Cooking class

Last week a number of us took a cooking class.  We made some excellent Turkish dishes, including the Turkish lentil soup that Paul keeps petitioning the cafeteria at La Sierra University to add to their menu.  I tried to write down the recipes for the dishes we made, though the whole thing was a little inaccurate.  When I would ask how much of a particular ingredient to use, the general answer was something like, "Oh about this much" or "you just add it until it looks right."  The other problem with getting recipes is that most Turks don't appear to use measuring cups.  Even in a lot of recipe books the recipes call for "1 tea spoon of ..." (the size spoon used for tea) or "1 tea glass of ..." or "one water glass of ..." or "one dessert spoon of ...."  These aren't standard measures; they literally mean something like "get a water glass out of your cupboard and dump that much in...."  In practice no one bothers with the water glass anymore; they just eyeball it.  I understand this way of cooking, because it's the way I cook too, but it does create some problems for transmitting recipes to people who don't know what it's "supposed" to look like or how it's supposed to taste.  As much as possible, I made gross estimates of amounts, and I think probably those who try to make these recipes will have to make some adjustments along the way.  Note also that at times I had to look at the side of a bag and estimate that 1/4 of the bag had been used out of 1000 mg.  In this case, I think you could just do the same thing when you try to translate back.  Calculate how many ounces of the ingredient you need, and then estimate what proportion of a bag or box you'd need. 

Unfortunately all the photos I took of the class were on Rachel's camera, so I don't have them to upload, but perhaps Rachel will put some up later.  I will list individual recipes here in individual posts so it's more manageable for me to put them up.