Doesn't pay to cook

If you know anything about us, you know we love our food experiences but after a few months of traveling to countries with culinary habits and ingredients different from ours, we decided that we missed our own home cooking. To remedy this we booked a cozy Airbnb place in the European side of Istanbul and started the laborious task of deciding what it was that we were actually going to cook...

Culinary negotiations and indecision surpassed (lest we forget that A and I do come from opposite sides of Europe), we set off to the nearest shop to get our precious ingredients.

It felt amazing to finally have a home cooked meal over a couple of beers and we were as happy as could be but after a couple of days we realized that unlike most places we know, home cooking seemed to cost more than actually eating out.

Don't get me wrong, the ingredients were not expensive nor were we specifically looking for fancy stuff. It is just that food from regular places in Turkey is so inexpensive that it literally doesn't pay to cook!

In our 3 weeks in Turkey we visited 6 different cities/towns and everywhere we came to the same conclusion. With gigantic Turkish breakfasts, that usually served as lunch as well, costing about 4 to 5 euro for two people (including coffee) it is almost impossible to make your own cost effective meal under that price.

In Istanbul we had the best lahmacun ever! Simple, with a squirt of lemon and a touch of coriander, it cost us 40 Lira. In Antalya, we had a breakfast that covered a table and a half with cheeses, honey, jams, olives, fried eggs and sausage for 80 lira! Healthy kebabs (none of those fatty sauces you'd see in Europe, just lean meat and veggies) for 45 Lira! Our biggest splurge was a 3 course dinner in a Goreme restaurant during a snowstorm which had us both celebrating our taste buds and struggling to breathe from the sheer quantity of delicious food we had just ingested and even that was under 10 euro per person!

Turkey is a lot of fun for food lovers with plenty of variety on offer depending on where you visit and prices that will make you decide to definitely splurge on extra starters. It is simple delicious!

And if you are traveling and didn't want to cook in the first place, well, it's the country with the perfect excuse: it simply doesn't pay to cook!