ready. If I need “dana kıyma” (minced beef), well, it’s best to take a book along. The meat here is good though and well worth the wait.

Cooking

The change in my shopping basket has, naturally enough, resulted in a different approach to cooking. “I suppose it’s aubergines and courgettes for dinner again tonight?” queried my Yorkshire born and bred father-in-law rather dolefully on day three of his holiday in Turkey. He was, of course, right. Gone were the “meat and two veg” kind of meals he was used to, and instead it’s generally “two veg and loads of salad” for dinner. This suits me fine but was clearly not suiting my husband’s father. I had been turning out my best examples of Turkish cooking -- ıspanak böreği (spinach pie), sigara böreği (cheese-filled pastries), mücver (courgette fritters), saksuka (aubergines in tomatoes sauce)and imam bayıldı (stuffed aubergine halves) thinking he would appreciate tasting Turkish food.

I had learnt how to make these Turkish dishes through trial and error. My first attempt at making mücver ended up as a rather tasteless pile of disintegrating mush. It took several goes to be able to knock up batches of sigara böreği without them unraveling during the cooking process. And learning how to cook aubergines in so many different ways has proved interesting. But over the last four years, I have become pretty adept at offering a range of passable Turkish meze dishes to visiting friends or family, mostly meat-free. There is no doubt in my mind that my intake of fresh fruit and vegetables in Antalya well exceeds the five daily doses recommended back home.

When my father-in-law returned to his more familiar Yorkshire stamping ground, he sent me a card, in which he had enclosed a recipe he had spotted in the paper and cut out for me for “aubergine kuku” (an Iranian dish, I think) to add to my repertoire. Maybe he was beginning to appreciate the change in diet after all, but we will have to wait for his next visit to see if he is a genuine convert.