Baklava for Breakfast (a Foodie Update post)

That has such a nice sound to it. I couldn't resist the alliteration.

In fact I did have baklava for breakfast, which is not great nutritionally except for the nuts. I don't even like sweets for the most part, but there was this leftover baklava, see, from the weekend of partying, and last night we (my host and I) had a good dinner of leftovers, including stuffed peppers and tomatoes and a lemony cold bulghur dish (very fine bulghur, not the coarse bulghur you see more of in the U.S. -- that's a kind of Middle Eastern / North African cracked wheat, for those of you who don't know, the base for tabouli or as it is sometimes spelled, tabbouleh) and a salad and a few dolmades (stuffed vine leaves, a Greek and Turkish and general Mediterranean dish), tiny thin ones you can pop into your mouth at the beginning of a meal as opposed to big ones you have to cut with a fork. Oh, and leftover pasta from Sunday night, with little baby calamari which one of the Italian men found fresh at the local market that day. So when it came time for the leftover baklava we didn't have much room left. I did have one small piece but that was it.

I slept long and with many dreams, catching up, and by the time I got up it was lunchtime. I was due for a half-day of sleep. Yesterday a couple of French friends (the last out of town guests from the birthday crowd) and I took a ferry to "the Asian side," which means the Asian side of the Bosphorus (Istanbul and its suburbs are in both Europe in Asia, the continents divided from each other by the Bosphorus Straits, full of ships of all kinds, from tankers to fishing boats, which I see out the window from the apartment) and did some touring, so I was out most of the day. Separate post to come about that little expedition. All this to say that it was time for some kind of meal by the time I got up today and that I wasn't terribly hungry since supper was so copious. I had a clementine (tangerine) and then foraged around the fridge and there, sitting on its plate looking delicious, was the baklava. So I had another little piece, with jasmine tea. Yum.


Turks, by the way, drink tea all the time, all day. Not Turkish coffee, though you can find that pretty easily. The drink of choice is tea. I think I'll write a post on tea later on since the local version bears describing.

Today is the feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe. She was here too. Now I've got you guessing.