my culinary woes

February 2009

Ever since I took an interest in cooking 15 yrs ago, I was never at a loss of what to cook. Maybe it was being in NYC and having access to world class restaurants for inspiration, ingredients from all over the world, and a eager circle of friends willing to come to & host dinner parties which made cooking seem easy & fun & natural, and provided a safe, non-judgmental environment for experimentation. No one cared if we ate at 11pm or if the appetizer didn't work out. It was a party and there was a lot of food around to snack on & free flowing wine.
Never really having received any cooking lessons from my mother, and after muddling my own way through various cookbooks and cooking shows, not realizing that there were different measuring cups for liquid & dry measurements, I decided about 15 years ago, that it was time to get some formal training. So I enrolled in the Institute of Culinary Education on 23rd St. which held night classes for busy working professionals. Using generally accepted professional methods grounded in French technique, I learned the basic principles, theories & techniques to cook all kinds of dishes from hot & cold hors d'oeuvres, soups, salads, fish, poultry, meat, and dessert, including sauces, and knife skills.
This was a revelation to me, because it basically freed me from having to use recipes. Once i had mastered the basic techniques and proportions, the rest was just flavorings. At the end of class we shared the meal that we had prepared & critiqued it, accompanied by a few bottles of wine. I loved the class so much that I took a Spa Cooking course, to marry my new love for cooking with my interest in health & nutrition. But I knew that these courses were for laymen and were more of an introduction to cooking for curious beginners. I became so enamored with cooking that I seriously considered switching careers, and enrolled in a course at the French Culinary Institute on Broome St on lower Broadway. It was there that I learned in more depth & detail the classic French techniques (the French codified cooking in Europe) and basic recipes to make all kinds of dishes, all in a professional kitchen setting, along with standards on hygiene and food safety. We had our own chef uniforms, with our names embroidered on the white double breasted jackets and wore tocques and aprons. During the 22 sessions, we made stocks & sauces (including the mother sauces) and pastry doughs, including pate feuilletee, mousses, souffles, all the different cuts of meat, de-boning a chicken, cleaning fish & shellfish, even genoise, bavarian & butter cream, creme anglaise, and syrups.
In the end, with the prospect of starting over again at the bottom of a new career, and the long & physically demanding restaurant work hours while standing on your feet, I decided that cooking would remain a passion, but not a profession for me.
But in all the years that I have enjoyed the pleasure of cooking, I have never been at a loss for what to cook...until now.
Arriving in Turkey, newly wed and excited by the prospect of learning a whole new cuisine first hand with all its own exotic ingredients and spices filled me with anticipation. I had never had Turkish food, or maybe once, but had Greek food, especially from the islands, and middle eastern food, and although they were not my favorite cuisines, I embarked with an open mind, knowing that i could fall back on my Western cuisine whenever I wanted.
So after having shared several restaurant meals with my husband, most of which were meat-centric - doner, kebabs, kofte, pirsola, and also a fish restaurant, I have to admit that I was not very enchanted with Turkish cuisine. I found the meat overcooked, and the fish I had although fresh, was nothing to write home about. I could have broiled it myself at home for 1/4 the price. Where was the artful presentation? Where was the preparation, skill and variety?
I chalked this up to the mediocre touristy restaurants we had been to in and around Sultanahmet, where my husband worked, during our short but sweet courtship. But now after living here, and sampling the cuisine at a range of restaurants from low to high, I still feel the same disappointment. Even the prized Bursa Iskender which most Turks rave about alongside Ottoman palace cuisine, left me unfazed. Of course I can appreciate the freshness & simplicity of Turkish cooking. But it wasn't until I had dinner at his parent's house that I really started to enjoy and appreciate Turkish cuisine. There i was served vegetable dishes, like the zeytinyagli ones, but expertly made and seasoned, vegetables prepared in ways i had never tasted. I have also been on a low carb diet for years, which is difficult to do in Turkey, where they think it is normal to eat potatoes, rice, makarna (pasta) and bread all in one meal. And they call whole wheat bread "diet bread" like you need to have a health problem to want to eat it. And I never liked borek, the ubiquitous multi-layered or stuffed pastry found at every corner. Until I had his mother's borek which is wonderful and has even converted a die hard carbo-phobic into eating several squares. I now even enjoy her dolmas, biber (green pepper) and yaprak (grape leaves) which are vegetable carb bombs, stuffed with seasoned rice. people here even stuff potatoes with rice! she makes very little meat, but her kofte are excellent and her ground beef stuffed eggplant is divine.
So I give credit to my husband's mother for showing me what there is to love about Turkish cuisine, and proving that the best Turkish food is served at home, not at the restaurants, because like most food, the most memorable & satisfying meals are made with love and attention and not at the hands of short order cooks.
But back to my dilemma. Having lived here now for 9 months, and having to cook dinner almost every night since i arrived in June, I am at a total loss for what to cook. I can attribute this to several reasons, one being the fact that I have never had to cook dinner every night, and find it tedious. In NYC even if you are married, you eat out at restaurants and order amazing take out, and maybe cook once a week, because you have the creative urge. You cook for dinner parties, not for dinner every night - this is a whole different ballgame. Secondly, I also need to cook mostly Turkish food for my loving husband, who's exposure to foreign cuisine it limited to dominoes pizza and pasta with ketchup & mayonnaise. When i first witnessed this distressing behavior (in Turkey, ketchup & mayonnaise are liberally used to smother french fries, plain pasta, AND pizza), I was in shock, and all I could say was that it was lucky that I am not Italian, or I would divorce him on the spot. That is how offensive I find it. I won't even try to figure out why or how this horrible custom came about.
Even though there is ethnic food available at restaurants, they are for the most part, very overpriced, not impressive, and sadly not very authentic. Leaving very little incentive to try new cuisines. So I don't blame my husband for thinking that his favorite restaurant, Me Gusto is Italian, instead of greasy, glorified bar food - since when are cheesy potato skins Italian? - How can you fully appreciate Italian cuisine, when you can't even eat pork?
Thirdly, I am pregnant, and just getting over my 1st trimester morning sickness, which is a bit of a misnomer, since it actually lasted the whole day, and left me nauseous at the thought of cooking dinner. And lastly, when you are used to having a different cuisine every day, and you marry someone who grew up eating the same rotation of dishes on a weekly basis, and is not even familiar with regional Turkish cuisine, and when you are afraid of shocking this person's system with all your foreign food, you get so bored with making dinner that you want to shoot yourself.
But I have to give my husband credit for being very supportive on my culinary mishaps in Turkish cuisine and for trying all of my foreign dishes and even liking some of them (I think). He has come a LONG way since the early days of our marriage, when I dutifully tried to make Turkish dishes from my cookbook, only to watch him refuse to eat because it wasn't the same as his mother made it. I once made yaprak dolma or sarma and he refused to eat them merely because they were too large, even though i had followed the recipe from my Turkish cookbook and they were smaller than i had seen at nearby cafes. But I had hunger on my side, and so as my Turkish cooking improved, with the help of a couple of lessons from his mother, his mind & palate expanded, to be more forgiving & willing to try slightly different preparations of the dishes he grew up eating, especially when he was hungry. I've learned all of his likes & dislikes, and insist on trying new dishes to push the envelope & satisfy my own homesickness.
But with dinner parties for relatives looming in the horizon, I am again struck by a loss of what to make. Normally planning a dinner party menu was an exciting prospect for me, one that i relished and would map out like I was catering an event for royalty.
But when you are faced with feeding a group of picky Turkish people, who don't even agree on the same way to prepare the same dish, and are not interested in trying foreign cuisine, my safety net is taken away, and I am left with my not yet mastered Turkish dishes, that I have been served by these same guests.
And I think that I have been discouraged by my Christmas dinner that I made for his parents and grandmother. I tried so hard to make something that I thought they would like, yet I could tell that they appreciated my efforts, but not the food. I have never had anyone not rave about my dinners, so this was a heavy blow. I served spiced roasted nuts, plain mixed nuts, dried apricots & plums, and fresh mandarin oranges. I served mulled cider & sparkling cider (none of them drink alcohol) which i had to scour the high end supermarkets in far away neighborhoods to find. I made a red lentil soup, braised beef with mashed potato & celery root, roasted brussel sprouts, sunchokes, carrots, onions & chestnuts, plus roasted beets with garlic & thyme & balsamic vinegar. i made a cauliflower gratin with a shallot bechamel sauce that went untouched, and a mesclun salad with feta and walnuts and a shallot vinaigrette. I baked hazelnut cookies and pistachio shortbread, and a pear frangipane tart that was just beautiful.
Now this would be a much easier feat at home, but here, i had to figure out the correct cut of beef i needed for braising & try to communicate this, in Turkish, to the butcher, and stop him from slicing it up into "biftek" and then pounding it into schnitzel. Then I had to figure out how to come up with beef stock (which they only sell in msg laden cubes here). And at that point i had not yet mastered the fahrenheit to celsius conversion, and so the roasted veggies almost burned, and i had to do a lot of juggling to keep everything warm.
Not surprisingly, everyone liked the soup, since it was Turkish, except his sister, who came late, and who didn't want soup (no trying things to please the host). No one wanted a vinegar dressing on their salad, so i had to improvise a turkish one with olive oil, lemon juice and pomegranate syrup, even though, the mother and grandmother liked the beets which were marinated with the same balsamic vinegar from the dressing. I attribute this to the acidic vinegars available here (apple & grape - no mild red wine vinegars). The sister did not want meat, but liked the mashed potatoes, until i told her that there was celery root in them, which she doesn't like, but didn't notice previously. As i said, no one even touched the cauliflower gratin (again, no trying things to please the chef or broaden your culinary horizons).
I think one person tried one of my cookies, no one touched the dried apricots or mandarins, and everyone dutifully ate a thin slice of tart.
All i could think of was maybe it was just too different for them? Were their palates ruined by eating the same dishes over and over for their whole lives?
So now you can see, when I am faced with having to cook for my husband's family, I balk, not wanting to have a repeat of my Christmas feast, and not wanting to serve them inferior versions of the dishes his mother taught me to make, which would pale in comparison to hers.
I even tried to make pirzola (lamb chops) for them once and they didn't like them because they were not well, well done. I find it a crime to ruin expensive cuts of meat by overcooking it until it is dry and hard and resembles the texture of the sole of a shoe.
But this is what i am fed & I graciously eat it, even though I could still be chewing it now.
And I know it is family, so there is no need to be overly polite, but I always find I am the one who always tries everything and eats the most, to show my appreciation for the meal that has been made for me. And I can be pickier than most about the quality of my food, but I don't see any reason to not lower my standards on occasion when someone is taking the trouble to make a special meal. I have never met a country of such picky eaters! Honestly, I've come to realize that New Yorkers, like most denizens of large, international cities, are world class eaters, meaning they love to try & appreciate new cuisines, and even though we have our share of predilections when we eat out (such as dressing on the side or egg white omelets, although nothing in comparison with LA), we are gracious guests when we are invited to dinner and love to try & appreciate something new.