Syriana

On Saturday I was fortunate to be invited to a cooking class at the fort's soon to be closing hostel. The instructor has been using the house I've been staying in to write and I'll likely assist her with tearing down her garden in the next few weeks.

She invited me to come and participate in her Syrian cooking class and all I had to do was stay a bit later and help clean up. It was a lot of fun to learn how simple cooking this type of food was. I admit, sometimes I am intimidated to cook foods from different countries because of the complicated list of ingredients or being fearful of being completely unable to mimic the flavors. This was a good lesson in stepping outside that comfort zone. We made quite a few dishes, but in general made breads and different dips. I was in charge of making two different dry dips, one mostly of thyme and hazelnuts and the other of thyme and sesame seeds - the "dips" are to be used with bread which is dipped first into olive oil and then the dry dips.

There was also an olive salad, which I hate in general, but it wasn't bad, a roasted red pepper hummus-like dip, cucumbers and tomatoes, and then the breads. We learned how to make pita bread, sesame rings (bread shaped like a ring with sesame seeds on it) and then beureks. The beureks are similar to calzones, and one group made a filling out of swiss chard, kale and some other stuff, and then we formed a little pocket to stuff it in to then we baked it. It wasn't as yummy as I was hoping, however once you put olive oil and used some of the dips, it worked out. The instructor also made homemade goat cheese, which was interesting, but when you mixed everything together is was tasty.

an example of a beurek, although ours weren't as pretty

example of a dry dip - this is supposed to be thyme and sesame, ours looked better though cause we used fresh thyme

Example of a sesame ring, pre-cooked