My friend asked me for a simit recipe and when I searched online, there were many. So if you want to make these awesome treats at home check out the recipe I found at this site:

Simit

Yucel Tellici

Simit is a fast food bread sold in the streets of Turkey by vendors. It is often eaten as a breakfast food with jam or yogurt. Simit is also great by itself!

Simit is light and flaky, baked to a golden brown color, and topped with sesame seeds. It is sometimes formed into rings, and are often braided.

Ingredients:

• 1 cup cups all purpose flour
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1 teaspoon olive oil
• 2 tablespoons butter
• 2 tablespoon water
• 1 tablespoons milk plus 1 teaspoon
• 1 egg, beaten
• sesame seeds
• milk for brushing

Preparation:

Preheat oven to 375 degrees.

In a medium mixing bowl, sift together flour and salt.

Make a depression in the dry ingredients with your fist, making a "hole" in the middle.

Add olive oil, melted butter, water, milk, and egg.

Fold dry ingredients into liquids to form a dough. This may take 10 minutes by hand.

Once you have a dough, tear off pieces of dough, make long, cigar shapes. Bring ends of "cigars" together to make a circle.

Place circle on greased cookie sheet.

Brush with milk. Sprinkle sesame seeds on top. Repeat with remaining dough.

Bake for 30 minutes, or until simit become a golden brown color and crispy on top.

*The one change I would make is to coat the simit completely in seeds before baking... that's how it's done here*

Something a Little Old-fashioned.

I'd never done this before and it's not technically cooking, but it does have to do with food, right?! So here it is. I've decided to stud some citrus fruits with cloves for the holiday season. I recommend wearing some kind of glove or protection for your fingers if you plan to do more than one fruit as those little cloves are hard and a wee bit sharp. The cloves go into the fruit fairly easily and if my marvelous mother is to be believed, then you can leave these babies out for quite a while and they will be like a natural air freshener in the house. Mine has a gorgeous smell of spices and citrus (I did 2 oranges, 1 lemon and 1 grapefruit) right now, can't wait to see how it continues to develop.

Çay and Simit

I can make the çay (Turkish tea) at home, but I cannot pull of the simit. It makes for one of the loveliest breakfasts or snacks on earth, particularly if you have a little cream cheese on hand. Below are a couple of pictures of this yummy for your tummy moment:


This is a close up of my simit. It's like a bagel in consistency (chewy goodness) but it is entirely crusted in sesame seeds and is baked that way so the seeds often look burnt, but they are roasted to perfection on the outside of the simit. Here in Ankara, you can buy them in the streets and they are 3 for 1 Turkish Lira. Very cheap and tasty.


Sometimes there are simit sellers like this, but more often than not, you will find the treats in nice, closed in, glass trolleys. Usually somewhere nearby is a freshly squeezed juice truck. These places pop out bottles and bottles of freshly squeezed fruit juices and the small bottle is just over 1 Turkish Lira, super reasonable, super yummy and super good for you! What more could you ask for in a street food!?

TEA!! Tea is a mainstay here. Turks drink a multitude of cups a day. One shop keeper told me that he probably drinks 15 glasses a day at least. And he also said that drinking tea was a fairly new thing in Turkey. He said that about 100 years ago, Turks didn't drink tea, but were drinking coffee instead. I can't remember why they switched over, but they did in a big way. Sure, Turkish coffee is still hugely popular here, but tea is drank all day and night long.