Ballı Çerez - Turkish honey appetizer in a jar

This Turkish honey appetizer more locally known as ballı çerez (honey appetizer) in Turkey is a festive-looking jar filled with multiple appetizing, energizing, and healthy goodies such as nuts (in many varieties) and honey syrup.  Its very complexly-arranged ingredients makes this confectionery item look more like a sweet treat or a flavorful dessert in a jar than just the usual honey-in-jars you'll see elsewhere.  Yet it has the same deliciously sweet honey flavor oozing  out of the comb - but with a rich nutty taste.  To me, it's something more like those who have an appetite for candies and sweets just can't turn their backs on the moment they'll see it... and just can't let go of it once they taste it!

Pirasali Borek, Turkish Leeks-Filled Puff Pastry

Mondays in the place I live in are usually the best time to shop for fresh produce such as fruits and vegetables that come straight from the farmers’ garden as well as fish, yogurts, cheese of every variety and everything else that’s not just food. This happens every week in our mahalle where an outdoor street market is often held on this particular day which we traditionally call açık pazar or open market. Almost every mahalle in Istanbul has it, though as I've said earlier the open markets in every town or city are scheduled differently at a particular day every week.

Back to my Turkish food adventure

Its been a long time.  It really is... since I last posted an article in this blog. 

Yet its not that I have already forgotten that this blog has ever existed.  Its just that I have been really very busy for the past several months.  So when I take a look back at my blog recently, I realized that I really missed out a lot of things.  Oh my, I am probably one of the worst bloggers on the web.  Yes, its because I've been gone for quite a while and it looks to me that I’m more of a seasonal blogger (of some sort, if there  is any) than a regular one.

Well, that doesn't really matter so much now that I'm back.  For now, all I know is that I really, truly miss posting anything here that concerns food... and more specifically Turkish food.  And even though I haven’t been hanging around here (in my blog) for so long, that doesn’t really mean that I've already put an end to my quest for Turkish food.  No, no, no… I never had, and I never will.  In fact, the adventure continues.

So here I am… back to my Turkish food adventure!

And this time, I'll make sure that I'll be regularly posting not just anything about food, but also about people and places in Turkey.  I am also renewing the look of my webpage to make it more of a food-e-licious blog with a just a few changes or revisions (such as adding some more useful pages, links, etc.) to make it more lively, more informative, and more useful to those people who are in the same quest as I do - and that is, to taste and explore the many varieties of Turkish cuisine.

So my dear readers, see you around.  Görüşmek üzere!