The joys of an oven

Sinan got an oven about two weeks ago and I've really enjoyed getting to bake things, and not always frying everything. One thing I'd been craving was coffee cake. Unfortunately I found that two important ingredients for baking, vanilla and brown sugar, are just not the same here. The vanilla is in a powder form and it just doesn't do as good as a job as the liquid kind we can get in the US. Also the brown sugar is much more granulated, and it tastes different. It looks like normal sugar, just brown. Anyway, the coffee cake (or crumb cake?) still tasted delicious and it hit the spot.



I also wanted to bake borek using something similar to phyllo dough. I'd been buying yufka (the incredibly thin dough already rolled out, at room temperature) but when you fry it is gets kind of tough and you have to rip bites off with your teeth, and it goes bad quickly. The frozen kind gets nice and fluffy and flaky. I didn't have any meat but I put feta cheese, parsley, and egg yolk into a piece of the defrosted dough, sealed it, covered it with egg yolk and milk, put those black (carroway? I don't remember) seeds on it, and baked them. Much better than what I'd been doing before!



Finally for dinner one night I just baked some chicken that had soaked in oil, garlic, salt, pepper and red pepper and surrounded it with all kinds of vegetables. Quite good! Three of us ate this whole pan!



When I went to Antalya, I decided to make some cookies to bring to them, instead of buying them like I usually do (ohhh great, here comes Sally with those same, boring cookies again). I love cinnamon/sugar combinations but they don't really make and sell pastries with it here, so I'll just make them myself. I make sugar cookie dough and then rolled out a square, sprinkled it with cinnamon and sugar, rolled it into a log, then cut little cookies off of it, then baked them. For another type of cookie I used a cookie cutter to make star shapes, baked them, let them cool, then made a sandwich with chocolate spread in between. They really enjoyed them! I thought they were a little tasteless due to too much butter and bad vanilla but they were edible.



I do do more than just eat, I promise I am still working. I'll catch you up on work stuff in a couple of days, not that much has changed. This week is interesting and I'm actually in Eskisehir, a city about 4 hours outside of Istanbul. There is a Wall Street center there and they are short a teacher, and the Sisli school where I am, we have too many hours, so I was sent (being asked first of course) there for a week. The transportation and hotel are being paid for - awesome! It seems like a nice city but I just don't quite get the layout yet but there is a pretty little river (or some type of water) running through part of the city with pedestrianized streets alongside it. I'll write about it more when I get some more photos. I have my first day at the new center now - wish me luck!