Love and pasta

"I'd heard that snacking and small dishes called meze were a big part of Turkish cuisine, but I hadn't expected the diversity. 

"Bites of seafood ranged from fried mussels bathed in a sauce of lemon, bread crumbs and ground walnuts to pickled herring stuffed with olives and bell peppers.

"The intense sweets included fried balls of dough basted in thick honey to chewy squares of Turkish delight dusted with powdered sugar and infused with different fruits or exotic flavorings, such as mastic, a tree sap that tasted like earthy spearmint. 

"And there were heavenly slices of flaky baklava crammed with pistachios and drenched in syrup, in a shop that smelled of warm butter."

Jen Lin-Liu in "On the Noodle Road: From Beijing to Rome with Love and Pasta"