I Love this about Turkey...

Bread is super important to Turks.  They eat it at every meal.  On a few occasions I haven't had any bread in my house.  When I've offered a friend something to eat (salad, soup, or some other bread-free food), they've given me a confused look and responded, "Jamie, how can I eat if there's no bread?"  It's that important.  Almost every neighborhood around here has at least one bakery or "bread oven" as the Turks would say.  They keep everyone supplied with fresh loaves for breakfast and dinner. 

 Having a bread oven nearby is a wonderful thing.   Last night for dinner we made pide (pronounced pee-day).  Pide is kind of like pizza but with no sauce.   The pide we ate last night started with me making the topping at home.   This time it was a mixture of hamburger meat, onion, pepper, tomato and some spices (really, you can put almost anything on it and it tastes great - cheese, chicken and mushrooms, sausage, spinach...).  Then we took a little family walk down to the bread oven, which is just around the corner from our house. 

This is the bread dough.  See how they have it all ready to bake into loaves?  They'll let you just buy this dough if you want, which leads to all sorts of wonderful possibilities - pizza dough, apple strudle (James told me to write that, and I guess it is a possibility for some people but I don't actually know how to make apple strudle), and our most frequently enjoyed choice... cinnamon rolls.  We asked them to use some of their dough to make us some pide.  
Here's one of the baker guys.  He flattened out some dough and is pileing some pide topping on it.  He'll spread it all out then hand it to the oven guy.

Now the oven guy is putting our raw pide on a long stick with a paddle at the end and getting it ready to pop into that big oven.

See how long and skinny our pide is?  Isn't that fun!  We made 4 pides last night and ended up paying about $1.50 for them (the price of 4 pieces of bread dough - plus about 5 cents per pide for the labor.)

Then we brought it home and ate it.  Mmmmmm!  We even have enough left over for lunch today, and you can't beat that!

We also bought some dough to take home to make cinnamon rolls for breakfast this morning.  Not really, but that was our plan.  Once we saw that delicious pide come out of the oven we forgot all our other plans and ran home to eat it.  James ended up getting up and going to the bread oven again this morning to get our cinnamon roll dough.

 

I love the bread oven!!