A Wedding Dish

In Turkish culture, it is a common custom to cook and serve some dishes in the concept of a traditional wedding ceremony. This old tradition still exists in especially our villages. The wedding hosts prepare some special dishes and serve them to their guests on the wedding day. As Turkish people love helping each other, they prepare these dishes together on that day. They cook in large boilers since there are hundreds of guests. The guests first have their meals and then dance accompanied by a very small band. Chickpeas stew is one of the most famous dishes served on a wedding day. The Picture you see here is from one of my friend’s wedding, that’s why the boiler is so big. But in this recipe I will give small amount of ingredients, just for 4 people, not for hundreds.

Ingredients
2 cups chickpeas, soaked overnight
½ cup meat, diced
3 onions, chopped big
1 green pepper, chopped (optional)
1 red bell pepper, chopped (optional)
1 tbsp pepper or tomato paste
2 tbsp olive oil
2 tsp salt
2 tsp cumin
3 cups hot water

Put the meat in a pot and cook it until tender (for about 30 minutes), pour little water if neccessary.

After the meat is soft enough, add olive oil, peppers and onions. Saute them until golden.

Dilute tomato or pepper paste with little water in a small bowl and pour it into the pot. Then add chickpeas and 3 cups hot water. Season with salt and cumin. Cumin is the spice which gives the taste of the dish, so do not skip it. Then put the lid on and cook it until the chickpeas soften.

You can serve this main dish with pilaf and cacik.

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Yann Tiersen Cookies

Please congratulate me… I finally achieved to cook these yummy cookies. Don’t ask how many times I tried. I just don’t want to count. After each failure, I promised myself not to try again. However, I couldn’t help breaking my promise as I see great cookie photos on the net. I did it at last.

This morning, when I woke up, I had the same feeling: Craving for cookies! I tried to be positive as I believe in the power of positive feeling. I opened my window to get some fresh air, watched the rain for a while, turned on the music player (playing Yann Tiersen) and found myself preparing the cookie ingredients once again.

The result was great! That’s what my husband and brother said with “yummmmm!” sound effect. So how did it come?

Ingredients
•    1 cup sugar
•    1 egg
•    1 stick (125gr) butter, room temperature
•    ½ lemon, zest grated
•    2 tsp lemon juice
•    2 cups flour
•    2 tsp ginger
•    1 tsp baking powder
•    Pounded almonds and whole almonds for garnish

Preheat the oven to 180C (356F)

Mix egg and sugar until smooth. Add butter and go on mixing. The mixture should be creamy. Put grated lemon zest and lemon juice in it. Now add flour and ginger little by little and mix it with a spoon. The dough shouldn’t be too hard or too soft. Take small pieces, first roll them, then flatten.

Put the pounded almonds in a bowl. Roll the flattened cookies in the pounded almonds and put them on greased  sheet. Finally place whole almonds on cookies. And bake it for 15 minutes. When they are done, do not leave them in the oven. Take the tray out. Let them cold. And serve these cookies with a cup of tea.

You can not guess how I’m happy with them, my first success on cookies.

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Lets Gather (for Kisir)

If a few Turkish women meet at a friend’s house, it’s unavoidable for them to make this delicious pounded wheat (bulgur) dish. It’s called KISIR.

I don’t know why or what makes this dish so popular, so precious, but I haven’t met a Turkish woman who refuses kisir. Even the idea of making kisir is enough to excite them. Of course, it’s not a woman’s dish (if there is such a classification…), there are a lot of men who are big fans of it, as well. But still, it has a different role in women’s life in Turkey. It’s the reason for meeting, a tasty way of saying “welcome” to new neighbors, and so on. Each may create their own reason. The main ingredient of kisir is bulgur (pounded wheat) and the amount of it depends on the number of people there. If there are 3 people, 3 cups bulgur is enough. However, women always add one more cup as they think that an unexpected guest may come just when they start to eat.

In fact, it’s one of those easy to prepare dishes. It is ready to eat in just 15 or 20 minutes. Kisir is not a main dish, but not a side dish either. It can be considered as a kind of appetizer which can be eaten at any time. So here are the ingredients.

Ingredients (serving: 2)
•    2 cups bulgur ( take your unexpected guests in consideration)
•    1 onion
•    3 cloves garlic
•    Half bunch of parsley
•    Half bunch of scallion
•    1 tomato
•    1 cucumber
•    ½ cup lemon juice
•    1 tbsp pepper (or tomato) paste
•    Olive oil
•    Salt
•    Cumin
•    Dried mint
•    Red pepper flakes
•    Hot water
•    ½ cup olive oil
•    2 tbsp sour pomegranate souce

Put bulgur in a large bowl. Put salt, cumin, dried mint and pepper flakes (1 tsp of each) on it. Then pour hot water in the bowl until the surface of bulgur. Cover it with a piece of cloth or with a lid and let it to be brewed until bulgur is softened. About 10 minutes will be ok.

Meanwhile, you can prepare the other ingredients. Chop garlic, parsley, scallion, tomato, cucumber In a large bowl and add lemon juice in it. Put it aside.

Dice the onion and saute it in olive oil until golden, add tomato/pepper paste in it and stir just one minute.

Now you will combine everything. First, check your soaked bulgur if it’s softened enough. If it’s ok, add sauted onion in it and mix them together with a spoon. Add sour pomegranate sauce in it and mix it (if you don’t have this souce, increase the amount of lemon juice). Then add all chopped vegeables with lemon juice. Mix it for the last time and that’s it! You can serve it with some leaves of lettuce and pepper pickles.

Enjoy it with your friends. Never alone!

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Reddish Appetite

Red Bell Peppers are great idea for breakfast. In a traditional Turkish breakfast, we generally have cheese, green and black olives, egg, jam, honey, sliced tomatoes and cucumbers. These are just the things coming to my mind.

It’s not common to have just cereals or fruit as breakfast. We love big breakfast! As everyone knows, breakfast is the most important meal of a day. If you ask me, I can not think of a life without breakfast. Some poeple don’t feel like eating in the morning, I’m just the opposite. At night, you can find me planning what to eat in the morning. One of our famous poets, Cemal Süreya says “Breakfast must have a strong relation with happiness”. That summarizes what I think about breakfast.

Apart from the common elements in our breakfast, we also like creating some special tastes.  Red Pepper is just one of them (I live write the other ones later). You can either have it just after preparing or keep it in a jar in refrigerator to eat later. You can keep it in this way for months.

Ingredients
•    5 red bell peppers
•    5 cloves garlic, sliced
•    A few leaves of dill
•    A few leaves of parsley
•    ½ cup vinegar
•    ½ cup olive oil
•    salt

Wash the peppers, remove their seeds and chop them big. Put these peppers and sliced garlic in a pot, pour vinegar into it. Cook them together until tender. Then add olive oil and salt, and saute the peppers, but not much. Take the pot from the stove let them get cold, but it shouldn’t be too cold. It will just lose heat. Then add the leaves of dill and parsley (chopped big), mix them with a spoon. It’s ready to eat.

If you increase the amount of ingredients, you can put it in a jar and whenever you want, make a surprise with it to your family. You will see these red bell peppers will add more color and more taste, thus more appetite to your breakfast tables.

Enjoy!

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Haricot Beans with Pastirma Recipe

Pastirma is Turkish traditional type of meat. Let me give a very brief history of Pastirma.

In ancient times, Turks, who lived in Central Asia invented this type of meat thanks to the hard life conditions they had. They had a nomadic life, so they had to find their own solutions for certain problems. One of those problems was how to keep meat for long times. As they were not a kind of settled community, they couldn’t put meat in deep wells (as they did later when they settled). So how could they keep meat without any decay?

Here is their solution: First seasoning meat with various spices and fenugreek seeds, and then drying it under sun. After drying it, they put this meat into their saddlebags on their horses and they hit the trail. The meat was no longer raw when dried under the heat of sun and tightened in saddlebags, which also got warm and helped meat cook by rubbing horses while they were in motion. They could keep meat for months with this method.

Today, pastirma is still produced from beef meat, but of course not with this method. There are private companies which produce pastirma in hygienic atmospheres. Among the cities of Turkey, Kayseri is famous for its pastirma.

Every Turkish person loves pastirma even despite its high price. They either use it in some dishes or eat it bare as an appetizer.

The most popular dish with pastirma is Haricot Beans with Pastirma. And here is the recipe:

Ingredients
•    2 cup haricot beans (serving: 6)
•    1 onion, diced
•    1 green pepper, chopped
•    ½ cup olive oil
•    100gr pastirma, the seasoned part is removed, sliced thin
•    ½ tbsp tomato paste
•    ½ tbsp pepper paste
•    1 tsp cumin
•    1,5 tsp salt

Soak the beans in a large bowl overnight. They should wait at least 8 hours before cooking.

Then, the following day, sieve beans in a clean pot and boil them in 1lt water until they are tender. You can do this in a very short time (even without soaking beans) if you boil them in a pressure cooker. But as I still don’t know how to use it, I do the first method. Sieve the beans in a bowl and put it aside.

In another pot, saute onion with olive oil until golden. Add gren pepper and saute them together. After they are softened, add tomato and pepper paste, stir it. Then add pastirma and beans together. Sprinkle salt and cumin in it. Stir it a few times. Now pour some water (the level of water should be a bit higher than the beans). Cook for 20 minutes over medium heat. Check the beans, if they are not soft enough, cook it more. You can reach the highest pleasure by eating this delicious dish with pilaf and some pickles.

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Broccoli Soup Recipe

As you can guess now, I’m a great lover of vegetables. Especially in Winter, when I eat vegetable, I feel I’m getting more and more healthy. Broccoli is just one of them. This green vegetable is gaining more fame in Turkey day by day. It has at most a-10- year history here. Before that, it wasn’t known enough. For some years, we read and hear that broccoli has many vitamins and elements fighting with many diseases, especially cancer.

Today, almost all women in Turkey, are struggling with their husbands or children to make them eat this magical green. As we don’t have a child, my victim is my husband. I won the fight with this broccoli soup. As he is a real meat lover, he didn’t want to have such vegetables until this soup. You can’t believe; he wanted the second bowl.

So here is the recipe:

Ingredients

•    Half bunch of broccoli
•    1 small carrot
•    1 celery stalk
•    1 cup milk
•    1 tbsp flour
•    1 tbsp butter
•    2 cups hot water
•    2 cups meat(or chicken, your choice) broth
•    2 tsp salt
•    1 tsp balck pepper
•    2 tbsp cream

Wash and clean broccoli, carrot and celery stalk. Chop into big pieces.

Melt the butter in a pot and add flour in it. Saute it until golden. Pour milk in it and stir. Now put the chopped vegetables and stir for 5 minutes.

Now pour  2 cups meat broth and hot water. Add salt and bring it to boil.

After 20 minutes, when the vegetables are tender, take the pot from the flame. Puree the vegetables using a blender until smooth.

Then put the pot (if you like, change the pot with a clean one) on the flame back. Add black pepper and simmer it for 10 minutes. At this point, everyone at home should have the magical smell and come to the kitchen.

Before serving, garnish it with a tbsp cream.

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Celery and Leek Stew Recipe

These vegetables are my favorite. Raw or cooked, either way makes me happy. Especially the fascinating smell of celery is enough to make me desirous to eat. I’m totally against wasting food, so I use the celery root for this dish while adding its stalk into my boiling soup. Then the entire house smells celery.

I must admit that my husband is fed up with this dish as I cook it very often. He starts to threaten me with complaining me to Obama. He says, as Obama is considered as the saver and the one who will find solutions for the problems in the world, and as a real democrat, he should solve this problem between us. I don’t know whether Obama listens to this complaint, but I’m sure he likes this vegetable dish if he gives it a chance. Here are the ingredients:

•    2 celery roots, diced
•    2 stalks leek, chopped
•    1 carrot, diced
•    A few leaves of cabbage, chopped
•    1 cup boiled chickpeas
•    ½ tomato paste
•    ½ lemon, squeezed
•    2 tbsp olive oil
•    Salt
•    1 cup hot water
•    ½  tsp sugar

Saute the diced carrot with olive oil in a pot. Add ½ tsp sugar and stir. Then diced celery roots, chopped leek stalks and cabbage go into the pot. Put the lid on and cook it for 10 minutes.

Now it’s chickpeas’ turn to combine with the others.

In a small bowl, mix tomato paste and  little water and add it into the pot to make your dish colored. Pour the hot water on them, add lemon juice and salt. Put the lid on again and do not open it for 20 minutes.

Enjoy it thinking how healthy you are with this vegetable dish.

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Milas Meatballs Recipe

This meatballs stew is a special dish of  Milas, Bodrum/Turkey. Unlike the other types of meatballs, this one is cooked with soem vegetables in hot water. You can serve this main dish with any kind of pilaf and salad or yogurt. I learnt this dish from my mother- in- law, who is from there. As I love adding something special from myself, I put some sliced garlic. This makes it more tasty.

Ingredients

200gr minced meat
2tbsp flour
1 egg
1tsp black pepper
3tsp salt
2 middle size potato, diced
4 garlic cloves, sliced
1 onion, diced
½ cup boiled chickpeas
½ pepper paste (or tomato paste)
2 tbsp olive oil
½ lemon, squeezed
3 cup hot water

Preparing meatballs:

Put minced meat in a bowl. Break the egg on it. Combine flour with them. Sprinkle 1 tsp black pepper and 1 tsp salt in it. Knead it well. Then pick small pieces from this mixture and roll them. Roast them in a pan for 5 minutes, until they cahnge color. You don’t need to put oil in the pan (or if needed, roast them with just 1 tbsp olive oil)Then take the roasted meatballs on a plate.

Cooking the dish:

Saute onion with olive oil in a pot until golden. Add pepper or tomato paste in it. Stir well. Then put diced potatoes and sliced garlic in it. Pour 1 cup hot water and cook it 5 minutes. When ther are about to soften, pour the rest of the hot water and add roasted meatballs and boiled chickpeas in it. Sprinkle 2 tsp salt, and add lemon juice. Put the lid on. After 30 minutes, Milas meatballs will be ready.

Enjoy it!

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Grilled Chicken Recipe

I love chicken dishes, but grilled chicken is my favorite. This may be your main dish, but it is a kind of appetizer for me and my husband as we like eating this chicken with glasses of beer. Many people prefer french fries with their beer, but grilled chicken is better for us. We cook it on an electric griller. The smell of the chicken on griller is as scrumptious as its taste. If you don’t have a griller, you can cook it in oven, as well.

Ingredients
•    500gr chicken wing pieces (depends on the number of people)
•    Salt
•    Dried thyme
•    Cayenne pepper

Wash the chicken pieces and drain. Sprinkle all spices on them. Incorporate all of them.

Place the chicken wing on your griller and roast them by turning occasionally. After this first group is grilled enough, take them from the griller and put on a plate. Without wasting time, place the second group of chicken and while they are roasting, you can eat the ones you’ve put on a plate accompanied by a large glass of beer.

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Kaki (Persimmon) Puree, The Saver

Kaki (Persimmon) is called “Hurma” in Turkish. We grow kakis in our yard. Most people do not know this orange colored fruit even in some regions of Turkey. Luckily, we have it in our yard. I know that kakis are originally from Far East. But it can be grown in certain parts of our country. You should wait until they are ripen enough, they should be so soft that you can not hold it hard. If it is not soft enough, you will have a stringent taste in your mouth. There are also some species which are edible hard, but stil they are more yummy when soft.

This magical fruit can save you from a friend/child begging for dessert at a night time. So here is the simplest recipe of night dessert/ snack.

Ingredients
•    3 kakis
•    1 tsp cinnamon
•    Almond

Put the kakis in a food processor and mash them. Pour it in a bowl. Sprinkle cinnamon, mix it. Garnish it with almond pieces. That’s it! This is not only yummy but also a healthy way of soothing your appetite.

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