Turkish Breakfast

Brunch is big in Berlin, especially on Sundays and especially when the weather is nice. People go out and sit at a restaurant or cafe for hours! (And no one at the restaurant cares that you sit there all day even if you order nothing more.) We have definitely become big fans of this tradition. However, now that the sun goes down at 4, you don't necessarily want to be eating breakfast for all the hours the sun is out. We have discovered that really our favorite Berlin breakfast is Turkish breakfast. There are many Turkish immigrants in Berlin so there are lots of good Turkish options.

The reason to love Turkish breakfast is that it is somewhere between the more traditional Berlin breakfast and American breakfast. Berlin breakfast is as you would expect for Continental breakfast: meat and cheese, fruits and vegetables, bread, and maybe a hard boiled egg. And butter. The slab of butter they give you for the bread is sometimes bigger than a slice of cheese! Imagine a large slice of brie.  Now imagine that it is butter. I don't know how a person could eat all of it. The Turkish breakfast we get has the meat and cheese (although Sucuk, garlic sausage that looks a bit like pepperoni, and wiechkäse, a Turkish table cheese), olives, and vegetables which is similar. However instead of bread, you get a Simit, a sesame ring. And the real winner is scrambled eggs! I don't know why I feel that a scrambled egg is more breakfasty than a hard boiled one, but it is. It really feels like I get to eat breakfast and lunch.

The cheese slab that stands alone, is really butter.

Our favorite place to go is called La Femme. We usually get the sampler platter seen here. It is always good. One of the things that makes it extra wonderful is that they make their own jam. Usually it is strawberry or berry of some sort, which I like. One time they made fig jam which was amazing! I am not ashamed to say I finished it with a spoon (why put that whole chunk of fruit on my bread?)

Another place that we like to go is a cafe on Hauptstrasse between Kleistpark and Akazienstrasse which is convenient as it is near a Turkish grocery store where we can pick up the things we like to have around at home: garlic sausage, cheese, loose tea, and some cheap and wonderful fresh dates. What I find most interesting about the food at this place is their one dish that has eggs cooked over hard with the garlic sausage cooked into it. They must put some slices of sausage in the pan before they break the eggs over it. I have not really seen eggs and sausage cooked this way, but I really like it.

When we were going back to the US for two weeks we needed to have Turkish breakfast before we left and as soon as we returned. We will need to improve our Turkish cooking skills for when we leave Berlin, because we will not be able to go long without it!