I love green olives more than black ones, maybe because they are preserved by mom. We generally have them in form of salad for breakfast (Green Olive Salad). Believe me it is so appetizing and helps you wake up. This bruchetta recipe just came to my mind when I was preparing breakfast at the weekend. I thought combining seperate breakfast foods on top of crispy bread slices would be perfect. Fortunately, I wasn’t wrong. This has become another favorite recipe of us with green olives since then.

Heat oven at 180C.

Cut the bread in slices. Drizzle olive oil over slices and place them in an oven tray. Cook them for about 15 minutes until golden and crispy.

Mix rest of the ingredients and share it on each slice. Serve when bread slices are still warm. They are quite fine when cold, too but I prefer warm.

Cut the avocado lengthwise. Tap its pit gently with a knife and make it hold the pit and pull the knife with enough force to discard the pit. Then scoop out its inside with a spoon and transfer into a bowl.
Add olive oil and mix it with a fork to make it creamy.
Add cheese, parsley, garlic and salt and mix.
Spread it on bread slices and garnish with red pepper flakes.
Note: Prepare this dip just before eating so that it doesn’t get brownish.

Preheat the oven at 200C.

Lay baking sheet in a baking dish. Place red bell peppers in it and roast them in oven until soft about 30 minutes.

Peel them and cut lengthwise into two.

Combine feta with parsley.

Put 1 tbsp feta and parsley mixture on the wide edge and roll. Repeat it for the other half and second pepper.

Place them on a plate, drizzle olive oil on them and serve.

When I saute spinach, I use all parts of it, but when I add it to salads as raw, I just use the leaves. So what will happen to its stalks? Will they end up in garbage can? No way!

I save them in a plastic bag and store in freezer to use them later either to make soup or this breakfast food with egg.

I would love to hear if you have any other ideas to use spinach stalks.

Boil spinach stalk until tender for about 15 minutes and drain.

Preheat the oven at 200C.

Transfer it to a small baking dish when it is still hot.

Add butter and mix it with stalks until it melts.

Sprinkle salt and pepper.

Make a hole in the center with a spoon and break an egg in that hole.

Cook it in oven until egg is done. You can understand it from its white.

Toss in cheese when you take it from oven and serve hot.

Crepe is one of these special foods that we have at Sunday breakfasts. I didn’t know the difference between pancake and crepes before starting to this blog and getting more interested in food blogs. I thought they are the same, but no I was wrong. Pancake is much thicker than crepes. I don’t know it’s origin, but crepes is very common in Turkish cuisine. We make it thin, so we don’t have pancake here.

I learnt how to make crepes with the help of a friend and my experiments. When we were with some friends one day, I asked what special food they prepare for breakfast. One of them said that crepes is on top of her breakfast list. Although I had eaten crepes several times at different places, I had never tried to make it. My friend was surprised as she said it is so easy to make it. She just gave the ingredients (no measurement), told me to mix them well and take some with a ladle and fry it on both side. Mix milk, flour and egg and fry. Ok it is a piece of cake for me! I can handle it. But my first try was a complete frustration. As I didn’t have exact mesurements of ingredients, I couldn’t decide how thick the batter should be. It wasn’t thick enough, so it was more like an omelette. After one more experiment, I decided on the amounts.

To enjoy it more, we fill it with various fillings and roll it up. Some of these fillings may be nutella,  jams, honey or cheese. My husband’s favorite is nutella while mine is cheese. And we both love it with black mulberry jam.

Krep
Ingredients
-    1 cup milk
-    1 egg
-    8 tbsp flour
-    Sunflower oil to fry (1/2 tsp for each time)

These ingredients make 7 crepes.

Beat egg and milk. Add flour little by little until smooth. It will be a bit less thicker than a basic cake batter.

Heat a nonstick pan. Coat it with ½ tsp oil and heat it. Make sure the oil spreads everywhere in the pan. The amount of oil shouldn’t be more than this, otherwise your crepes may not have a shape you desire.

Take some batter with a small ladle and pour it in the center of the pan. It must be a thin crepes, so just pour one ladle each time and turn the pan around itself to spread the batter and fry it over low heat. You must be quick while doing these steps.

Flip it up after about 1 minute with a wooden spatula and fry the other side about 1 minute. Take it on a plate and oil the pan again and repeat the same steps. Don’t forget to put ½ tsp oil in the pan each time.

You can serve them as they are and leave the filling to your guests. Or you can fill them with various fillings, roll them up and cut in rolls.

Another thing making me happy was the quality and the price of tomatoes. They are always expensive during Winter although they don’t taste like a real tomato. You know winter is not its season. And it was 50% cheaper and much more tasty, so I bought a big bag of tomatoes. I love to use tomatoes in dishes and to eat it raw. I remember that I used to eat tomatoes like apples, just biting into it. I didn’t know then how tomatoes are helpful on different problems of our body like rheumatism, cancer and stomach problems. I would eat it because I would love its sourness. We had a small garden and mom and dad would grow vegetables there. When mom entered the house with a big bowl of newly picked fragrant tomatoes which were in various colors like pink, orange and red, it was impossible not to grab one. Who can resist it? I can’t forget the taste of those tomatoes, they were absolutely different. I would take a bite and when I reached its seeds, I would sprinkle a little salt to give it a sourish flavor. Tomato was like any other fruits for me, it wasn’t in the category of vegetables and it was one of my favorite snacks during the day. However, as I don’t have the chance of growing tomatoes, I can’t find those tomatoes of my childhood at markets. The ones at bazaar in this season are very similar, though. That’s why I bought that many.

And the first thing I made with these tomatoes (I mean after snacking some) was a breakfast surprise: Tomatoes stuffed with cheese.

Domates Dolma
Ingredients (serving: 2)
-    2 tomatoes
-    ½ cup feta cheese, crumbled
-    Parsley leaves, chopped
-    1 tsp olive oil
-    Chili powder

Wash the tomatoes well. Cut their top and discard the seeds. And do you know what to do with these? Throw them directly into your mouth! Seriously, I did it. but if you don’t feel like doing so, put them in a small bowl, keep in the refrigerator so that you can use it in a sauce or in another dish next time.

Mix the chopped parsley and olive oil with cheese and stuff the tomatoes with this mixture. Sinally put a little chili powder on each. You can drizzle a little more olive oil on the top if you like.
Note: I read somewhere that olive oil helps to reveal the vitamins in tomato when entering the body, so it’s necessary to use some with tomatoes.

There is also another version of stuffed tomatoes in my blog, but that one was cooked in oven and was stuffed with yellow cheese (kashar). You can find it here.

The first time I ate this sauce was  when I was studying at university. I was staying at a dormitory sharing the room with four people, all of whom were from a different city. I learnt several new foods special to their hometowns and their moms. Once a week, our moms would alternately send a package full of foods that we missed and couldn’t easily find there. We would look forward to getting the package on that day with a great excitement. Those packages would turn our dinners into great feasts for a few days. And it was then when all of us realized how talented our moms were at fitting so many things in a box.  We would get together and unpack the package together with a great excitement.

Acuka was in one of these packages sent by a roommate’s mom. It was in a glass jar and I thought that it was a kind of tomato or pepper paste. It was more than this. When I opened the jar and smelled, I was fascinated by the scent of the flavors. My friend said that they eat this sauce at breakfast by spreading it on bread slices or on toast. I  also love to place a cheese cube on it. We ate it not only at breakfast but also at nights when we got hungry while studying.  When you want to snack, acuka is a great solution for you. Also, this sauce might be served as an appetizer or savory food with Turkish raki. You can keep this sauce in jars for a long time, so when you have unexpected guests, you can spread acuka on bread slices and serve it with tea. I’m sure they will all love it  and ask for its recipe.

I’m so lucky to have homemade pepper and tomato paste and would like to thank to mom for this. She makes them every summer and brings some for us. As they are already salty, I don’t add any salt in this sauce. I’m planning to write about pepper paste soon as it has a very important role in Turkish cuisine.

Acuka
Ingredients
-    3 tbsp pepper paste
-    1 tbsp tomato paste
-    ½ cup olive oil
-    1 cup walnut, crumbled
-    4 cloves garlic, mashed
-    2 tsp cumin
-    1 tsp black pepper
-    A pinch of dried thyme

Mix all the ingredients in a bowl. Taste it after they are mixed and if you think any of these ingredients is not enough, add some more of it.
You can increase the amounts and keep it in glass jars.

There are several vegetables used to make fritters, but zucchini is the most prefered one in Turkish cuisine. There are several reasons why Turkish women generally use zucchini for fritters. First, it  helps digestion system of body. You don’t feel bloated when you eat fritters made of zucchini. There is another reason for Turkish moms to favour zucchini while making fritters. You know moms always wish their children eat all vegetables and zucchini is one of the vegetables that children hardly love to eat.   However, I can’t think of a child who refuses these small and cute fritters. Knowing this, clever moms make fritters to make their children love this light vegetable. As this is not a main dish, moms generally make these as a snack before dinner time when their children come back from school.

Also, zucchini fritters enrich friend meetings in the afternoon. Turkish women try to serve various snacks when they invite some friends. Some of these snacks are a kind of borek, stuffed grapevine leaves, kisir, potato salad, lentil balls, cigarette borek, etc. And zucchini fritters are one of these snacks that is served to guests on a plate with some sliced tomatoes and cucumbers.

The last reason to prefer zucchini for fritters is that Turkish women want to put leftover zucchinis in use. When making stuffed zucchini, they carve their inside out and they don’t use these in stuffing mixture. As they don’t want to waste these, they generally put them in a plastic bag and keep in refrigerator for the following day. They make fritters from these at breakfast or as a snack for their children. So if you stuff zucchinis, do not throw their insides away.

Kabak Mucver

Ingredients
-    2 zucchinis
-    1 cup crumbled feta cheese
-    2 eggs
-    8 tbsp flour
-    Half bunch of parsley
-    Half bunch of fresh dill
-    1 tbsp baking powder
-    1 tsp salt
-    1 tsp black pepper
-    ½ cup vegetable oil to fry

Grate the zucchinis and squeeze their juice with your hands.

Beat the eggs in a large bowl. Add cheese and whisk.

Mince the parsley and dill. Put them with grated and squeezed zucchini in the egg mixture.

Finally, add flour, baking powder, salt and black pepper and mix them all until combined.

Heat the oil in a skillet over medium high heat.. Take a little mixture with a tablespoon and throw it in the pan. Put as many pieces as your pan contains. When one side is fried (in about a minute), flap the other side. When both sides are fried, take the fritters and put them on a paper towel to get rid of the excessive oil.

Alternatively, you can cook them in oven instead of frying if you want it without oil. You will just place the fritter mixture with a tablespoon on a baking sheet in an oven tray and cook them at 180C for about 30 minutes until golden.

Serve these fritters with some greens or sliced tomatoes and cucumbers.

Healthy Vegetables

An eggplant, a carrot, a green pepper and a zucchini are close friends in the same neighborhood. They love to spend time together; they go swimming, play tennis, and have a morning walk together. In fact, the zucchini is the one who encourages them to have such an active life. Unlike the other vegetables, who love to mess around at home, the zucchini always try to be active to be fit. She always reminds her friends that they are vegetables, which means they must do exercise to stay healthy. She always tries different methods to persuade the other vegetables to exercise. This time she takes her friends to a dance club and maybe because of the lively music or the lovely costumes, they all enjoyed to be there. The zucchini thinks that she eventually finds the best way for her friends to exercise as they all promise to attend the club regularly.(drawing by mom)  

 

If you are following my blog for some time, you know how much I love breakfast. Breakfast means a happy start for me. But what do I call as breakfast? Absolutely not a bowl of cereals! That could be a perfect snack for me, not more than this. The word breakfast suggests mainly the fascinating smell of Turkish black tea spreading into the kitchen. There there must be various cheese, black and green olives, sliced tomatoes and cucumbers drizzled with extra virgin olive oil, various jams, a few sprigs of fresh herbs like dill, mint, parsley or arugula and egg (either boiled or fried) on a breakfast table.

These are the main foods at a typical Turkish breakfast and I do love them all. However, as I’m working during weekdays, I don’t have time to have such a big and complete breakfast in the mornings. I have simply a toasted sandwich just before leaving home. That’s one of the reasons why I love Sundays, I have hours to have a big, appealing breakfast. Believe or not, I count the days until Sunday with the dream of a complete breakfast. For me, preparing breakfast is as heart warming as having breakfast. To make that breakfast more special, we love to make something special for that morning. This potato omelette is one of the dishes we make specially for Sunday mornings. In fact, this omelette has a different meaning for me. I used to make it so often when I was a university student away from parents and living alone. It wasn’t a breakfast though. As I didn’t know many recipes and as I found it so easy to prepare, I used to have it as a lunch or dinner after coming from school. You see how things might change? This tasty omelette became one of my favorite breakfast foods. I no longer have it as a lunch or dinner as I can make lots of different dishes instead. It’s up to you when you have this omelette, but I’m sure you will love it. And a fresh salad goes very well with it.

I used a copper pan to make this omelette, but if you don’t have it, you can use a non stick pan instead. Copper pans are associated with omelettes in Turkish cuisine, so it’s our first choice if we make an egg dish.

Patatesli Omlet
Ingredients (serving:2)
-    1 large potato, chopped in small and thin cubes
-    ¼ cup of cheese of your choice, crumbled or grated
-    3 eggs
-    A few sprigs of fresh dill, minced
-    Salt
-    Black pepper
-    Cumin
-    Red pepper flakes
-    1 tbsp butter
-    ½ tbsp olive oil

Melt the butter in a copper pan, add olive oil and fry the potatoes in it on medium heat. Make sure that the inner sides of the pan is also oiled. This will make it easy to transfer it on a plate when cooked. While they are frying, break the eggs in a bowl and beat them very well. Add salt and spices in it with minced dill and mix well. Stir the potatoes occasionally. And do use a wooden spoon for this not to damage the pan.

When potatoes are fried, lower the heat and add cheese on them ( I used yellow cheese, which is called kasar peyniri in Turkish). Stir a few times and without waiting long, pour the egg mixture. Do not stir it after adding the beaten egg in it. Just make some small touches in the center and around the omelette with your wooden spoon to give enough space for the egg mixture to reach the heat. Do not overcook it, it will be ready in 2 minutes.

You can serve it as it is in the pan or on a plate with a herb on the top.

This salad is a very special one for me as I learnt it from dad. The word ‘salad’ is generally used for various combinations of raw vegetables like tomatoes, lettuce, scallions and other greens or combinations of raw fruits. However, this one is totally different. It takes the name of ‘warm salad’ as it is cooked, none of the vegetables in it is raw.

This warm salad is made especially in Mediterranean region of Turkey. In rural areas of this region, people work in agriculture and in forest. Agriculture workers cultivate lots of fruits, vegetables and cereals. As for the forest workers, they are devided into two groups. Some log the full grown trees like pine to send the logs to the industrial area while the others plant new young trees in places of these logged trees to renew forests. Warm salad is so important for these workers. They usually get up so early in the morning and almost never hit the road without having warm salad as breakfast. As it is hot and spicy, after eating it, workers do not get cold while working. It is both filling and easy to digest when compared to raw salads, so workers in this region prefer it.

Dad worked in that region as a teacher years ago and he had good relationships with the people of the region. He always tells us how those people were so respectful and hospitable to teachers. There used to be one school in such rural areas, so teachers of that school were so precious for them. There were generally two or three teachers and they were always invited to a house of someone for dinner. People would always bring some products of their areas to teachers. As a result of this good relationship, dad learnt this warm salad from these people during his working years in that region and it became one of his favorite food at breakfast. I remember that he used to wake my brother and me up with the fantastic smell of this salad. Noone can resist dipping a slice of bread in this salad at breakfast. At first, one may think that this salad can not be for breakfast and it is more suitable for lunch or dinner, but it makes you addicted after the first try.

Sıcak Salata

Ingredients (serving: 4)

-    4 tomatoes
-    2 sweet green peppers
-    4 small hot green peppers
-    4 cloves garlic
-    1 tbsp olive oil
-    1 tsp salt
-    1 tsp cumin
-    1 tsp paprika

Wash all vegetables. To peel the tomatoes easily, wait them in hot water for 10 minutes. Meanwhile, heat the olive oil in a pan.  Chop sweet green peppers and saute them. Put the hot peppers in the pan as a whole, do not chop them. Then peel the tomatoes and dice them. Cut the garlic cloves into two. Put tomatoes and garlic in the pan, stir and cover it. After about 15 minutes, add salt, cumin and paprika,  stir and take it from heat. Serve this salad on plates and put 1 small hot green pepper on each. If you can’t eat it spicy, you may not add those spices.

Preperation for Summer

As it is summer now, all vegetables and fruits start exercising to look fit. They didn’t do any sports during winter, so they gained weight and now it’s time to lose those weights. They find it so boring to exercise alone, and the clever tomato suggests doing it together. she reads on a paper that you are more successful in losing weight when you exercise with others. That’s why they decide to meet and jog together. However, it’s still not easy for tomato to jog as much as others, she gets tired easily as she is to weak to carry herself. Someone must tell her that people love her plump. (drawing by mom)