Turkish Muse

The Wednesday Chef’s Ragù alla Bolognese

I’m a rather new follower to Luisa Weiss’s blog, The Wednesday Chef, but I’m likely no less an ardent reader than many of her long-time fans. When her book, My Berlin Kitchen, came out this fall, and I happened to be visiting the US, I placed an order for it, even though it was still in hardcover, and waited until I was back home in Turkey to crack the first page.

I didn’t wait long though and thank goodness. From the moment I started reading, I couldn’t stop, and I blew through my jet lag by reading the entire book the first weekend I was home. The simple earnestness of the writing, the lyricism, the push and pull of various cultures and people and food; it all rang true to me. Her book, much like her blog, felt a little bit like home.

I inserted little sticky notes on every recipe I wanted to try, but after reading the book, put it on the shelf in the kitchen with all the other cookbooks and went about living my life, almost, but not quite, forgetting about the ragù that first arrested my interest when I read it.

The list of ingredients seemed deceptively simple: 1 kilo of meat, an onion, a couple of carrots, a bit of red wine, tomatoes and salt. How could those humble ingredients make such a compelling sauce, one that carried Luisa through some of her most difficult moments?

I’d had that ragù in the back of my mind for weeks, and only one thing kept me from making it right away: Luisa recommends simmering the sauce for a full seven hours. I didn’t think I had the time, or the concentration, or the discipline, really, to commit a full seven hours to a meat sauce.

But lately I’ve been feeling flighty, a bit anxious, and I needed something to ground me, something to make me feel and embrace the place and space I’m in. The sauce, I decided, was perfect for a Saturday, when I could slow down a bit, commit to this project, and dedicate my day to the creation of something fulfilling.

So yesterday morning I set about slowly chopping an onion, then a couple of carrots. I sautéed the onion in olive oil and butter, then added the carrots. The meat came next -- all beef, as I had no access to pork -- and I used a wooden spoon to break it up, dividing it into small pieces, as small as the finely diced onion and carrots. I added half a cup of red wine, then the pureed tomatoes and salt.

And then I lowered the heat and put on the lid. Seven hours to go and counting.

I went about my day, doing laundry, watching the news, tidying up the living room, playing with the cats. But instead of rushing from one task to the next, in a flurry of indecision as to what I wanted to do, I felt the pull of the slowly simmering sauce telling me to take a breath, to savor the day, to really participate.

After the seven hours were up, the house smelled simply heavenly, and the sauce quivered in the pot, ready to be spooned over a fresh pot of penne pasta. We poured some red wine, sat at the table and enjoyed.

Ragù alla Bolognese
Adapted slightly from My Berlin Kitchen by Luisa Weiss of The Wednesday Chef

1 tablespoon olive oil
3 tablespoons butter
1 large yellow onion, finely minced
2 large carrots, finely minced
1 kilo mince meat (kiyma)
½ cup red wine
1, 800-gram can of peeled tomatoes, pureed
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon black pepper

Put the oil and butter in a large cast-iron pot (or any large pot, really) over medium heat so that the butter melts. Add the onion and cook for about 7 minutes, stirring often. Then add the carrots and cook for another 2-3 minutes.

Add the mince meat and, using a wooden spoon, stir and chop the meat so that it breaks up into small, uniform pieces about the size of the carrot and onion. This will take several minutes and will require some elbow grease. Stir and cook until the meat is no longer pink, about 8 to 10 minutes.

Add the wine and stir well to combine, then simmer for another 2-3 minutes. Add the pureed tomatoes, salt and pepper, stir well, and lower the heat to the lowest possible setting. Put the lid on and let the pot simmer as long as you can, ideally 7 hours, but at a minimum, 5.

Bosphorus Brewing Company

For as many bars as there are in Istanbul, there have never been any pubs. Not until now, anyway. Now that the Bosphorus Brewing Company has opened, Istanbul has its first and very own family-owned and -run English pub, complete with homemade lagers, ales, sausages and mash, and yes, even Sunday roast.

It’s the kind of thing people in Istanbul have been waiting for for ages: a place where they can get good beer – not just Efes or Tuborg or Bomonti – accompanied by decent food with good service in a pleasant atmosphere.

It’s not a lot to ask, really, but in Istanbul – particularly in Beyoglu with its proliferation of identical bars all serving otuzluks of Efes for 9 TL – a good-quality pub has always been elusive, one step above and beyond the status quo offerings of surly barmen whose only qualification is their literal ability to draw a tap.

But the Bosphorus Brewing Company clearly had something else in mind when it opened in mid-November.

There are 5 beers currently on tap, with a stout to come (it was available at opening, but quickly sold out). My personal favorites are the Halic Gold, a lively and strong beer (7.4% alcohol) and the Beer 81.

Just last week, we celebrated a friend’s birthday there, and Jeff and I started off with the 5-beer sampler: 5, 5-cl shots of beer to get a taste of each one. While I liked the Icmedik and the Istanbul Pale Ale, both reminded me quite a bit of what is already on offer in the local beer market. I imagine both would be excellent served cold in the summer time on the pub’s terrace, but after the sampling, I immediately went for a glass of the Beer 81, followed by the Halic Gold.

The food is excellent, as well, and very English -- sausages and mash, beer-battered shrimp, lamb curry, steak in ale, chile con carne (served over rice, very strange to this American), bread pudding and sticky toffee pudding.

The pub was packed last weekend, its second after opening, which was a good sign but of course not entirely unexpected. Any new place here attracts an immediate and large crowd, which can quickly wane as the months wear on and people grow bored and search out the next new thing.

While the Bosphorus Brewing Company is a boon for expats, pub culture does not really exist in Istanbul. As foreigners were pounding back beers last weekend, a large table was crowded with Turkish people, many of them women, each of who appeared to sip one beer over several hours. Clearly, local café culture -- in which people sit for hours sipping 2-3 teas and paying 3 TL for it -- will not transition well to a British pub.

Still, the Bosphorus Brewing Company offers something no one else in the city does, and for that, it is very likely to develop a loyal and faithful crowd.

More info: Bosphorus Brewing Company website

Telling a Different Story

In the past year, I've travelled to Istanbul countless times, cooked and baked some amazing food, drank Guiness in Ireland with my in-laws, spent a raucuous weekend in Bodrum with friends, visited London for the first time with my best friend, celebrated my 30th birthday in Paris, and on and on.

I wanted to tell you about it, all of it, and yet I didn't. I wasn't on hiatus from writing exactly, but on a long -- okay, very long -- hiatus from this blog, from this space, which I had been feeling for a long time no longer reflected the life I was leading.

The second reason I didn't write on the blog very much was because the last year has not been the easiest of my life, and I wasn't sure how much of myself I wanted to put out here. I wanted to hole up inside, bake brownies and pretend that nothing was wrong. But I couldn't bring myself to pretend that nothing was wrong here, to all of you, because I knew it wasn't true and somehow that didn't seem fair.

The problem was that I didn't know how to say what I wanted to say. A lot of what I wanted to say didn't seem to fit here, didn't fit in with previous stories and posts, and I was stymied by what I thought you all came here for and what you wanted to read. And so I didn't say anything.

To be honest, for a long time, that was liberating. To not consider every meal, every event, a story or a post or something I had to share. And since I figured you all came here for restaurant reviews and pithy stories about street cats, I figured I couldn't write about the pubs in Galway or birthday cocktails at Harry's New York Bar because....that's not what this space is supposed to be about.

But this morning I woke up and realized that in not writing anything, anything at all, that I am wasting this space as a forum for writing and thinking and musing and that I was throwing away five years of online living just because I didn't know what I wanted to say right here and right now.

And honestly, I still don't exactly know what I'm going to say here. This space I'm in now is fluid and flexible and a little bit confusing, but part of me is hoping that I'll figure a few things out here, on this blog, where I'll just write what I feel and what I want and the rest be damned.

 

Having Your Cake and Eating it Too

A couple of weeks ago a summons for jury duty arrived at my parents' house for me. This was surprising to me for two main reasons: 1) I've actually never been called for jury duty, which is surprising in that I'm 29 and have spent the last decade as an adult American citizen; you would've thought I'd have been called earlier; and 2) I haven't lived at my parents' house in a decade.

It was really the second reason that made me pause. When I thought about it, not only did I realize that I have not lived in Mechanicsburg, PA in exactly 10 years, but I also have not worked there since I was 18. Strange that it took this long for them to send me a summons, when I never received one in the three years I lived as a tax-paying working adult in Philly or the one year I lived in Kansas.

The summons was for the month of October and did not specify a date or even a week I would be needed. Very easily, I went online and filled out a request for disqualification, which was granted in less than 24 hours, the reason most certainly being that I do not live in the state of PA. (I suspect that when the state says they will pay for your transportation expenses to and from court, they don't mean an $800 plane ticket.)

To be clear, I have nothing against jury duty; in fact, I think it's a privilege to serve and I am frankly aghast at how some of the most progressive, liberal Americans manage to "get out" of having to serve by lying or making up all manner of excuses. It's precisely those kinds of people I'd want to have on a jury. (The progressive, liberal kind, not the lying kind, obviously.)

It was about the time that the letter came that I made the decision to visit the US this month. This was a rather abrupt decision, completely unplanned or thought out really. After I booked the tickets, though, I realized I could spend a morning at the PA Department of Motor Vehicles getting my driver's license -- which expires on Oct. 24 -- renewed. This would work out great, I thought: I've got the jury duty summons letter as proof that I "live" in PA and can thus obtain a PA state's driver's license

(In case you're wondering, the US federal government does not issue driver's licenses; only individual states do and in order to get a state driver's license, you have to prove residence there.)

However, in the year since I have last been in the US -- when the rules to prove PA residencey were much more lax and I unfortunately forgot my social security card, a crucial part of getting a new driver's license -- the laws have changed and you now need two of the following in order to prove residency in PA:

1. Tax records;
2. Mortgage documents;
3. Lease agreements;
4. W-4 form (a form showing wages from employment);
5. Current weapons permit;
6. Current utility bills.

Let's all just do a collective "WTF?!?" on No. 5.

Now that's done, um, yeah, I don't have a single one of those things, so no driver's license for me. After Oct. 24, I will no longer be able to operate a motor vehicle anywhere in the world. That means no driving in Spain this Christmas and no driving the Aegean coast of Turkey next summer. Drats.

So I can't serve on a jury, nor can I get a driver's license.

At least I still have my passport and can vote for president.

One Morning Over Breakfast

Last week over breakfast I decided that taking yourself out to breakfast -- solo -- must be one of the world's most underrated activities. There's lots of articles about taking yourself out to lunch, or dinner, but breakfast? Simply not done. But let me tell you: it's pretty awesome.

I didn't have to fight anyone for the last tomato, and I got to eat as much cheese as I wanted, and -- this is the best part -- the bal kaymak was all mine. Bliss.

The trick to taking yourself out to breakfast, I think, is to go somewhere close to home -- no need to travel very far -- go out early, and have a great view. Now, not everyone can sit two feet from the Aegean but there are lots of other views and places just as nice in the world.

The truth is, I've come around to this city called Izmir. That's a survival mechanism of sorts, I suppose. You can't live somewhere for three years and continue to hate it. That requires too much energy, energy that could be used instead for jogging and dancing and having fun.

The trick to it is to travel. A lot. It doesn't need to be very far -- Istanbul or Foca will do. I just need to get out of Izmir at least once a month, twice if possible, to wind myself up a bit, have a good party, eat some stellar food and remind myself that the world does not begin and end with home.

Which -- let's be honest here -- isn't too bad at all.