Fun in the Kitchen

I've always enjoyed cooking and experimenting in the kitchen, so I'm having a lot of fun learning what foods I can get here and trying to figure out what I can create with them!  When we first arrived, our good friends who live here brought us a bag of groceries to get us started, which was so thoughtful and helpful!  Justin also could navigate the grocery store pretty well, so he picked us up a few staples too.  So our first full day in Turkey, we ate grilled cheese sandwiches and corn for lunch, with sliced apples on the side.

Then we had spaghetti and meatballs for dinner!

Justin had found these premade refrigerated meatballs at the store, and we just combined them with the pasta and sauce our friends had given.  The peas and carrots we found frozen at the grocery store, so it turned out to be a simple AND delicious meal!

The pasta sauce is expensive and hard to find in a jar, though, so today I attempted to make my own with what I could find at our local store (and the Italian Seasoning I had brought).  It wasn't too bad for a first attempt!

Elias and I also made our first attempt at banana bread a few days after we arrived.  (He and I always made it together at home.)  He likes the measuring and mixing, but his favorite part is licking the bowl!

I thought I'd point out a few things from the above photo, especially for those of you who have lived overseas before and might have such questions.

• Starting from the left side of the picture: The bread pan is really long and narrow.  It ended up cooking about the same length of time as a 9x5 pan, although with the temperature conversion to Celsius and my weird convection oven, who knows how it really compares?!  
• The white bottle is refrigerated milk!  (Many countries only have milk that is kept unrefrigerated on a shelf, and that's what we were expecting to find here.  Even the shelf-stable milk here isn't bad, but the refrigerator milk is DELICIOUS and not very expensive.  Win!)  
• Then in the red bowl up front, we made our own brown sugar by mixing white sugar with molasses. 
• The oil is sunflower oil - they don't have vegetable oil or canola oil here, so that's what we've got for a light oil!

It baked up very well though, and was DELICIOUS!  (In fact, some of the best we've ever made.  I suspect it's because we used real sugar - we used to use Splenda in the States.)  Elias approves!