Spicy Cockroach

Nearly lunchtime, so I was on the prowl for something to eat. I opened the fridge door.
Hmmm. A tub of margarine, half a tub of yoghurt .... that was all, if you ignore the almost empty mayonnaise jar in the door.

Peter was standing at the kitchen bench, killing ants one by one. These are our first Turkish ants and there aren't very many of them - not like when you get ants in the kitchen in Australia!

So, as usual, we put on our coats and shoes and headed down the street for something to eat. Looking for something different, something we haven't tried yet.

At each restaurant door a man was calling "Buyurun! Buyurun!" trying to draw us in. So we wandered slowly past keeping just out of their reach. Many restaurants have one or two meaty kebabs turning in the window near the door, and an attendant slicing off slivers with a huge knife. The one near the railway station has vegetables embedded with the meat and a strong aroma of curry which is almost impossible to resist.

In another window there is a man who seems to be cooking mince - like dry-frying fine mince on a large shiny hot-plate, constantly mixing it with two metal spatulas. Just inside the door there is a hot pan full of mussels in their shells. We have often seen roadside sellers with pans full of mussels and lemon wedges - it seems like a very doubtful indulgence, a good way to get food poisoning. But when we thought about that it seems very unlikely, Turkish people are very fussy about cleanliness and health. So then someone has told us that these things are not just mussels, but cooked and seasoned mussels mixed with rice and returned to their shells for presentation. So here's something we haven't tried yet.

It was obviously time to try the mussels, and maybe that squishy mince stuff too. We wandered in - the restaurant is very narrow, just a table on each side and an aisle in the middle, but very long. Down the back there are tables with soft comfy bench chairs. We asked the 'buyurun' (welcome) man about the squishy stuff - "Bu ne?" (what's this?) and he told us "cockroach".

Well, that's what it sounded like. Of course, if we were still in China it really would be cockroaches, probably on a stick. But this was actually kokoreç.

So we tried some of the mussels - they were really delicious, stuffed back into the shell with seasoned cooked rice, and drizzled with fresh lemon juice.

And then we also had some of the cockroach stuff. It was really spicy. I had to drink some ayran - salty yoghurt drink - to stop my mouth burning too much. It was served with fresh bread - like everything - and there was a bowl of pickled peppers on the table to add to it ... but I had enough spice.

And then, today, I decided to look it up on the internet. As it says in Wikipedia:
"Kokoreç is a Turkish dish made of seasoned, skewered lamb intestines."

Oh. OK.