Yogurt Soup

It sounds disgusting, I know. But it defied all my expectations: I thought it would taste awful, it didn't; I thought it would be a cold soup, it isn't.

With a fridge full of yogurt, I had to do more than eat a bowl of it with lunch and dinner every day. And even my daily smoothie wasn't making enough of a dent in my supply. Enter yogurt soup: this tart, tangy soup has a je ne sais quoi aspect that I've been searching for since I ate a creamy borscht on a Polish train from Berlin to Krakow in 1995. I'm not kidding. I've been searching for that balance of sour and salty for fifteen years, without success. Until now.

Yogurt Soup:

1/2 c. rice or other grain (barley or wheat berries are nice)

2 c. yogurt

1 egg

salt

2 tbsp. flour

dried peppermint, heat (paprika or red pepper flakes; I'm using Turkish pul biber, which is spicy dried red pepper)

Rinse the rice and simmer in approx. 4-5 cups of water until done.

Meanwhile, in a small bowl, whisk the egg and add salt -- perhaps 2 tsp to start; you really need to adjust to taste, but this soup wants salt! Add the flour and mix in. Add the yogurt and mix it in too.

Take a tbsp. of the boiling rice water and add to the yogurt mixture, stirring vigorously; repeat; repeat again. This gently warms the yogurt and egg so that neither curdle. Now add the whole shebang into the simmering pot; slowly simmer, stirring, for 10-15 minutes.

Top with mint and dried red pepper; squeeze lemon into each bowl as you serve if you like -- I don't find it necessary.

Afiyet olsun! (Bon appetit!)

Yogurt

Four years, five pounds and one baby ago, I put on a pair of şalvar, covered my hair with a scarf to keep it clean and out of my face, and milked a cow. Or rather, tried to. I never did manage to squeeze a drop of milk out of that animal's stubborn teats, but the day remains a highlight of my early months in Turkey -- I wasn't working and had no stress or responsibilities; I could focus entirely on ''the experience,'' ''the adventure'' of my new expat life.

Recently, I found the pictures from that day. The first thing I thought upon seeing them was how skinny I used to be! No matter how carefully I eat, life here has just that much more oil and unrefined carbs, and no opportunity to walk anywhere. But that's beside the point. Looking at the four photos taken that afternoon transported me back to that village house and garden, whose residents have recently reentered our lives, incidentally, and to the wonderful truly alive feeling I had that day.

It's also appropriate that I should have stumbled upon those photos just now, because Murat and his wife recently gave us a huge bucket of yogurt. I don't know how many kilograms the silver bucket held, but it was darn heavy, and every time I put it back on its shelf in the fridge, I worried the shelf would break! The yogurt lasted two weeks, and we needed to eat a little every single day in order to get through the whole lot. But it was the best yogurt I've ever eaten, so that wasn't difficult. It was so sweet and creamy, I even asked if they'd put sugar in it! (''Just milk,'' they promised ... although I've heard that before!)

And the best part? It's from the milk of the very same cow I milked four years ago!

Out-of-Stock

I am completely annoyed by how often shops in Turkey, particularly grocery stores, run out of a certain product. You'd think that they could anticipate the event and reorder when stock runs low. I feel a little forgiving when it's a small independent shop, who may not have the money to be stocking a lot in advance, and whose owner certainly doesn't have any real retail training. But when major chains, Turkish and foreign, are regularly out of something I've made a special trip to buy, it drives me crazy.

My local supermarket, Carrefour, only seems to carry Sütaş brand light yogurt half the week. But since it is the only brand of yogurt whose non-fat version tastes any good, I refuse to settle for another brand, and often go home empty-handed. My local Carrefour doesn't even sell the müsli or bread I like, and has only a very limited selection of real fruit juice, but that's a topic for another blog post. For those items, I often go to Metro Grossmarkt in a neighbouring city thirty kilometres away.

I am smarter than to make a speacial trip just to Metro, and usually combine it with other errands, stopping in at Metro on my way past. But that doesn't make me any less annoyed when I can't find what I'm looking for. After all, it's a German company, and its employees have presumably been trained well. Last week there were several items on my list that I couldn't find, including Hahne müsli, the only musli available here that is reasonably priced and doesn't have an exorbitant sugar content. A stock clerk informed me that there had been a sale on the item the previous week, and so they'd sold out. Is that an excuse? I thought to myself, outraged.

And to add salt to my wounds, when I complained to a manager, who then investigated my müsli crisis, I was informed that according to the computer, there was indeed more müsli somewhere in the store, but that it had been misplaced and was sitting on a skid somewhere high up on a shelf, and needed to be found.

The no-sugar-added fruit juices I like were likewise out of stock that day, and rather than settle for a sugary variety, I bought none.

If I seem unusually picky, might I defend myself by explaining the incredible joy I felt when I finally found these favourite grocery items of mine in the first place. In the case of the yogurt, I taste-tested a different brand's fat-free variety every week, deeming them all absolutely awful, before discovering Sütaş' delicious, creamy, you'd-never-guess-it-was-low-fat yogurt. And with the müsli, I went from one extreme -- no müsli -- to buying extremely expensive 150-gram boxes of sweetened Turkish varieties, which would be empty after three breakfasts, it seemed. And I'd gone over two years without drinking any juice at all, stubbornly refusing to drink the admittedly delicious sour cherry and other flavoured 'nectars' which contained no more than 20% real juice and lots of added sugar, and fondly reminiscing about my freezer back in Toronto, which had always been full of tins of Minute Maid frozen pure orange juice -- with pulp and added calcium. So the discovery of new products I truly loved was so sweet, that the disappointment of not being able to find them is all the greater.