From sun and chirping birds I arrived to the up-to-the-knee snow. It took 1.5 hours to get from Istanbul to Sapanca and then 2.5 hours to drive up to our farmhouse. We stopped by the car workshop to put on tire chains. We then lost one of the chains as we climbed the hill and stopped to look for it and fix it again. We dropped the car by the gate and climbed the last 100 meters with bags and new gas cylinder through the up-to-the-knee snow and the complete darkness. There had been no electricity since the morning. Very typical for this winter.

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My mother-in-law’s kitchen assistant has left and the weekend has come. 30 hours at the kitchen. I don’t know if I should write about the complexities of working with the family members (read - husbands), the joys of having good relationships with your Turkish mother-in-law, the power of yoga to keep your body going after you fall on a wet staircase and hurt your back, mundanity of skinning tomatoes, dreams of hamam, reminiscences of my consulting job which also required working under pressure, the irony of fate which got me back into long hours after I ran away from them and emptiness in my head after all that. There must be a major theme to this weekend and to the post. And I think it is how being bound can be so empowering.

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Making dolma (Turkish for any stuffed dish) calls for so many steps and so much patience that I like to keep it for the days when you cook for the whole week ahead. Waiting for your rice to soak, simmer, steam, cool down and then get cooked in dolma becomes less painstaking if meanwhile you are preparing meat stock to make a soup or pressure cooking chickpeas to turn them into hummus.

This Sunday could have been such a cooking-ahead-day but turned different: the snowfall closed the way up to our farmhouse at the Istanbul countryside. Which meant that early morning we put together a huge breakfast for the guests who arrived the night before and relaxed for the rest of the day as no one else dared the steep hill taking you 500 m above the sea level. Once the breakfast was over we were so happy with the sun and snow that immediately put the rice to soak and went out to made a snowman.

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I have got unexpected feedback to my speech at the recent tourism conference in Ukraine: I was talking about how to develop and launch a niche tourism product (aka my Istanbul food walks and cooking classes). After my presentation another speaker approached me, “Olga, you look like a very happy person! Indeed what one needs to be happy - job that you love and family that supports you”. Indeed while we may picture happiness as a definitive climax with the bad guys killed and the good ones kissing with sparkles in the sky as a backdrop happiness often times comes in simpler and not-so-glorious aspects.

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I am used to being a foreigner. For the past 10 years I am. Through my travels and living abroad. Even in my home country. “You speak Russian without an accent“, - a Moscow taxi driver notes. “I am a native” - I murmur.

Being a foreigner is always discriminating - in a very cool but also very annoying way. On the one hand you get a license to do outrageous things that violate local customs. Yet on the other hand you are never given full excess to the local living. And you are constantly balancing between keeping your identity (and sanity) and yet integrating.

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Baking is just like your boyfriend going for a boys’ night out. In baking you can only hope you have picked a reliable recipe and measured your ingredients right. Stove top cooking always gives you a chance to open the lead and fix things going wrong. Not the baking: once you send your creation to the oven you can’t control the outcome anymore. Same with the boys’ night out. If you pick the right guy in whom you trust and if you have enough self-confidence you can wish him a great boys’ night out with a light heart.

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