The basic Turkish meal often contains rice, bread, white beans and eggplant with stewed meat, either chicken or beef. Potatoes and spicy banana peppers find their way into the mix in smaller quantities. Tomatoes are fresh and densely flavored, omnipresent, and can be found grilled, boiled, stuffed, chopped in salads, and as wedges are served with nearly every breakfast meal. Also in the morning people eat several kinds of olives. Fruit seems to be picked ripe and grown inside Turkey. Right now one finds oranges, cherries, hard green plums and peaches. No foreign, exotic or out of season fruit appears in the normal markets, with bananas as the exception and I do not know their source. Cucumbers are everywhere and quite tasty. Pork chops, roasts, pork loin, bacon and breakfast sausage do not exist here. Shellfish is rare and apparently only served in a few restaurants catering to Western tourists. You will find spicy meatballs, lots of lamb and chicken but no thick marbled cuts of meat. Steaks in their American form are not even contemplated in the Turkish cuisine. A beefsteak in Turkey is small, thin, often tough and difficult to cut even with the occasional sharp knife you are able to obtain. Nevertheless they are good to eat. Salads are modestly sized and obtainable fresh wherever you look. And people seem to eat them regularly. There is one salad dressing in Turkey: olive oil dripped on the vegetables with a lemon wedge on the side. You squeeze out the juice, add the salt and pepper and dig in. Unlike Americans, the Turks do not seem obsessed with cheese. They do eat it; however, they do not melt it over every edible substance in their food supply as people tend to do in The States.