Days 3 & 4

Sunday I had my first solo culinary endeavour in Turkey: cupcakes. A very un-Turkish food. But we were going to a picnic at the American military base, so I figured that cupcakes wouldn't go amiss. And, for the most part, they were fine. It seems that the Turkish icing sugar is a bit more granular than I'd like, but otherwise, the vanilla cupcakes with lemon frosting came out just fine.

Today I did my very first Turkish cooking: Red Lentil Soup, Prawns with Chili and Garlic Chickpea Mash, and Mushroom Salad, followed by red fruit salad with triple sec (my own invention).

My shopping experience was pretty easy; the British Embassy liaison officer took me to a market where I found most of the heavy stuff, and then later I went on my own to the local market to get the produce.

Over-organised as I am, I spent the morning looking up the Turkish words for the ingredients on a website and writing them down next to the English words on my shopping list. It's amazing; in Turkey they seem to play by the rule that whatever the customer wants, the customer gets. I walked into the produce market looking for chilies, rosemary and cress. They had no rosemary in sight, but when I was able to finally communicate to the guy what it was I wanted, he nodded, sauntered off down the street, and reappeared 5 minutes later with rosemary in hand. When I asked for chilies, they only had large, clingfilmed packets of them. When I didn't want the whole thing, he ripped it open and gave me half instead. Sadly, the failure of the trip was the cress; I thought that's what I was buying, but it definitely isn't. I only wish I did know what it was, because then I could google a recipe and make something out of it. As it is, we have a huge (and I do mean enormous) bunch of the stuff and nothing to put it in. In fact, if I can figure out how to upload photos, I'll take on of the mystery green and see if anyone has any guesses as to what it is.

The recipes came out pretty well; my favourite was the lentil soup, A liked the shrimp with chickpea mash, and the mushroom salad was great. It involves marinating the raw mushrooms in garlic and lemon juice for several hours so that the mushrooms effectively become cooked through (like ceviche), and then you use the marinade to make the dressing for the greens.

So far, so good!