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Published: April 9th 2008
Me, cooking.
Yep. I can cook stuff. Who knew?As mentioned in the previous post, the taco night last Friday was a success. However, it was hard to get all the necessary ingredients, as Turkey is located absolutely nowhere near Mexico. Turkey has ground beef, so we got that taken care of easily, and one of the staple meals here is called a dürüm which, as far as I can tell translates to “wrap.” It is some kind of meat (chicken or lamb, usually) and veggie combination (like lettuce and tomato) rolled up in a tortilla-like piece of bread. Basically, the point I’m trying to get across is that they have tortilla-like things here, so tortillas were easy to get a hold of. In the US, (in case you didn’t know…) there are taco-flavored seasoning packets to add that taco-flavored-kick to ground beef, but here, we had to resort to other measures. After looking online to see just what in the heck was in taco-powder, my pal Mickey found that it called for hefty amounts of cumin, which he was able to find, so we used that and a ground red pepper (or something like it), in addition to a little chopped onions, to give our ground beef a little
The Taco Crew
Here we are. From left to right, me Dutch Hakan, Ben, Mickey, Turkish Hakan, Stephen. flavor. So far, so good, we had tortilla substitutes, ground beef, an approximate taco-powder. The next obstacle was cheese. Normally one associates cheddar with tacos (at least I do). However, cheese varies throughout the globe, and there isn’t any normal cheddar cheese here in Turkey. So, we resorted to kas(h)ar cheese, which has a bit of its own zap to it, and it was really tasty with our taco cration. Lettuce, onions and tomatoes are abundant here, so the only topping we were missing was sour cream, which I will return to in a minute.
The Turks were intrigued by the tacos, and one of the first questions we were asked while cooking up the meal was “can we put yogurt on it?” Yogurt is a very big part of Turkish eating habits. Unlike yogurt in the US, the yogurt here is very plain and unsweetened, so it can go with just about anything. One of the oddest uses I’ve seen with it is in conjunction with tomato sauce and pasta, but it actually tastes really good. Although it was a little odd at first, it soon became a kind of unsour sour cream for our tacos, resulting in tacos with a Turkish twist. It was very tasty.
That was all on Friday night. Late Friday night, my throat started hurting, and I spent the weekend in bed blowing my nose and sleeping. It’s Wednesday now, and aside from still being a little tired, I'm almost back to full strength.
Originally, I told Aunt Janet I would have some pictures of my classrooms by Monday. I had to put it off a little, but I was able to get a few shots of recess at a local elementary school here, so I think it will be worth it. That will be posted just as soon as I can upload the pictures…
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carrierchan
Carrierchan
Scottish burritos
HAHA! That is awesome. I fixed up bean burritos with a girl from America and my friend Hanna (from Sweden). I was so surprised to find refried beans here that I decided to make bean and cheese burritos. My flat-mates had never heard of the Refried beans and they were pretty skeptical about it until they were actually done. It was so good. We used the Turkish yogurt as sour cream too. Plus some guacamole that Hanna fixed up. I have decided to make a list of all the foods I want when I get back home. Hope things are going well for you in Turykey! When do you get back again? And what are you doing this summer?