Muhlama
Ingredients:
1 1/2 cup grated Kashar cheese
1 1/2 cup string cheese
1 tsp cheese in a skin (Turkish 'tulum peyniri')
2 tbsp corn flour
2 tbsp butter
1 cup water

Preparation:
Brown the corn flour first in a skillet in half the butter. Add the string cheese and the Kashar. Add a cup of water to the mixture and continue stirring. Then add the rest of the cheese and butter. When the cheese mixture has reached the consistency of a paste, pour it over the melted butter in the skillet. Serve piping hot.

During the month of Ramazan in particular, dishes made of dough grace the table both at breakfast and at the evening meal. The famous Black Sea 'pide' or flat bread is ubiquitous in Turkey throughout the month. Pide is made all over Turkey, but the best is that made with Black Sea butter, cheese and 'kavurma'.

What is interesting here is that in a region where wheat is not widely grown, bread-baking is nevertheless a highly developed art. Even if the anchovy's indisputable domination of the cuisine casts a bit of a shadow over its other specialties, Black Sea pide, like Italian pizza, is certainly going to find a place in world cuisines in the years ahead.
http://www.thy.com/en-INT/corporate/skylife/article.aspx?mkl=521

Kastamonu: it’s Wednesday and market day in Kastamonu. And to come from a big city, Istanbul for instance, and find yourself in a market in Kastamonu means you’re going to be asking, ‘What is this?’, at every step. Many of the things grown in this city, which exported walnuts and almonds to Rome in its day, are unfamiliar to me. ‘üryani eriği’, for example, a kind of plum grown only in Kastamonu. “You won’t find these any place except Kastamonu,” says the woman vendor. Another is ‘siyez’ bulghur, a species of wheat first grown at the dawn of agriculture. It existed in 10,000 B.C., and it still exists today. It doesn’t matter if you buy it or not, the women will still tell you the story: “After the harvest we boil it up in a big cauldron. Then we dry it and finally we husk it in a water mill.” Lined up at counters side by side, the women are selling ‘pestil’ (sheets of dried fruit pulp) made from ‘üryan’ plums. And so much more: sour apple cider, whole wheat flour ground in a water mill, Taşköprü garlic, flax seed, yoghurt strained through a gauze bag, Tosya rice…


http://www.thy.com/en-INT/corporate/skylife/article.aspx?mkl=521

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XoqKpdWGmbA

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IWjTn_GwCqU

Müjde, well said! Aferin !

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oNuEdiBYHQI

http://www.business-with-turkey.com/tourist-guide/tavukgz.shtml

thanks, Vineyard! I just listened to 'Silence Of Anatolia' 'Obstinacy' and "Silk Road"

No modern Turkish musician enjoys a higher international profile than the pianist-composer Fazil Say, whose Warner CDs I welcomed in Cornucopia 27. In an introductory essay to a new Naïve release of his compositions, René Koering sees him as “a winged faun... the child of a country where dream is the driving force”.

His music is an extraordinary melting-pot of sound, colour and pulse, drawing on a breadth of images and associations, from Art Tatum to Sufi trance. Each consumes the other in Dervish in Manhattan, a foot-stomping piece as electrifying as the “self-portrait” Violin Sonata or the high-adrenalin, demon-dancing Paganini Variations.

Say's Turkishness is anything but folksy. In pieces like Black Earth, Silk Road and the Two Pieces for Piano and Orchestra, he conjures up not so much the song of a people as elements of terrain. Scaling giant peaks, suggesting palaces and ruins, his bass sonorities dig deep into soil and history. His plucked piano strings, transporting the instrument from Europe to Asia, evoke remoteness and legend where spirits older than man watch over the world. His dances are the rituals of war under hot suns, impassioned music of relentless step. Unmissable

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