The thing I have adopted most readily from my wife's Turkish Culture (besides my wife herself) is the Turkish style breakfast that I eat most mornings nowadays. Below is a how-to presentation that I was originally intending to use for an audition, as part of the application process to teach for Kaplan Test Prep. The directions are, as is indicated by the title, particular to the Tarzana, CA studio apartment where my wife and I lived for a year and a half.
The first thing you need, of course, is ingredients. For the meat: Sucuk (pronounced sue-jook). Not too hard to find as long as you have some kind of Middle-Eastern market available to you. Sucuk is dried beef sausage, delicious. You need eggs, of course. For the salad, Persian cucumbers and vine-ripened tomatoes. Good toasting bread is necessary, as is butter, lemon juice and of course, olive oil.
I find the best way to do the sucuk is to peel the paper off the whole sausage, slice it into silver-dollar sized pieces, about 8 per person, and place them in a small frying pan over extremely low heat. The sucuk will cook slowly as everything else is going on. Drizzle olive oil over the sausage slices and place a saucepan lid over them. The sucuk releases delicious spiced oil as it heats up, which mixes with the olive oil and makes an amazing dip for the toast later on. Turn up the heat on the sucuk at the last minute so that you can see the oil sizzle. Bring the frying pan to the table and set on some kind of coaster so that you can serve the meat directly, hot, to the plates.
For the salad, simply peel the cucumbers and slice them into little discs, like the sausage. Wash and dice the tomatoes and place all the veggies in a bowl. Drizzle the vegetables with olive oil and lemon juice. Toss just before serving.
Eggs are left to personal preference, but I think over-easy or sunny side up is best in keeping with the Mediterranean spirit of the meal. Like many cultures of the region, the more delicious spreads and oils and gooey yolk-like substances you have around to dip your bread in, the better. I cook my eggs after putting the lid on the sucuk.
Since the two hot plates in my kitchen fully load the local circuit on their own, I wait until the sucuk is cooked and then turn off the power to that hot plate before toasting my bread. Otherwise 2 hot plates and the toaster oven together will trip the surge protector. Butter that bread, put it on the plate with your eggs, serve sucuk and salad at the table. Afiyetolsun! - (Bon Appetit in Turkish)
