by Sam Tackeff | Sep 15, 2011 | Uncategorized
A few weeks ago, we got it in our heads to look at apartments in Boston. The two months of living with my parents was surprisingly calm, but we both enjoy having our own space. I missed cooking for two, instead of cooking for four. I missed sweet, blissful silence. We looked at apartments online, and visited a few outrageously expensive small spaces. More expensive than our apartment in San Francisco? The size of a padded cell with sloping ceilings that even I was sure to hit my head on? “But it’s right in Harvard Square…” I tried to rationalize, ignoring the fact the oven was half size. It’s a good thing Devon has more sense than I do about these things.
And then….
We found “the one”. The knee-buckling, makes you feel wobbly, teen movie first love, “one”.
The top floor of an 1890 Victorian home in Newton, a suburb of Boston. There were no photos on Craigslist, and the description seemed too good to be true. The house had all the charm we both wanted:three bedrooms, a living room with a turret, a large eat in kitchen, two bathrooms, and a clawfoot tub. A small balcony off my office. Three parking spaces. Heat and hot water included. Exactly what we were paying in San Francisco, but double the size. Better yet, the house needed a little bit of love – not the big stuff, but painting, little projects, upkeep, and the landlord would be willing to fund our “This Old House” fantasies.
The landlord emailed us the next morning to let us know that he was planning on showing the place again, but if we wanted it, it was ours.
What did we do? Turn it down.
I wasn’t sure I was ready to move yet. I loved spending so much time with my mom. Devon and I were both working freelance. And I was scared of ghosts in an old house. Yes, ghosts. Living in Newton was too “adult”. Turning down that house seemed stupid and I regretted it. And then three weeks later the landlord sent us another email. The people he had shown it to had jumped at the apartment (we knew they would), but failed the credit check. The place was still ours if we wanted it.
By that time, Devon had a new job at creative agency doing what he is really good at. I was ready. We brought my mom along. We tactfully asked if anyone had complained about hauntings. The landlord looked at us and laughed out loud. I took that as a good sign.
And now, we are here.
We sold almost everything we owned in San Francisco larger than my cookbooks and his guitars, so we are starting from scratch in a house that has more space than either of us could have hoped for. We’ve been working on the necessities. We have our internet set up. I have a new library card. We have a bed, our TV, and one single chair. I’ll be back in the kitchen, writing long to-do lists, choosing color swatches, patching up walls, having people over, and keeping you all updated. It feels exquisite.
And, I’ll finally have a place to put these:
by Sam Tackeff | Aug 30, 2011 | Local stores, Restaurants, Sandwich, Turkish
Have you been in a convenience store lately? It used to be that you could only find sad packages of stale sunflower seeds, Slim Jims, or half smushed Hostess snack packs, but not much else. You may have been able to buy your late night desperation pint of ice cream, but usually it wasn’t the good flavor. For decades, convenience stores weren’t filled with what one wanted, but rather what one, in a moment of irrationality, believed they needed.
Now I have certainly been grateful at times for the salvation of convenience stores: that Snickers bar in Fort Bragg after driving unintentionally three hours up the Pacific Coast Highway without having eaten all day, and the air conditioning in a Buttonwillow gas station when it was 120°F come to mind. But these experiences have been few and far between. It used to be that I wouldn’t stop in one unless I was truly desperate.
I am here to share that times are ‘a changing. In New England, a curious thing seems to be happening. This region has hopes and dreams for convenience stores, and is pushing for a small revolution. Taking it a new level. The ultra-convenience. Superlative convenience. Or more to the point, actually convenient. In New England, our convenience stores are marvelous and full of happy surprises. We have affectionate names for them too. Cumby’s anyone? Ours come with or without gas. And, some of them house restaurants.
Take, for instance, my latest experience: Turkish Kebab’s, located in Jay’s Newmarket Convenience.
Jay’s Convenience Store is actually a converted house. You can get your gas and your cigarettes and your six-packs, but what you really want to come for is the food. Real Turkish food. I’m not really sure which I would have found more unlikely a decade ago – having great food in a convenience store, or finding Turkish food in Newmarket, New Hampshire.
Turkish food is my comfort food, the food I crave. I grew up spending summers in Istanbul. We would visit the city where my grandmother lived, and then spend weeks on Büyükada, the biggest of the Princes’ Islands. The setting was idyllic: a beautiful island in the Bosphorus, with centuries old houses, no cars, and horse drawn carriages. You’d take your tea in the afternoon on the waterfront, watching the ferry boats come in from the city, their passengers visibly relaxing as they got off the boats. We’d swim, and bike, and walk through the neighborhoods. But mostly, we’d eat.
The street food culture in Turkey is diverse and enticing at every corner. There are Dönerci’s selling döner kebap – meat cooked on a rotating spit, and shaved thinly (similar to schwarma). You can get kebabs in sandwiches, or midye tava (fried mussels) with a nut sauce called tarator, or stuffed mussels taken straight from the Bosphorus and cooked on the sidewalk. Or you can get lahmacun, (lah-ma-joon) a thin Turkish flatbread with lamb, filled with lettuce and lemon, and wrapped up to eat on the go. There is Tost – which is the best grilled cheese you will ever eat, stuffed optionally with sucuk, a spicy sausage. Or if you need something sweet, there are pudding shops nearly everywhere, and more ice cream and waffle sellers than there are Starbucks in Manhattan.
I tend to feel sorry for myself that I live so far away from Turkey, especially in the summertime, so I was ecstatic to find Jay’s so close to home to fill myself up on the foods I was missing. I try to do a lot of Turkish cooking but you just can’t recreate döner without a large spit and a qualified chef. (It takes years of training to become a proper Dönerci).
Jay’s is filled with all sorts of treats that I crave. Kebabs – which loosely refers to almost any meat cooked on a stick – are their specialty. I’ve heard good things about their falafel, although I haven’t tried it. You can also get almost anything in sub form. They do Italian style subs as well, and some Italian home-style dishes.
They also have a large variety of Turkish salads, including Kısır, a bulgur wheat salad similar to Tabouli (they actually label it as Tabouli, but technically it is different), and hummus, and a very good eggplant salad. They have “popular” New England favorites including seafood salad, but why you would purchase that when you had Jay’s other options, I have no idea.
Turkish people also consume a lot of pastry and fried foods, and Jay’s carries many of these as well, including flaky Börek (turnovers) filled with white cheese and parsley, savory meat pies, zucchini fritters, and even some Italian arancini (rice balls) as big as your fist.
I was excited to hear the grocery section had a small collection of imported Turkish foods, because I always find myself missing things like Turkish honey, jams, and olive spreads. We typically travel over an hour to stock up on these things at Sevan in Watertown, Massachusetts, and I was looking forward to the.. erm.. close to home convenience.
Unfortunately, when we went, the entire Turkish grocery section in the back had been decimated. It turns out they had received a visit that week from a group of Turkish high-schoolers spending the month at Phillips Exeter Academy’s summer school. At least I can completely understand their impulse!
And apparently, students can also get a 15% discount on food if they show their ID. It’s probably better that they weren’t open when I was in highschool, otherwise I would have been in twice a week abusing their generosity.
This trip we all decided to order the same thing – thinly sliced döner in a Turkish lavash bread, rolled with lettuce, tomato, pickled onion, and yogurt sauce. While very tasty, I found myself finding the ratio a little off – there was actually too much meat for my preference, and I would have liked a little bit more sauce. Next time, I think I might actually get the tomato sauce their Italian cook makes rather than the more traditional yogurt. Nothing wrong with a little fusion!
We also took home some smoky Turkish eggplant salad, and some kisir, as well as some kadayif – a crispy pastry similar to baklava, except with vermicelli-like dough filled with pistachio nuts. (At some point, I’ll write a 5000 word essay on my love of Turkish pastry… the stuff is glorious.)
The one flaw of Jay’s is the lack of seating: when you are hungry, you want to eat food right away! Some quick thinking led us to the benches at Stratham Hill Park. And here, I leave you with a shot of my mother, a real live Turkish person, enjoying her sandwich. Authenticity folks, I like it.
Turkish Kebab’s Subs & Grill (in Jay’s Newmarket Convenient Store and Gas)
35 North Main Street, Newmarket, New Hampshire
603 – 659- 1500
