What’s their secret? “Certainly not her cooking style,” he laughs as he walks to the stove. “On our first date, I asked her if she could cook. ‘Sure,’ she said, full of confidence. Turns out she was bluffing. She was still living with her parents and her mother cooked for her. In our first year together she tried to cook more often, but I’d be standing there impatiently and didn’t really give her the space to try things out on her own. When she got the hang of it she was off like a train. Now she cooks really well, but she prefers not to have me around. She follows recipes, whereas I cook by intuition. Maybe that’s also a typically Dutch thing.”

As a surprise, the box of Turkish delight from Turkey, intended for Christmas, is opened after dinner to loud cheers from the children. And amid all the bustle, nobody noticed that Can had accidentally used buckwheat instead of lentils.

Post scriptum

Our conversation took place before the earthquake. Asked how his loved ones are doing now, Can replied: “My parents live in Istanbul nowadays so they are safe, but luckily my family members in Adana are also ok. Some of them are now at temporary accommodations but what matters most is that they are safe. I have experienced as a teenager a big earthquake in late 90s in Adana and we had to sleep outside in cars for a week. I remember having nightmares as a young man during those times. I have not lost any loved one but it haunted me for a long time. However what happened now is nothing comparable to anything I have seen or heard of. The trauma of surviving such a tragedy on such a massive scale is very difficult to cope with. It is not an easy thing for any community to lose everything; your family, your friends, your school, your livelihood, your whole life within minutes. And now there are thousands of communities, and dozens of cities which has to endure this en masse. In addition these earthquakes has also revealed to the whole world how corruption combined with neglecting meritocracy in crisis management can lead to massacre of possibly hundreds of thousands of lives. And this is the part that makes me frustrated, and should make everyone frustrated. So we can all learn a lesson out of this.”