On a fine April morning I drove slowly in Marmaris, trailing a woman pulling a wheeled trolley. It was Thursday and I hoped her destination was the weekly market that had drawn me to this tidy resort city on the southwestern coast of Turkey. Soon enough she merged into a stream of pedestrians flowing toward a concrete structure covering an entire city block. At 10:30 a.m. the Marmaris Thursday market was in full swing, arcades packed with shoppers perusing tables heaped with produce, cheeses under glass and seafood glinting in the sunlight.

I was traveling the region having been inspired by a cookbook, “Aegean Flavours,” written by Didem Senol, a New York-trained Turkish chef whose penchant for cooking in season is on display at her Istanbul restaurant, Lokanta Maya, and her tiny cafe there, Gram. Many of the book’s recipes are informed by the time Ms. Senol spent heading the kitchen at her father’s hotel, the Dionysos, on the Bozburun peninsula near Marmaris, where she shopped the city’s market and others in the region.

“I learned that when a vendor knows you she’ll pull something special — a jam, a cheese — from beneath her stall,” she told me last winter in Istanbul. And so we planned a spring trip centered on those markets, which are especially abundant with foraged leafy vegetables this time of year, and the restaurants that best make use of them.