Turkish delights

You know you're in a really great country when your tummy loves the local food and doesn't yearn at all for KFC, Burger King or McDonald's. For me, this great place was Turkey.

I love Turkish food. Turkey was the only country where I never once stepped into a burger or pizza joint and never felt the need to look for a Thai, Indian or Chinese restaurant. These fall under the category of 'food which is familiar to me' - anything with noodles or rice, which I usually seek out after a few days.

So what is it about Turkish food then?

Let's begin with breakfast. The basics are bread, cheese, salami, olives and a cup of strong coffee. I was lucky and happened to pick a hotel which had a pretty generous breakfast with some extras thrown in, like goat's cheese, cereal, three types of bread and five varieties of olives. My favourite were the boiled eggs with paprika sprinkled on top.

Lunch and dinner in Turkey are wonderful affairs. There's nothing like a succulent, freshly grilled kebab with a crunchy salad on the side. That's another thing I like about Turkish food- the main ingredient may be meat, but it's always eaten with lots of vegetables. The aubergines, carrots, pickles and tomatoes aren't included just to add colour.

Grilled chicken with rice and salad

Kebab with vegetables and a dollop of yoghurt

I'm not a big fan of desserts or sweet stuff in general but I knew I had to have authentic baklava once I arrived. I prefer baklava to lokum or Turkish delight, which can get a bit 'too much' and cloying after a while.

I love baklava for its simplicity. Those nice, crisp layers with crushed nuts in between, all drenched in honey. Yum.

Don't wait to eat baklava after dinner at a restaurant- make it an event in itself. There was a little cafe near my hotel in Sultanahmet which I stopped at a couple of times after breakfast just to have a plate of baklava and some tea.

Keep an eye out for Istanbul's bakeries. There are dozens all over the city and they sell a huge variety of baklava filled with pistachios, almonds, walnuts and chocolate.

Unless you order a small plate for dessert at a restaurant, baklava is sold according to weight. This is good, because it means that you can buy different varieties to make up 1 kilogramme, or however much you want.

If you're thinking of bringing some back home with you, buy it a day before you leave and ask the bakery to pack it well. Your precious baklava should last more than a week after you reach home.

Let's talk about food

I live to eat. Who doesn't?

When you're on the road, (quite possibly) broke and starving, looking for a decent meal can either be a pleasure or drive you crazy. Meals always become more memorable when you're away, so this is a list of the worst and best stuff I've eaten on my travels:

1- Worst meal ever: 
Spaghetti bolognaise at a cafe in Rome. Not home-cooked but one of those processed instant meals sold in microwavable containers. Not only was it expensive and over-heated, it tasted absolutely foul and the waiter didn't even have the decency to serve it on a plate- it was left in its plastic container.

2- Best meals:

There've been so many so this is a long list:

- bagels and pumpkin soup in Christchurch, New Zealand, in winter

- chicken briyani at the Everest Club in Hong Kong- after pots and pots of instant noodles, this was the most amazing meal I'd had in days

- roast lamb in Dunedin, New Zealand - how can you NOT eat lamb in NZ?

- chettinad meen varuval (spicy fried fish) in Chennai, India

- the most juicy, succulent burgers ever at a roadside cafe in Sausalito, California, USA

- tuna kimchee noodles in Seoul, South Korea, at a restaurant in the Posco Building

3- Most memorable (for the right reasons): 

a) fried rice at a Thai restaurant in Christchurch: it was winter, I was starving and was dying for some rice. I found this little Thai place near my hostel by accident and I asked the lady to make the fried rice really hot. She said, 'White man hot or Asian hot?' and I said, 'Asian extra hot', and she laughed and went into the kitchen. The nasi goreng cili padi (chili fried rice) that she brought out ten minutes later was amazing.

b) dinner at the Muslim quarter, Xi'an, China: once again, it was winter. Sat by a roadside restaurant, ordered some shashlik (lamb kebabs) nd got chatted up by one of the guys working there. His English was bad and my Mandarin was crappy so I used my phrasebook most of the time. He ended up taking me on a tour of the city.

c) dinner at the Dead Fish Bar, Siem Reap. The green curry is excellent!

d) Ice-cream in Venice, Italy: we'd been walking for hours around the city, looking for this elusive gelato parlour which apparently had the best ice-cream in Venice. Just when I was ready to push my travel companion into the canal out of frustration, we turned a corner and there it was, this famous ice-cream place. We each ordered TEN scoops of various flavours, found a nice spot by the canal and finished our ice-cream in silence.

4- Most memorable (for the wrong reasons): 

Indomie (instant noodles) in Greymouth, New Zealand, about seven years ago: I'd booked into the Hairy Lemon Backpackers the night before (don't EVER stay there by the way, it's the worst place I've ever stayed at) and to my surprise, found Indomie at a convenience store. I bought the noodles immediately and dashed back to the Hairy Lemon.

I was stupid enough to book myself into a place which had a kitchen that was absolutely filthy, with a kettle that had rat droppings inside it, and because I was really really stupid, was too lazy to find another hotel. So what did I do? I went upstairs, avoided the chap at the stairs who was staring at me, went to my room and put the noodles into a bowl. I then filled the bowl with water and put the bowl, noodles and all, on top of the heater and waited for the water to get hot, in order to cook the aforementioned noodles.

I waited. And waited. And waited.

OF COURSE the water didn't boil, so what did I do? It was dark outside, there were strange men hanging around the lobby and I was starving. So I ate the noodles just like that, soaked in cold water. Dinner was eaten in silence.

I said goodbye to the Hairy Lemon and its scary kitchen and left Greymouth first thing in the morning.