Apricots and Thomas

There are many, many fruit trees here. And lately we've seen people under them with plastic bags picking up loads of fruit - mainly apricots are on offer from the trees right now. So last week we stopped under a apricot tree which had not yet been stripped bare and shook some branches and plucked a bit to get nearly 2 kilos of apricots! What fun! They are gorgeous! The bread is there for scale. The bread was yummy too and a loaf of nice fresh bread is only .45 YTL. I know that I put the prices of things up often but I think it is good to get an idea of the price of things here for perspective. I think bread everywhere should be less than 50 cents a loaf! On the other hand, an imported magazine here like British Vogue is 15YTL and the American Vogue is 22YTL. At least the Economist puts their own prices on the magazine relative to the markets and currencies where it’s sold so it is only about 5YTL.

I digress. Here are the apricots.



It was a boatload of fruit so we did two things. I used the seasonal crumble recipe from the rebar modern food cookbook to inspire me and made an apricot crumble. A few weeks ago I made one with peaches and a hazlenut/oatmeal topping but this crumble was just an oatmeal topping with the apricot filling. Because we don't have measuring cups/spoons, nor can I figure out what cornstarch is here (or if there is such a thing) I use the recipe more as a guide. Typically, I follow recipes to a T but it has been good for me to read them as guidelines and then do whatever makes the most sense given our kitchen (don't forget we have a gas oven with 3 settings so none of this preheating to 350 degrees business!) and resources. The crumble was excellent - not too sweet. Also, we cooked the rest of the apricots and reduced them to put in the freezer to make good things later like apricot glazed chicken.

In addition to visits from the apricot fairy, we also get visits from Thomas The Cat from time to time. We call him Thomas because he sort of has the colors and markings of Tom from Tom and Jerry (although I know Tom is really gray). Thomas is our Lojaman's cat. Every Lojman (apartment block) seems to have one and Thomas is ours. He likes to come in for some milk and then explore the apartment a bit before heading out again.





Turkish lesson:
(I really could use a Turkish keyboard for this because I am missing the "s" and "c" with the squiggle below and the "o" and "u" with the two dots and the "g" with the smile above it)
black = kara
white = bayez
cat = kide
ve = and

Thomas = kara ve bayez kide :)