Turkish Breakfast

Welcome to the next phase in our lives and this blog. I'm going to spend the rest of this week blogging about the crafty things we did for our wedding, and then I'll stop talking about it unless you all ask for more. Because this isn't a wedding blog. (If you need one of those, go here.) As mentioned previously, our first year of marriage has flown right by, and we're eating up the last bit of it tonight with a picnic on the beach where we exchanged our vows last summer. We're having Turkish breakfast, which you might have noticed on the menu post yesterday. Julia said I should explain what the hell that is a little bit better, so here goes. Two years ago, Julia had the amazing opportunity to travel to Turkey for a show she stage managed. She was gone for a week, and when she got home, she was obsessed with what they were fed for the first meal of each day. I wasn't there, but here's how I envision it. In a grand, open-air room, a long table overflows with the yummiest things artfully arranged on antique metal serving trays.* On these lovely dishes one finds warm, crusty, buttery bread; a generous assortment of fine cheeses**; fresh tomatoes and cucumbers; some herbs, maybe oregano or dill; and ripe native olives. There are, perhaps, some salads and salamis to choose from as well. You fill a plate with an assortment of these and lounge on overstuffed floor pillows next to a low table. The melody of a sitar player drifts in from the street below. A crisp Mediterranean breeze dances through an open window, swirling the aroma of dark, bold Turkish coffee around your head...*** Oh sorry. Got a little lost there. When we do it at home, it doesn't have quite the same ambiance, but it is, nevertheless, oh so delicious. We slice a loaf of crusty bread, butter it, and warm it up. And then we stack up tomatoes, cucumber, cheese (we like Dubliner or a good aged cheddar particularly; feta is also lovely), and whatever fresh herbs we have, and sometimes a good salami, and then we eat it like an open-faced sandwich. And Julia eats olives with it, if I remember to buy them. Quick and easy to prepare (unless you're making the bread from scratch like I'm doing right now) yet surprisingly filling, Turkish breakfast can also be a great lunch or dinner and it travels pretty well too. Go get yourself some! *Honey, if it was paper plates and catering trays, please, for the love, do not ever tell me so. **Really, I'm completely sold once you mention the cheese. ***Seriously, baby, if it wasn't as exotic and romantic and glorious as all this, I repeat, DO NOT EVER TELL ME SO.