Cooking Class in Photos

Last week I took a wonderful class at a culinary school called Cooking Alaturka in Sultanahment, a famously historic neighborhood located pretty far south of where I live. The class was in English, required no previous cooking experience, and accepted Euros, Dollars, or Lira (geared toward travelers, perhaps?). Though I was the only one under age 35, living in Istanbul, and there alone, the old fogies who took the class were quite pleasant. We had lot of fun preparing five dishes and sitting down to a served course-by-course lunch. The menu: stuffed eggplants (the Turkish name is Imam Bayaldi, which literally means the Imam fainted with joy, or he fainted when he saw the amount of olive oil in the dish), zucchini pancakes with garlic yogurt (kabak mueveri), bulgur and red lentil soup (ezogelin corbasi), grape leaves stuffed with meat (etli yaprak dolmasi), and syrup-soaked semolina cookies (sekerpare). Here are some shots of our creations.

Syruping the cookies. Why bake plain, old dry cookies when you remove your hot baked goods from the oven and drench them in melted sugar?
The hot stuffed grape leaves (commonly known as domas) with some cooking liquid as a sauce and a side of yogurt.
The final presentation of the cookies, topped with a hazelnut and sprinkled with grated coconut and crushed pistachios
The dolmas before we put the lid on to steam.

Brewing Turkish coffee over a high flame in the traditional pot
Rolling the dolmas in grape leaves
Painting an egg wash on the cookies
Our stuffed eggplants