EuroLIfe: Day 223

As you may have noticed, it's been a while since Michael has written. Word on the street says that he's going to write a post tomorrow on the Lycean Way (and the Lyceans themselves...sort of a buy one get one free post!) We've been rather negligent of late, though, so I thought I'd at least do a quick post today.

In addition to many outdoor adventures, cultural encounters, and other edifying experiences that comprised our Turkey vacation, we also did a lot of eating. Not just regular old eating, either...we ate like royalty. Every morning and evening, we would report to the beautiful dining room where we found an enormous variety of freshly made treats. Breakfast was good, but dinner was incredible. (We had no idea how amazing Turkish food is!) We started the evening with the cold appetizers--including delicious grilled vegetables, hummus, stuffed peppers, stuffed grape leaves, various spreads with fresh breads...and it goes on and on. There was a large spread of fresh cheeses as well, and more varieties of olives than I have ever seen. (Not my cup of tea, but still impressive!)

After that, we would go for the main courses...but again, there were usually too many to choose from! They were mostly cooked right in the dining room, too, so you could simply walk up to the man grilling the fish, for example, and wait for him to plop one on your plate! There was always a fish option, and a number of lamb dishes, and pasta dishes, some chicken or other, and about a dozen (honestly) side dishes. Once again, it wasn't just that there was a lot of food, but that the food was all of the quality that you would expect at a restaurant at which we couldn't ordinarily afford to eat :)

And finally--and I'm sure you all saw this coming--there was the dessert. Now this was really a problem. I had to take pictures. There were no fewer than 30 desserts every evening. Each one of them looked handmade and, quite frankly, irresistible. I tried to take a picture of the dessert table and couldn't fit it all in one photo...that should tell you something! So here are TWO photos of the dessert choices with which we were confronted every evening.















As you can imagine, the pictures don't do justice to the selection. The very first evening, I stood at the dessert table for a few minutes just paralyzed. I had absolutely no idea how to proceed. In the end, I resisted about 80% of what I really (really) wanted to try, and was rather proud of myself until I saw that I had 7 desserts on my plate. Now, they were little desserts--sized for sampling, so to speak--but 7 desserts is 7 desserts, and even I can admit that that's probably too many.

One thing I discovered in Turkey: I had never had a decent piece of baklava! I thought I had, but once I tried the real deal I saw what I had been missing. That was one of the real dessert highlights--that and the various fruit tarts on homemade butter crusts...and, of course, the chocolate desserts were not bad either :)


These last two pictures are our dessert plates one evening. I told Michael that we could only take the pictures if we didn't tell anyone whose plate was whose. He readily agreed and said with a smile "I'm sure nobody will ever guess." Humph.