April 25^th, I take a cooking class at Cooking Alaturka.  The owner, chef, is Evangeline.  She’s from Amsterdam, French trained, a world traveler.  We made Karmyarik, an eggplant and minced meat dish; yayla corbasi, a yogurt soup, zenyinyagli taze fasulye; green runner beans in olive oil with garlic, onion and tomato; kabak mueveri, zucchini patties with herbs and cheese and for dessert, incir tathsi, walnut stuffed figs in syrup.  After a hard morning of prep and cooking we all sat down and ate our feast in the little restaurant that fronts Evangeline’s cooking school.  My fellow classmates were a couple from Denver, a mother and daughter from Oregon and an air traffic controller from Barcelona.  (He told me that in Spain at the present anyone can pay to go to air traffic controller school and they’ve shortened the course from two years to six months!  Yikes.)  The food was delicious and the company interesting.