Sunday market

Like a bird landing for the first time in nest-building season, I have already found my favourite vendors.

Alabalık, or trout, is the type of delicious fish I've been buying at this fish market stand. A simple gesture indicates gutting and beheading:

The source of my biftek and butcher paper. The meat is so lean it doesn't make good hamburgers!

A strawberry vendor sitting in street traffic. The pony is patient and sweet:

Turkish strawberries have a very brief season. While dark red and small, like fraise du bois, they are not a patch on English strawberries:

My Turkish has not really improved, but this fellow is quite humorous. Last week I was so spoiled for choice all I could do was hem and haw 'hmmm' - he replied 'Ommm' so we namaste-gestured. Today, on my return, he remembered me and we namasted again.

He has the most beautifully arrayed stand, a balanced visual composition  of carrots, spinach, turnips, red radishes, celeriac, red and white cabbage, lemons, leeks, and beetroot. Below are black radishes, (?), rocket, long spring onions, many fresh herbs, and lettuces:

Just opposite is the cheese and olive guys. Traversing left to right increases the saltiness of the cheese, all versions of feta, but with far subtler distinctions and gradations of flavour and texture (soft and bendy to crumbly) than available in London:

 Also, eggs, dry cheese and fresh cheese:

And olives of all flavours and degrees of dried, soft, fresh, salty. My favourite, lower left greenish/brown, is slightly soft, with pit and not too salty. All for less than £2 per kilo:

A very Turkish very seasonal fruit are these green plums. The size of large grapes with a tiny stone which is similar in flavour and texture to the pips in grapes. It was so unexpectedly small and soft I accidentally ate the first one I tried. The fruits are extremely crisp, like an apple, and also extremely tart, similar in acidity to an unripe gooseberry:

And the pears! Lumpy, massive, and misshapen but of a golden-rosy hue, crisp and perfect with (surprise) the salty panir cheese.