Cooking in a foreign country is always an adventure. I can remember my early visits to the grocery store as a newly planted expat here. Befuddled is the appropriate word. Turkish grocery stores seemed very limited to me then. Where were the frozen foods, the canned goods, the microwave meals? It took me some time to figure out that most people went there only for the basics, like toilet paper, milk, dried legumes and rice, flour, etc. I soon figured out that most Turkish housewives do their shopping at the local pazars (farmers’ markets). That’s where they buy their produce, cheese, olives, bread, and even spices and honey. I would come out of the grocery store with just a few bags, scratching my head and wondering, “How long is all of this going to last me?”

So I did what I had to do and learned how to navigate the pazar. That wasn’t an easy task, either. Not knowing the metric system, I had no idea how much to ask for and struggled to find the Turkish words to ask for much of anything at all. It was no use imitating the other women around me. They seemed to be buying for a small restaurant for the most part. No, I was completely on my own and would have to sort it out somehow. Eventually, I figured it out and now I can walk through a pazar like an old hand. In fact, pazars are even a guilty pleasure to me now. Just try to get me out of one!

I should be grateful, I suppose, that I did not move to Japan. I have seen the shelves of Japanese grocery stores. Hundreds of bags with Japanese characters and sometimes not so much as a picture to guide the language ignorant. Add to that the fact that they eat all sorts of odd things that it would never occur to me to eat at all, let alone buy at a grocery store.

No, at least in Turkey, it’s easy enough to get the lay of the land. The aisles are arranged logically and items you would expext to go together are grouped as such here: flour and sugar are lined up together with general goods for baking, which is entirely logical. You can safely pick up a bag of flour without knowing the Turkish name for it because, well, a bag of flour is easily identifiable and almost always has a little wheat symbol featured somewhere.

The hard part was getting those things home and figuring out what to do with them. I mean, I was a career gal back home; not a homemaker. I am sure I used actual flour to roll out a crust for something at one point or another in my life, but more often than not, I’d settle for a ready made crust. I was into convenience food like that. But now I lived in a country with no ready made crust, so I could either forgo or make do. To my credit, I chose to make do, often with comical results.

I eventually got brave and started buying little packet meals, like rice dishes. I wanted so desperately to return to the freedom of convenience food. I was tired of soaking lentils overnight and cleaning up my kitchen after what appeared to be a flour explosion.
But even those packets were a new form of hell. I would look at the directions on the back and just sigh. Just try to painstakingly translate those directions word for word. Not only is it thanklessly laborious, but it is practically impossible. Add to that the general confusion regarding measurements.

Now I know how spoiled we are in America, what with our Pampered Chef parties and our Williams Sonoma stores. But I just assumed that all civilized cultures would use measuring cups and spoons, right? I mean, at the very least. Oh, how wrong I was!

Let’s set aside for a moment the fact that I come from one of the only countries on earth that still clings tirelessly to the Imperial System. No doubt having knowledge of the Metric System would really have come in handy. (and yes, I am aware that I can teach myself!) But only a Turkish housewife could save me from the measuring predicament I found myself in.

You see, Turkish recipes are actually tailored towards a housewife that has come from the village. It is assumed that she has no fancy modern-day devices or appliances. What is assumed is that she has cutlery.

When cooking from a recipe here, you will find the following forms of measurement: tea glass (which is a little tulip-shaped vessel that tea is served in), water glass (which is a glass that holds about 6 ounces), tea spoon (which is actually a tiny little spoon used to stir sugar in tea), dessert spoon (which is actually our teaspoon), and soup spoon (which is actually our tablespoon). I can’t tell you how many recipes I warped by thinking a teaspoon was a dessert spoon. I believe it all came crashing down on me one day when I was putting the dishes away. “We don’t have a lot of………(wheels turning)tea….spoons.” (light bulb burning brightly)

These days, I’ve got it all worked out. I can just as easily make dolma (stuffed grape leaves) as I can pad thai in my Turkish kitchen. Learning a new language is something that can wait. Learning how to cook and eat? That is an entirely different story to this gal!