Food and Drink #5

There is a cheese maturing inside this goatskin - we tried some - pungent.

This neat machine peeled and sliced apples and quinces...

like so. I was surprised to find the quince sweet enough to eat raw.

Fried fish stall on the Asian shore of the Bosphorus.

Random appreciator of fried fish sandwich, found nearby.

Taksim area includes a lot of open air bars - you stand on the street, a waiter finds you and takes your order, some time later he re-appears with your drink (in this case, Turkish Raki, which I may have mentioned and which, in my humble opinion, is NOT GOOD. So much so that I distracted Bid for a moment and poured most of mine into her plastic cup... she waded through it, brave and stalwart mite), and then, some time later again, to get the money. Complicated but seems to work. Meanwhile, elderly men sell popcorn from barrows, popping the corn over a brazier of coals as they trundle. There is also a lot of smoking.*

The far-famed Turbot of Kiyikoy, in preparation in the kitchen at Hotel Edorfina.

And halfway through its destruction. Mehemet instructed us that with fish, one has "only a salad. Order fish and a salad, and then in the restaurant, they will know you are serious".

Turbot creates happiness (yes we were wildly spoiled at Hotel Endorfina - taken fishing, given the run of the kitchen AND allowed on the furniture (as with the ouzo of apology in Santorini, these things did eventually come with a price, but we managed to avoid paying it in quite the way our host may have optimistically imagined).

Ahh, fresh pomegranate juice. So wildly good, so disastrously stainy.

Cold cooked black mussels, put back inside their shells on a bed of delicious spicy rice and sold as a night snack all over Istanbul. This, my friends in aquaculture, is what we should be doing with mussels.

Bream, our last dinner together on this trip, eaten at the New Galata Restaurant, under the Galata Bridge, looking down the Golden Horn towards Asia.

Figs stuffed with walnuts - known for some reason as Turkish viagra....

I am in Changi airport as I write this, having eaten laksa (good) and durian puffs (not so good) in the city today, and finishing off my rambutans....but I seem to have lost my camera... so here endth the food and drink. But one more post under construction - the wonders of Istanbul. 

Keep watching, folks.

* Joke from Mehemet in in Kiyikoy: 

Q: who smokes more than a Turk?

A: two Turks.