Turkish Delight

Merhaba! On our last day of Week 4, and the last day of Summer school, we travelled to a country that bridges between the Asian and European continents, Turkey. It is another country where Nanako spent her earlier childhood. In fact she will be spending one week of her Summer this year in Istanbul and Izmir to see her old friends and teachers. She is happy to bring back stories from the country we learnt about today after we all come back from our trips over the long break. Our specialty food for today was Turkish ice-cream called Dondurma famous for being sticky and elastic. Its texture is made from two ingredients unique in Turkey: 1) salep, orchid root powder and 2) mastic, resin from a mastic tree. Since these ingredients are banned outside of the country, we could not make real dondurma but we replaced the ingredients with something we can get in Japan – natto! But before we could add in the secret spice, we needed to make the ice-cream first. We prepared one big zip lock bag and into it we put two trays of ice and 6 tbsp of rock salt. Then in a small zip lock bag, we put 300ml of fresh cream, 2 tbsp of castor sugar and 1 tsp of vanilla essence and made sure that it was tightly shut. We then placed the smaller bag inside the bigger bag and covered the two bags with a towel while we shook them, shook them, shook them, shook them, shook them! After ten minutes of good shaking, all the while we sang a song that was originally introduced by Sheree with a bit of arrangement (the song went like this: ‘shake it, shake it, shake it as it goes, shake it, shake it and pass it to your friends’), we felt the cream getting harder. However, it didn’t get as hard as it did when Nanako experimented at home so we decided to leave the bag in the freezer for another few minutes before we could taste it. For our morning activity, we had a couple of things to do.   There were colored beans – in yellow, red, blue, green and purple - to count and pick up with chopsticks and put them into colored cups of the same colors as the beans. For some friends, it was difficult to pick up the beans with chopsticks but Kosei patiently completed the task! Well done! On the big table, we continued making different shapes with the basil play dough. We also had a tray with colored ice cubes which we touched with our hands. The ice felt ‘cold’ and ‘nice’ while it melted and the colors mixed into rainbow colors. On the small table, there were some Turkish flags to color in. For this flag we only used red to color around the crescent shaped moon and star shining next to it. Next to the flag coloring activity, some friends made their own ice cream cones with colored tissue paper and sparkles. Since the rain never stopped today, instead of going to the park, we moved our bodies in the classroom! First we played the musical chair on a song called, ‘kiss Kiss’ sang by a Turkish singer, Tarkan. Each time we counted the number of chairs and friends, we counted in Turkish: bir, iki uch, dort, besh, altu, yedi, sekiz. The next activity was called Stop and Go. For this activity we listened to a couple of different songs and each time we moved according to the music, sometimes we became robots, snakes, rabbits and so on, and when the music stopped we all stopped! We also played a charade game on the white board to where we drew a picture of any food of our choice and our friends and teachers had to guess! It was fun trying to pretend being a teacher and guessing what our friends were drawing on the board. For our circle time, we reviewed how to count in Turkish using a big piece of paper on to which we stuck ice-cream cones and ice cream scoops. We each had a chance to choose one cone and the scoops of ice cream that matched with the number written on the cone. Since there were eight friends we made eight ice cream cones in all. After the counting, we sang a song that is quite similar to ‘Old MacDonald had a Farm’ called ‘Ali Babanin chiftli.’ We learnt how to say roosters (horozlari), lambs (kuzulari), dogs (Kopekleri) and cats (Kedileri) in Turkish. It is funny how there are different sounds of animals in different countries!After our nap time, we tasted the home made ‘dondurma’ ice cream and opened the five containers to find out what were inside and the five things were: coffee beans, flour, rice, corn seeds and rosemary! Hoşçakal for now! All our Love, Nanako and Darren