Sandra making burek. Image courtesy of superfora.wordpress.com.

The internet is a great source for all things foodie, and we’re constantly bookmarking, starring, and emailing intriguing recipes, food porn, and inspiration. Here’s a selection of clippings we think are worth checking out.

A savoury Turkish pastry I often enjoyed at breakfast during my trip to Turkey was called börek. Happiness was me when I saw that my lovely friend Sandra over at Superfora provided the recipe for the Croatian cousin, burek.

Here in Vancouver, there’s a great Lebanese-inspired restaurant, Nuba, that has a popular fried cauliflower dish called Najib’s Special. This dish from Melissa Clark’s new cookbook, Cook This Now, reminds me of that dish and how amazing cauliflower can become with the right direction.

This hot raisin quickbread sounds too easy and too much like a poor man’s scone too ignore. (Because I’m not rich, and I love cinnamon-y scones!)

Autumn comfort food doesn’t always have to mean death to your waistline. Soothe your carb cravings with a polenta and swiss chard bake.

It’s still pumpkin season: What happens when you take the classic Chilean street snack, a sopapilla, and cross it with pumpkin cheesecake? Gourd greatness.

Today’s Special: Roast turkey on a roll, Torrisi Italian Specialties
Ah, New York. It’s my favourite place to be. And although I missed out on a traditional Thanksgiving meal, it’s my favourite place to be during my favourite long weekend. Anything you might have heard about autumn in New York is true, but add that a July-like heat wave is possible. I could hardly believe my luck.
To offset my lack of a proper turkey and fixings meal, I made sure to still have some gobbler while in the Big Apple. First, I went for Henry Public‘s amazing turkey leg sandwich and then, to the roast turkey at Torrisi Italian Specialties. Substituting their fresh ricotta for the mayo, it was hard to believe at first that a white roll, with lettuce, tomato and “spicy sauce” atop herb-roasted breast meat would yield one of the best sandwiches I’ve ever had. But on second thought, it wasn’t. There was something magical about that sauce. And the meat itself… it doesn’t happen very often where I stop to think about how delicious the herbs are on a piece of meat. Who cares that it was breast meat? It was juicy and flavourful and perfect for Thanksgiving weekend. Worth the hype. Worth the wait.

I must mention again that it was like 25 above, and I ate it on a park bench. I heart NY.

Torrisi Italian Specialties
Mulberry & Prince, New York City

It should come as no surprise to some of you, that dessert was also a highlight of my day while in Turkey. I always have room. And of course, because it’s vacation, I had extra room.

Growing up with Big Turk as a chocolate bar reality, Turkish Delight, or lokum, never held much appeal, even with me being a jelly candy kind of girl. Along with apple tea and carpets, you’re never very far in Turkey from someone wanting to sell you lokum. When something is everywhere, there is usually lots of bad. But when you do find the good stuff, you’re hooked.  Kind of like with baklava. A lot of Turkish sweets are dripping in honey and simple syrup. And as I find with a lot of baklava here, more drippings are used to hide bad dough handling.  Good dough handling, where the layers almost move from soft and rich to airy and crisp, results in the kind of baklava that entices you to eat piece after piece after piece…

Dried fruit was my sweet snack of choice. The unsulfured apricots were my favourite, but I also made my way through bags of black plums, yellow plums, cherries and black mulberries.

Pudding. Cream chose wisely when she placed Turkey under her finger on a map. This culture of pudding lovers was a perfect match for this all-things-creamy loving fool. Firin sütlaç is Turkish rice pudding and it always comes cold with a burnt top.  Here, rice is a thickener rather than a star, so the grains are few and far between.

I would walk by the dessert shops and be mesmerized by all the puddings and their many colours. A banana pudding with tahini and grape molasses was particularly memorable given the unparticular setting of my hotel. When on the Cesme peninsula, I had the opportunity to fall head over with the flavour of mastic. Cookies, lokum, sugar-free gum. I loved it in all forms. Sakizli muhallebi with a topping of vanilla ice cream during my last night in Alacati made a particularly good impression.

The underdog: tavuk gögsü kazandibi. Burnt bottom chicken breast pudding. That’s right, chicken breast. A pudding made with finely shredded chicken breast to thicken it up. The first taste is a leap of faith, even when you’ve got some vanilla ice cream in there to mask any potential ick factor. No ick. All mmmmmmmmm…

You see the fibres. You know it’s chicken. But the only thing going through your mind is that it’s quite possible you’ll need another order because you’ve developed a strong affinity for it. It’s a thick thick thick vanilla pudding with an almost marshmallow-like texture that’s then accented with the extra sweetness that comes from being at the bottom of the pot.

Ciya Sofrasi has been written up by more than one author as being one of the best restaurants in Istanbul. I went twice. As much as I loved the starters and mains, I also went back because I wanted to try more of the desserts. The first go, I had kerebic, which is a semolina cookie/ball filled with pistachios. Not really crispy and not really soft, you use your fork to break into a wonderful green middle. It’s served alongside a sweet white foam that aids in digestion. The host described it in broken English as sort of being like marshmallow without the marsh. Whatever. It tasted delicious, especially when washed down with oregano tea.

The candied veg intrigued me to no end, and I had to try a little bit of both the candied eggplant and pumpkin… and the special pistachio baklava filled with cream. So sweet and chewy those veg were that I could only handle a few bites.  You can see kaymak makes an appearance, as it did above, atop the ekmek kadayif (Turkish bread pudding) on that mixed plate of baklava. Are you surprised that I couldn’t escape its rich, creamy grip?

I’ve been back from Turkey almost two weeks now and I’m still in vacation withdrawal. I miss walking down unfamiliar streets, having my daily soundtrack be an unknown language and every face being someone completely new. My stomach is also in withdrawal, especially as my vacation eating is usually double the caloric value of my everyday eating. Walking everywhere means my skinny jeans still fit, but now I unfortunately feel like I’m on a diet.

Breakfast turned out to be one of the most unexpectedly delicious occasions while there, and whether on my own or eating the free hotel spread, I was never disappointed. Especially because I made sure to fill up as much as I could to fuel my feet for most of the day.  That means trying everything.

First and foremost, you don’t drink coffee with breakfast. The rich, sweet joy that is Turkish coffee happens after. During your meal (and for any other moment of the day for that matter), you drink tea. Strong, black tea in little glass cups. With sugar. As a change of pace one day, I also tried the more wintry drink of salep.

All meals come with bread. All types of bread. From basic French to fluffy pita, it’s always fresh and always ready to accompany the many Turkish treats that come at breakfast. Oh and simit often appears, that sesame not-quite-a-bagel baked good. Simit vendors can be found on every corner and they call out to you when you have hunger pains in the afternoon. But, be warned. A simit sitting too long is a simit only worth looking at. I learned my lesson after two bites and vowed to seek out one at a bakery to check the difference. There was a huge one, and it’s left me wondering what I ever saw in bagels.

For the savoury bites, you’ve got olives, tomatoes, cucumber, pastirma and a basic white cheese called peynir. A favoured egg dish is called menemen, which is scrambled eggs with tomatoes, peppers and spices served in the hot dish it is cooked in.  Always slightly runny, menemen is perfect for dragging some fresh bread through. A place I frequented regularly in Istanbul specializes in the breakfast foods of the Turkish province of Van. Their “Van Breakfast Plate” came with, as you can see, five different cheeses, Turkish cacik (tzatziki) and bal kaymak.

Bal kaymak. Sometimes I think I went to Turkey just to eat bal kaymak, or honey and clotted cream. Thicker than the Devonshire cream we’re familiar with here, Turkish clotted cream thickly spread over bread and then drizzled with honey is what I want to eat for my last meal. That fat and sugar were the magic ingredients for keep me going and going and going all day on the streets of busy Istanbul. When I think about it now and realize I might never have it again, I start to well up a little. One proprietor even showed me camera phone pictures of the buffalo where the cream came from the day before. LE sigh.

For the sweet side of breakfast, you had your choice of jams and honeys, fruit and maybe some cake. At one favourite hotel, the homemade jams put every place EVER to shame. That’s 15 in the picture, but there were four more “special” ones that you got to sample on one of your mornings. The lavender still lingers on my tongue when I think *really* hard.

Menemen and Bal Kaymak

Strong tea, crusty bread, white butter and bal kaymak.

OMG. The most amazing simit.

Jam selections don't get better than this.

Salep

A little bit of liquid perfection.