It’s a major irresponsibility that I never composed a post dedicated to drooling over the culinary glories of Asia Minor. [pause to let eyes glaze over dreamily] It seems especially poignant now that it’s raining buckets here, and Istanbul is just a sun-drenched, produce-rich memory. Karl, the unstoppable documentarian, took a million pictures, and though we griped at the time, we’re now all quite grateful (Tamara nixed the bawdiest bathing suit pics; I’m trusting Peter cut the ones of me with the worst posture), and he’s nodding smugly.

First of all, let me just say that cookbook author Paula Wolfert deserves sainthood. She’s out there, in tiny villages all around the Mediterranean, talking to little old ladies and writing down their recipes before they croak and all is forgotten. She also wrote an article for Food & Wine, way back when Istanbul was just a gleam in our eyes. I cooked all the recipes by this alleged genius chef, Musa Dagdeviren, and drooled. Then Tamara was talking to the food editor of Saveur, and she was raving about the same guy and his fantastic restaurant. It’s called Ciya, on the Asian side, in the produce market of Kadikoy, and it’s the most phenomenally wonderful food I’ve eaten in years. Very simple–a cold help-yourself salad bar, then a point-to-order collection of hot stews and so on. No booze. Yummy melon and cherry drinks. The most charming waiter in the world, who brought us little extras like oregano tea. Unfortunately, the specifics are fucking lost, because I managed to leave my little notebook in a cab recently. (Why is my record-keeping life unraveling this way? First my computer, then this….) We also went back for lunch, when we had extra time to meander in the market, leading to ecstatic tastes of five kinds of honey, inside the beautiful honey shop, all wood-paneled, filled with dizzy bees, and sporting a honeycomb-pattern ceiling, as well as photo ops with heavy lifters of fish and roving geese.

We’d wanted to go to Ciya again for dinner (yes, that’s three meals in three days–so?), but we got happily waylaid at our new friend Gurhan’s, in an evening that deserves its own coverage. [pause to swoon with memory] Otherwise, we ate some intensely delicious ice cream (I think I’d mentioned before): a comedy of errors in the ordering, but we ended up with flavors none of us could complain about, even if they weren’t the ones we’d asked for. One example: the green fig ice cream. Another: banana, which was really, really just like bananas, but richer. And all the dark berries. We slurped at our spoons while transfixed with embarrassment at the flat-screen TV showing appallingly slutty Christina Aguilera videos. (Can someone, for the sake of America’s global image, reign in MTV just a tad?)

We also had some manti, these little tiny lamb dumplings covered in garlicky yogurt sauce. We had beautifully composed maqlubeh (a sort of Levantine upside-down eggplant cake with rice in the middle) and the most amazing crumbly pistachio cake topped with clotted cream at a little Armenian place in the car-parts district. Ayran and fresh-grilled fish sandwiches–big slabs of oily mackerel with skin so black they looked like eggplant slices from far away. And the very first day we were in town, we had kebabs galore, plus some cheese the guy had made himself–and this was in the sorta tourist zone. And back in Ayvalik, where our hotel owner snipped some grapes right off the shade-making vines in the backyard, and they were perfectly honeylike…

I’m crying right now that I don’t have my notebook. All the Turkish words I wrote down. All the little memories I could be jogging, just flipping through the pages. And I’ll never know whether that salad I ate at Ciya was sorrel or what. Unless, of course, I go right straight back next year.