I'm sitting in Topkapi Palace. From there, I can hear the strains of a Turkish marching band outside and, later in the afternoon, the call to prayer from a mosque next door.
This isn't Turkey, though, it's the Orange County Fair and Event Center in Costa Mesa, transformed for the Anatolian Cultures & Food Festival. The four-day event was an opportunity to experience everything Turkish.
The entire site, including the food stands (at top), had been set up to recreate Turkish architecture and historic sites. The food wasn't simulated, though. It was the real thing, some of it straight from Turkey.
These women, rolling out the dough for flatbreads, could have been working and gossiping in some Turkish village.
You could find meat such as this, cooked on a vertical skewer, almost anywhere in Turkey.
These huge containers hold a popular street food called tantuni. The spiced, diced meat is eaten wrapped in a flat bread called lavas.
Gaziantep, considered the culinary center of Turkey, sent this man to make katmer, a package of sheer dough filled with pistachios, thick cream and sugar. It sold out so quickly that by the time I tried to buy some, it was gone. In Turkey, newlyweds eat this alluring pastry at their first breakfast to represent the sweetness they hope to find in their marriage.
Gaziantep is renowned for baklava (above), some of it colored green with pistachios. The Gaziantep booth offered little boxes with individual bites of the famous baklava of Imam Cagdas, a restaurant in Gaziantep, and sold packages of intensely flavored local pistachios.
Komagene, a Turkish chain that as yet has no American outlet, served spicy, sweet chee kufta in a romaine leaf (above). This meatless tartare, composed of bulgur ground with walnuts, almonds and many seasonings, could be a big seller here.
Another delicious bulgur dish was kisir, sometimes called Turkish tabbouleh.
Food columnist and cookbook author Faye Levy (Feast from the Mideast) gave an overview of Anatolian cuisine in an area set aside for talks and cooking demonstrations.
Vegetables cooked in olive oil is a menu category in Turkey, she said, and a specialty of Izmir, where the cuisine is influenced by Greece. The Veggieland stall served only such vegetables, among them stuffed eggplants (above) and green beans with tomatoes.
Manti, or Turkish ravioli, showed off the fine handwork of Turkish cooks. The tiny morsels of meat-stuffed pasta were topped with tomato sauce and yogurt.
Baklava wasn't the only sweet. Another was lokma (above), fried dough balls to munch on with tea.
Coconut-coated carrot balls were composed of pureed carrots mixed with crushed cookies, sugar, cinnamon and walnuts.
Other desserts included bread kataifi, small syrup-soaked semolina cakes called sekerpare and Noah's pudding, a mixture of barley, rice, beans, dried fruits, walnuts and coconut.
Cones of "sticky" ice cream from Maras attracted long lines of customers. Also popular were snow cones flavored with Turkish style syrups (above).
Some 400 volunteers worked for two weeks to set up the festival, which included music performances, folk dances and displays of Turkish arts and crafts. If you missed it, that's a shame. But you can still find information on Turkish cuisine and recipes on the festival website.
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