We had booked in for an excursion later today - a cooking class in a small village near Selcuk, so we used the morning and afternoon to explore some areas outside our home base.
A 6km drive west brought us right to the Aegean to a sleepy place called Pamucak beach. The beach stretched really long and flat and the water lapped lazily up to the edge. Even though it's officially off season, we got the feeling this little beach was a little eclectic. The owner of the one Cafe on the beach came down and proceeded to tell us that it was free to sit on his chairs because it was not high season. Hmmm... Thx. He had a small mix of customers sitting on the beach in front of his Cafe, and they were very bohemian looking.
We weren't in to sitting too long, so we walked up and down for a bit. This place would be nice in the hot weather - the water looked amazing.
When we were walking back to the car near the top of the beach, we noticed a bunch of caravan-looking shacks and eclectic abodes. Hippies in Turkey - cool!
We drove south along the coastal road and took a pic of the beach where we'd been - the beach we were on continued south until it hit a resort area. The beaches, pools and water parks actually looked half busy. The water park reminded us of Papa and Uncle Steve who had inadvertently booked a four night stay at a kids water park hotel when they were in the nearby city of Izmir. At the time, batchelor Steve's description of being at a family hotel with his Dad sounded pretty hilarious.
We made our way to the nearby City of Kusadasi, a place that has 65,000 residents which swells to 500,000 residents in the summer... Perhaps Papa would describe it as "the Grand Bend of Turkey" (this stems from another papa story that I will get at later). Kusadasi is one of the most popular stops for cruise ships on the Aegean coast. Of course, what makes the city are free teeter totters....
Crack was bad in Istanbul, so I happily settled for Creed....
After lunch, we were putting in time before out cooking class. It was about twenty minutes away, and didn't start until 3pm. I emailed the guy named Yalshin who I'd been talking to to see if he had any specific instructions to find the place, as he had just said "go to the town and ask for me", lol.
The "Bazaar" section of Kusadasi was a crazy, outdoor hodgepodge of shops along nice cobbled streets. It would have been a miracle if we didn't end up with a scarf or two....
I imagined what it must be like to get the sudden rush of five thousand people coming off a cruise ship with two hours to shop.... What a feeding frenzy! There were actually two small cruise ships docked in the port, but the streets didn't seem too busy here. I imagine they go to Ephesus in the morning, then have the late afternoon to shop back in the city before heading out to their next destination. Beth and I go back and forth on the idea of cruises - maybe it's a blast with friends, but to actually "see" a place, I think it's not the option we would choose.
This lucky street had hundreds of "Evil Eyes" protecting them. Sometimes we joke about desperately finding a store that actually sells the Nazar. You can't go five meters in the country without seeing evil eye fridge magnets, earings, necklace pendants, wall hangings, etc etc etc.
There were also about four hundred shoe shops.... Abby and I produced many loud sighs every time the two shoe hoarders stepped into one of the clone shops.
Sigh.....
Oh.... I forgot. Beth bought just one scarf.
At just after two, I received an email from the cooking class saying they were ready for us if we wanted to come any time. We thought, oh, that's nice of them. So we drove out of Kusadasi following a crazy road that google had found - it went from two lane paved, to one lane paved, to a very rocky single lane road. The "path" wound through hills packed with olive trees on both sides - man did it smell good. We saw local families every once in a while picking the olives - it struck us all as a very simple, nice lifestyle here in the countryside.
When we arrived in The village of Kirazli, I called Yalshin and told him I was in front of a school - he said to keep driving and he would find me. Alright then. Sure enough, I drove another minute and a guy waved me down. We got out and made our introductions. He welcomed us into a building at the side of a road that opened up into a courtyard up a hill where there was an outdoor, covered kitchen. He introduced us to his daughter wife who would be teaching us. He then remarked how they'd been waiting and wondering if something had happened to us.... Huh? Beth looked at her watch and said it was 2:45pm, but Yalshin laughed and said it was 3:45pm. For whatever reason, Turkey had decided to postpone daylight savings for two weeks (some weird thing about the election this Sunday). We'd been running an hour behind for four days!! How bizarre that not only did we not notice, but it also did not affect us at all. Apparently, Beth had seen a headline in her daily "bad news headline scan" a few days ago but had not exactly delved into the details. Too funny. Oh well, we were glad we noticed it before our flight this Saturday!
We got to work - actually there was really only space for two or three people at a time. Unfortunately, our teacher, Yalshin's second wife apparently, did not speak very much English. Even on the cooking front, she had trouble getting anything more than simple instructions out to us.
The food, however, was excellent. Everything was simple, fresh, organic and delicious. Olive oil was fresh, homemade, cold pressed virgin olive oil. Cheese was from the lady down the street. Phyllo pastry was from the next village. Vegetables from her garden. It was all pretty interesting to see how everyday Turks eat.
The stuffed peppers used dry, uncooked rice inside, mixed with other ingredients. Cool.
Here we fried zucchini for a cold veggie dish for later, and sautéed a sauce to stuff inside eggplants.
Apparently one of the reasons Beth can't get enough of eggplant is because it contains nicotine (it's a relative of the tobacco plant). Surprisingly, it also contains almost no noticeable amounts of vitamins.... Weird.
Now for the important part.....cheese rolls! My Mum always used to complain about how annoying it was to work with the phyllo pastry to make Ross and my treasured "tiropita" cheese rolls...this phyllo pastry was really easy to use.
Abby and Robin made the hand squeezed patties for this cold lentil, bulgar and spices appetizer.
Fry baby fry....
Within abount an hour and a half, we'd finished our seven or eight dishes and sat down to eat. The appetizers were fantastic.
The mains - stuffed eggplant and stuffed peppers were great too.
We washed it all down with a local wine that Robin pointed out would be a great drink in Inappropriate World. This cooking class, though the food was great and the setting was really nice, was one of our least favourite. We've done seven (Japan, Vietnam x2, Malaysia, Thailand, India and now Turkey) classes on this trip - all have been very different. The ones we liked the most was where the host was able to really interact - explaining not only about the food but also about local customs and what was happening locally and nationally. You can really learn a lot over the course of preparing a meal, and we didn't really get much out of this one. Additionally, the recipes were just "listed" on the woman's website - not much effort was given in the presentation of the course.
Well, we left with full bellies, so there's that!
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