When my suitemates and I first started getting to know each other, they were appalled by how picky of an eater I was. I told them I was always open to try new things, but the family I grew up with wasn’t one that spent much time in the kitchen or at the dinner table. Because of this, my suitemate decided that every Sunday night we would all work together to make a home cooked meal so that I would be able to try new things, and so I decided that choosing recipes from M Omur Akkur’s cook book "Ottoman Cuisine: A Rich Culinary Tradition" would be a good idea for my modern Middle East midterm, considering I would have been cooking something new anyway. So this past Sunday, everyone got to try something new.
The first thing we started with, logically, was reading through the cookbook. Some of the things in the cookbook seemed silly to even attempt because all of the ingredients sounded gross to us, even considering the fact that we were trying new things. Other things in the book would have costed too much. My overall goal was to find recipes with as few ingredients as possible so I wouldn’t have to spend too much money. This also out ruled a few of the recipes that needed expensive cookware as well as having too many ingredients. Luckily for me I was planning on going home for the weekend so my mother offered to buy what she could while I was home, which made the experience good for my bank account, thankfully.
As soon as I got back to Hofstra my suitemates and I headed to our building’s kitchen and spent a total of about three hours preparing the three dishes. We definitely should have organized the counter a little bit more before we started because the entire table was an unsolved puzzle of all of our ingredients. I started to work on the three dishes from the book while my two suitemates prepared their own (very American) dessert.
I chose to make the chicken kebab dish, the cheese cutlets, and the bean patties out of Akkur’s book. Since the chicken needed to be marinated, I started with preparing that. It quickly became a struggle. I didn’t have a grater for the onion, so decided to chop the onion as finely as I could. This took me a while just because of all the times I had to walk away and wait until my eyes stopped burning. The next issue I had was the fact that I had accidentally bought cinnamon sugar as opposed to plain cinnamon, but overall I think it benefitted the end product. At that point I already assumed the rest of the dinner was going to be a disaster since I had already messed up the chicken recipe’s main components, but I kept going.
At the same time, I asked my roommate to boil some salt water for the green beans in order to save time. Once it was boiling I set my half hour timer to cook the beans in addition to the hour long timer for the chicken to marinate. From there, I moved onto the cheese cutlet. This is where my roommates started to help me. All the cheese cutlet required was wax paper, olive oil, mozzarella or cheddar cheese (I decided on mozzarella), and thyme. It seemed like it would be simple, but it wasn’t. In the words of my suitemate they “tasted like really shitty garlic bread.” The first finished product and they were a complete failure. I really wasn’t looking forward to seeing how the other two would turn out.
At that point the chicken was still marinating, and the beans were still supposed to cook for another ten minutes, so I got started on making the mixture for the bean patties. This was one of the easier parts of the cooking I did. Once the beans were strained, cooled, and chopped and the olive oil was heated up enough to fry them, I began putting spoonful after spoonful into the frying pan. 15 people in my dorm tried it and the resident assistant of the floor below us was the only person who disliked them. My faith in the cooking project was restored just in time for the chicken to be cooked.
Akkur mentioned in the book that with the chicken, “the more butter you use the tastier the chicken will be.” I decided to test this out. Akkur was certainly right, my suite mates and I all agreed. We also all thought the chicken was the best dish. Even the resident assistant liked the chicken. When I had started preparing the chicken, I thought it was going to be awful. I didn’t think mixing cinnamon and onion could possibly end up tasting good. I’m glad I was proven to be wrong.
As difficult as it was trying to get everything organized enough to cook the three dishes simultaneously, I had an overall great experience. I spent time with my suitemates, made new friends in my building, cooked a whole meal by myself for my first time, and tasted some very unique, and for the most part good, food. Cooking for a midterm is the raddest thing ever.
