Acuka the Walnut Sauce

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.

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Potato Omelette

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.

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Yellow Cherry Jam

Sari Kiraz Receli

Do you love cherries as much as I do? I really don’t know how to describe my feelings when I see a cherry tree full of cherries.  Whenever I see such a tree, I realize how beautiful living is. This may sound nonsense, but I don’t have the same feeling for other fruit trees. It makes me so happy to see those little red things between green leaves on a tree. I suppose that this makes the tree happy as well. It looks like a bride in reds. Have I told before that red is the color of brides and newly married women in our culture? I think I love seeing cherry trees much more than eating cherries.

I would witness how cherry trees blossommed and then fruited as a child when we visited my grandma. There were immense cherry yards in the village she was living and I remember watching these yards with a great admiration. It is such a village that nobody has to get permission to get into someone’s yard and to taste some cherries, so we would enter one, taste some and then enter another to taste a different species of cherry. Grandma also had a cherry tree in her backyard where we (my cousins and I) enjoyed a lot. We would climb on the tree, which was my favorite method to taste fruits, and would chat there eating cherries. The funniest thing I remember is that we, as girls, would make ear rings from cherries by hanging them on our ears. We would love to feel swingings of cherries on our ears when we  shake our heads. Would you do the same thing when you were children?

Besides their wonderful taste and beauty, it is known that cherries also have healing effects. It is known that they are more effective as painkillers than an aspirin. So if you have bad headache, please try eating cherries before taking any other painkillers. No need to mention that they are great antioxidants. Heavy smokers should eat cherries to get rid of the nicotine in their body. It also strengthens our immune system and our body against many cancer types. Grandma would also say that cherry stalk has many herbal effects,too. She would make tea boiling cherry stalks in water for about 10 minutes. She would say that this helped kidneys work well and cured joint calcification. I learnt one more thing from her that cherry stones keep heat for a long time, so she never wasted these stones. She would fill a heatproof bag with dried cherry stones and heat it in oven. She put this heated bag under my feet whenever I had stomachache. I’m always in favor of trying herbal healing before any medicine just like grandma as I believe that nature has all remedies if used right.

Cherries are mostly in various tones of red, but we have a unique species of cherries in Turkey, yellow cherries. They are so rare in our country that it is grown in few regions. I don’t know if it’s grown in other countries. It has a very limited season here, so if you see it at the market, you shouldn’t miss that chance. Yellow cherries are sweeter in taste, that may be the reason why people prefer mostly these to make jam. They make jam either from yellow cherries or sour cherries.

At the open market last week I had that chance and I bought 2 kilos of yellow cherries to make some jam. Unfortunately I didn’t think how I would pit them. In the evening, when I  prepared the necessary cups in the kitchen and grabbed one cherry, I realized it wouldn’t be so easy to pit them. I wanted them remain as they were, but how? Believe or not, I spent great effort on scooping their stones. After some time, getting tired, I gave up and just cut them in half and easily removed the stones. I called mom in the morning and told my cherry adventure. She laughed at me and asked why I didn’t buy a cherry pitter. A cherry pitter? What was that, I’ve never heard such a thing! Gosh why didn’t I talk to mom a day before? Then she told me if I didn’t have that tool, I could use a paper clip as a hook to remove cherry stones. She claims it works perfect. It was too late for me! Oh wait! I’m planning to making jam from sour cherry as well when its season comes, I can try either of these methods then. If you know any other ways to pit cherries, I’d be glad to hear.

2 kilos (4,40 pounds) cherries make about 1 kilo jam.

Ingredients
-    2 kilos yellow cherries
-    1 ½ kilo (3.30 pound) sugar
-    Juice of ½ lemon

Wash the cherries, remove their stalks and stones (either with  Oxo Good Grips Cherry Pitter or by cutting them in half). Put the cherries in a large pot. Then pour sugar on them and wait it 5 hours. You can do this step overnight. At the end of this time, you’ll see that all sugar is dissolved and cherries release their water. That’s why we don’t need to add extra water.

Put the pot on low heat and boil it until it gets thick enough. Remove its scum occasionally. To understand if it has the right thickness, drop very little jam on a plate, turn it upside down. If the jam doesn’t run down easily, if it’s a bit sticky, that means it’s done. Add lemon juice, boil it another 5 minutes and take it from fire. do not boil it more after adding lemon juice. Otherwise, your jam gets too dark in color.

If your cherries are too soft, then after it boils for about 10 minutes, take the cherries from the sherbet with a strainer and keep boling the sherbet until it reaches the right consistency. ıf you boil the cherries with its sherbet for the whole time, cherries will be overcooked and all mashed. Then add the cherries and boil them for a few minutes more. And add lemon juice.  Let it cool.

If you have a balcony or a garden, wait your jam under sun. This helps its consisteny, so don’t worry if your jam is not thick enough after boiling, just wait it under sun for a few days. Do not forget to cover it with a veil to protect it from any insects. Then you can put it in jars and keep it in a place without sunlight.

As a final note, I!d like to thank to Jenn from Bread + Butter. She is so sweet to share her award with me, I’m so honored. She has a fantastic blog with so many delicious recipes. Go visit her blog.

So according to the rule of this award, I’m supposed to name 7 things about me.

1. I love watching movies
2. The last movie I watched is Knowing by the director Alex Proyas. It was great with the performance of Nicolas Cage.
3.I am interested in literature, I love to read novels, short stories, poetries.
4.I sometimes try to write short stories.
5. I always read before sleeping. Reading Zorba the Greek by Nicos Kazancakis these days.
6. I LOVE eggs at breakfast.
7. I hate cleaning greens like spinach, parsley or fresh mint as too much dirt hides in them. But of course I do that cleaning

It’s absoultely so hard to decide on just 7 bloggers to share this award, so I  want to share it with everyone I’m in contact with in this blog world.

Cherries in Winter

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Black Mulberry Jam

Whenever I see black mulberries at the market, I remember the mythological story in the book Metamopheses written by Ovid, a Roman poet. I read this story at my university years and was so mch impressed by it. The story takes place in Babylon, where mulberry finds the suitable climate.

There are two lovers in the story, Pyramus and Thisbe. They loved each other so much since their childhood, but their parents were against this love. Their houses were side by side and they would whisper their love to each other through a fissure in the wall seperating their houses. One night they decided to escape from their houses and meet under a tree. It was a tall tree full of white berries. At that night, Thisbe arrived first, but saw a wild lion there with a bloody mouth. This was enough to scare her, and she ran away towards a dark cave. However, she dropped her veil on her way.

A little time later, Pyramus arrived and saw the lion with Thisbe’s veil in its bloody mouth. He started to cry feeling a big regret not coming earlier. He thought that his beloved was eaten by the lion. He knew that he couldn’t live without Thisbe, he grabbed his sword and killed himself under the tree. His blood sprinkled on the tree and its fruits turned into a blackish-red color. (The tree in this picture is from our neighbor’s yard when the fruits were not ripe enough)

After some time, Thisbe decided to go back to their meeting place not to disappoint her beloved. Unfortunately, when she returned, she saw the body of Pyramus under the mulberry tree. What a destiny they had! She cried and cried and cried. Her tears dropped on the beloved body and cleaned it from blood. She understood that Pyramus killed himself because he thought that she was eaten by the lion. Death didn’t have enough power to seperate these lovers. Thisbe did exactly the same to reach her beloved through death and she placed the sword directly into her heart. Her body fell on the body of Pyramus. Witnessing all these, the tree has the color of Pyramus’s blood on its berries and Thisbe’s tears on its leaves.

What is more interesting about black mulberry tree is hidden in this story. You know when you touch the black berries with naked hand, your hands turn into a blackish color. And it is very hard to remove this color from your hand. Do you know what removes it? Its leaves! If you pick a leaf from the tree itslef and rub your hand with it, you will see that your hand turns into its own color.

As I knew this incredible truth about this tragic fruit, I asked for a few leaves from the salesman to clean my hands. He gave the ones he was using for decorating his fruit stand. And guess what? It really worked!

I don’t know how many people know this story, but many people love to eat black mulberries. It’s getting more and more popular as doctors explain that it is a great source of antioxidant and has many benefits for our body.  It protects our hearts and it defers getting old. It cleans the blood, so it is recommened to anemia patients. It also removes fatigue and curative for mouth and throat infections.

We love to eat this fruit, but we can find it in a limited time of year, so to make it longer, I make its jam to eat it in Winter, too.

Ingredients
-    1 kilo (2.2 pounds) black mulberry
-    1 kilo sugar
-    ½ lemon
-    ½ cup water

Wash the mulberries well and cut their stems one by one.

In a large pot, put one layer mulberries one layer sugar until both finish. Cover the pot and wait it at least 8 hours. You can do this step overnight.

When you remove its cover, you will see that mulberries release their water with the help of sugar. Add ½ cup water in this pot and put it over medium heat. Bring it to boil and keep boiling for 20 minutes. When you see it starts to get a consistency, you’re on the right way. Finally squeeze half lemon juice and boil it for 5 minutes more. Then take it from fire. Let it cool.

To have the best result, cover the top of the pot with a very thin veil and wait it under sun at your balcony or garden. This will help your jam to get the right consistency and to get more delicious.

We love to eat this jam at breakfast spreading it on a slice of bread with cheese.

By the way, don’t forget to send me (zerrin@giverecipe.com ) an email to join the contest!

Ducks At Pub

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Goat Cheese Salad

Tulum Peyniri Salatası
We finished our work earlier today and a colleague of mine invited me to have an afternoon tea together at her home. I knew that she moved her new house a week ago, so I gladly accepted to learn its location. And guess what we had together! Not surprisingly we planned to make kisir together on the way home, so we stopped by a supermarket to buy the necessary ingredients. I mentioned the role of kisir among Turkish women before, making and having kisir together is a very common habit of us when we decide to come together. She bought the ingredients of kisir and I bought a chocolate cake from the market. It is a part of our culture to buy and take something to the house we are invited. If you don’t, it’s not a problem at all, but it’s thought as a sign of politeness if you go with something (such as a kind of dessert or drink) to there.

When we arrived, she suggested to show around  her new house. I don’t know if this is special to our culture or if other cultures have this same tradition. Generally when people move to a new house, they show around that new house to their guests. They want their guests to know the parts of the house and feel comfortable. In this way, they know where the kitchen is or where the rest room is, so they can easily find these places when they need. This may be thought as a sign of showing off in other cultures, but here it is thought as a friendly behaviour.And you can make your friend happy saying how beautifully her house is decorated. To be honest, I personally don’t like this tradition much. Homes are the only places where we have our privacy and this shouldn’t be bothered. Besides, I don’t think that it’s necessary for the guests to know every part of your house. What do you say? It would be great to hear if anyone from other cultures have the same tradition.

Anyway, we had great time together making and eating kisir followed by tea and chocolate cake. And when I returned home, I decided to prepare a quick dinner which we call breakfast as it included Turkish black tea, potato salad, sliced tomato and cucumber and a salad made of goat cheese.

This goat cheese is very different from regulat goat cheese. This cheese is encased in a skin of goat. It has an incredible taste most probably because it has a long and difficult process. Goat milk is heated and fermented. There becomes a clot and this clot is waited in a fabric bag for 3 days so that it is decomposed from its water. After that, the clot is crumbled and mixed with a 3% proportion of salt and then it is waited in open air for about 18 hours. This process is repeated a few times to get the right aroma. Finally, the cheese is encased in a goat skin and waited for 120 days.  This goat skin has also a long process. It is salted 1 and a half year before the cheese is encased. After such an arduous process, you can imagine how wonderful it tastes.

We either eat this specail cheese plain or make a salad of it for an appetizing breakfast. The ingredients of this salad is up to you, you can use any greens you have. Some people put tomatoes in this salad, but I don’t love it in cheese salad as it is a succulent vegetable.

Ingredients
-    1 cup goat cheese encased in skin (or any kind you love)
-    Fresh dill
-    Parsley
-    Fresh basil
-    Red pepper flakes
-    1 tbsp olive oil

Chop all  greens and mix them with cheese. Season it with red pepper flakes and drizzle olive oil on it. You can serve this sald with sliced tomatoes and cucumbers near it (not in it) and a few black olives also go perfect with it.

Stubborn Tomatoes

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Savory Pastry

Tuzlu Kuru Pasta

My friend, my neighbor at the same time, called this afternoon and invited me to have Turkish coffee together. She’s very good at making Turkish coffee with a lot of foams on top and she knows I love it. As I mentioned in my “Turkish Coffee” post, it’s a tradition to drink this coffee with one or more friends, never alone. So if you crave for Turkish coffee, you should invite a friend.

You know Turkish coffee requires something sweet near it (a piece of chocolate, Turkish delight, chocolate cake, cookies, etc.), so I took some cacao cake that I made yesterday. Of course she greeted me with a big smilewhen she saw this cake. While we were having our well made coffee, we decided to make some savory pastries together. We love working together in the kitchen, so we enjoyed a lot playing with the dough and preparing these pastries.

Ingredients
-4 cups flour
-250g butter
-2 eggs
-1 yolk
-1tsp salt
-2tsp baking powder
-100g cheese, crumbled
-nigella sativa

Note: All of these should be in room temperature. We made about 40 pieces of pastries from these ingredients.

Preheat the oven to 180C (350F)

Pour the flour in a large bowl and break two eggs in the middle of it. Add butter and salt, then mix them with your hands. Put the crumbled cheese and knead the dough well. You’ll see how cheese adds its taste. Make two big balls from this dough. Sprinkle some flour on the counter and roll them out one by one as big as a small plate.
Beat the yolk in a small bowl and spread it with the help of a brush on the dough you roll out. Then sprinkle nigella sativa on them. We used three kinds of nigella sativa here; white, brown and black.

Grab a cookie cutter with the shape you like and cut them carefully. We used a star shape cutter here.

Lay an oven proof paper on a tray and arrange the stars on it. As we love playing with the dough, we also gave some spiral shapes with our hands.

Place the tray in oven and cook them for 25 minutes. Do not wait them in the oven, take out immediately. When they get cold enough, you can serve it with a cup of tea at breakfast or at afternoon tea times.

And my friend was so kind to put some of these pastries in the cup with which I brought my cake.

Guest in Turkish Culture

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Potato Salad

Patates Salatası

We didn’t have enough time to prepare a dish for dinner this evening. We were so hungry that we needed something quick, but of course it wouldn’t be a kind of prepackaged food. Do you have any guess what we do whenever we feel too tired to cook something suitable for “dinner” concept? In Turkish culture, a perfect dinner should include a kind of soup as a starter and as a main dish meat or chicken or vegetable stew should be on dinner table accompanied by a kind of salad or yogurt. No need to mention desserts for a wonderful ending. However, we don’t always have time for all these courses as we are working. Fortunately, our culture has a great solution for people in need of quick dishes. That is; Breakfast at Dinner Time!

The meaning of “breakfast” is broad in Turkish language. It doesn’t mean only the meal eaten in the morning. If you have tea, cheese, olives, sliced tomatoes, peppers and cucumbers on your table, it is called breakfast no matter when you eat them. These are the indispensable foods of breakfast. And of course it’s up to you to enrich your breakfast with some pastries or different versions of egg or other food “inventions”. The most common food of this untimely breakfast is potato salad. So this evening, we decided to have a breakfast style dinner and as a preperation, we just boiled potatoes and eggs, which means we didn’t spend so much time on it. I should add that Turkish people apply this type of breakfast whenever they don’t have enough time or ingredients for a demanding dish.

Ingredients
- 4 middle sized potatoes
- Half bunch of parsley
- 2 scallions
- 1 onion
- 1 green pepper
- 2 tsp sumac
- 2 tsp red pepper flakes
- 1 tsp salt
- 2 tbsp olive oil
- 2 eggs, hard boiled
- 1 tsp dry thyme

Boil the potatoes until soft. Meanwhile, you can prepare other ingredients.
Dice the onion into a bowl, cover it with sumac and crumble them together so that sumac and onion combine well.
Chop scallions, pepper, and parsley and add them in the bowl.

When potatoes cook, take them from the heat and wait them in cold water to peel them easily. When they are cold enough, peel and cut them in big cubes and toss them in the bowl. Add red pepper flakes and salt and combine them. Take the salad on a plate.

Slice the hard-boiled eggs and put them near the salad. Drizzle olive oil on the salad and egg slices. Sprinkle some pepper flakes and dry thyme on eggs. And your potato salad is ready to be the main character of your breakfast.

Note: Some people prefer slicing eggs into the salad and mixing them altogether, but I love to see egg slices seperately, that’s why I put them near the salad.

The Egg Pushing The Door

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Open Sandwich with Tomato

Domatesli Kanepe

I was working on this Sunday, so unfortunately we couldn’t have a big breakfast. You know it’s so important for me to have breakfast with a lot of items, it’s like a feast for me at weekends. I got up early yesterday morning with no desire of going out. But I had to!

When I went out, all these feeling disappeared as I saw that it was a lively Spring day. And I really enjoyed walking to work. But this is not the thing I want to share with you today. I’m planning to add some Spring pictures soon, but not today. Today’s surprise is from my husband. He called me before lunch break and wanted me to return home for a late breakfast in the break. Normally I wouldn’t go for such a short time, it was just one-hour-break. However, he persuaded me by telling that there was a surprise waiting for me. I understood the advantage of living close to my work and went home at lunch break.

By the time he opened the door, I understood what his surprise was. These open sandwiches with tomato! One of my favorites. And he had already brewed the tea. So this late breakfast with these small, crispy, hot sandwiches (not lunch) made me feel better. It also helped me feel Sunday although I worked.

Here is the recipe of these yummy open sandwiches by my husband.

Ingredients
-1 loaf bread
- 2 tbsp butter
- 4 tomatoes
- 2 green peppers
- ½ tbsp tomato paste
- ½ cup cheese (any kind you like), crumbled
- dried thyme

Preheat the oven to 180C (350F).

Slice the bread in small and thin shapes. Lay an oven proof paper on a tray. Array the bread slices on it. Top each slice with 1tsp butter. 2 tbsp will be enough for all slices, so try to put it equally.

Peel tomatoes and squeeze its water, you may leave a little water inside, but not much. If you don’t squeeze it, the sandwiches may be lumpy. Chop tomatoes and peppers in a bowl. Mix tomato paste with them. Sprinkle a pinch of dried thyme. And put this mixture equally on the slices.

Crumble the cheese (he used white cheese and it was little salty, so he didn’t add any salt to this tomato mixture. If your cheese is not salty, add a pinch of salt to it). Then put cheese on the slices with tomato-pepper mixture.

Cook them for half an hour and serve hot with a cup of tea for breakfast. It also makes a perfect snack. Enjoy!

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Cigarette Borek

Sigara Boregi

Our national football team had a match with Spain yesterday. We love watching matches with friends, so we called some friends and invited them to watch the match together. They already knew that we’d prepare some food for the night, but this time they  had a request from us: Cigarette boreks!  Of course we accepted.

They came just before the match began and they all went crazy with the smell of cigarette boreks. They brought several bottles of beer, so we understood that it was a part of their plan. We all agree on cigarette boreks go perfect with cold beer. Although Spanish team defeated with a 2-1 score, we had great time because both teams played well. By the way, I should admit we grabed a cigarette borek each time our players missed a goal. It’s better than cigarette itself at all.

The name of this borek is cigarette just because of its shape. You put some very healthy ingredients in it like cheese and parsley instead of tobacco.

Ingredients

- 3 phyllo sheets

- 1 cup white cheese, crumbled

- Half bunch parsley, chopped

- A very small cup water, just to stick the ends

- ½ cup vegetable oil

Lay the sheets on the counter and cut them into pieces of triangle. You see it in the picture, if you like you can cut them bigger, but originally they are small.

Mix chopped parsley and cheese together. If you like you can add spices you like. We love it plain.

Grab a triangle and put some cheese mixture on the wide side of it. First fold the left and right edges and then roll it up. To stick its end, dip your finger into the water in small cup and rub it on the end of the triangle.

Heat oil in a pan and fry these cigarette boreks until golden brown.

You can serve these crunchy cigarettes as a kind of snack with beer or tea. You can even surprise your family or friends by serving it at breakfast. The sound it makes while eating is as enjoyable as eating it.

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Bazlama Bread

Bazlama

This is a traditional bread, generally baked over wood fire in villages. When my grandpas were alive, we used to visit them  very often. They used to live in a village and whenever we went there, grandma would always bake bazlama for us. She would also brew a teapot of tea again over a wood fire. I don’t know why, but the fire of wood changes the taste of everything. If you have the chance of cooking a dish over wood fire, you’ll understand what I mean. Even tea gets a different flavor when brewed over it.

Grandma would always serve bazlama with a piece of butter she herself made and with some olive oil which they themselves produced. So this simple breakfast became a feast for us. Imagine a piece of newly baked bazlama, still fuming, and dipping it into some very natural olive oil or spreading some fresh butter, which has a milky scent, on it.

As I don’t have a chance of baking it on a wood fire, I bake it on a non stick pan over the lowest heat of the oven. Today the special item for our big Sunday breakfast was this bazlama. We ate it dipping in olive oil.

Ingredients
•    3 cups flour
•    ½ cup yogurt
•    1 cup warm water
•    1 dessert spoon instant yeast
•    ¼ olive oil
•    2 tsp sugar
•    2 tsp salt

Put the flour in a bowl. Add yogurt and mix it. Then add olive oil, sugar and salt. Mix the warm water and instant yeast in a cup very well and pour it in the mixture. Then knead all of them. You see my measurement cup here.

The dough should still be sticky, don’t worry. Cover the bowl and wait it in a warm place at least 5 hours to rise well. Waiting it for a day is better.

When the dough is OK, you can bake it and eat hot. Sprinkle some flour on the counter, take a piece of dough, a bit bigger than orange. Round it in your palms, then put it on the counter. Widen it by pressing your hands on it. You don’t need to use a rolling pin as the dough is so soft.

Heat a non stick pan, and put the shaped dough on it. Cook it turning it out continually over the lowest heat. It will be done in about 10 minutes. I make five bazlamas from these ingredients.

You can serve it with olive oil near it. We also sprinkle some dry thyme in our natural olive oil.

Note: I made this before reading the article, 10 pre-polluted Americans by OysterCulture, which is about food safety including the harms of teflon. And now, I’m definitely confused about using non stick pans. There should be a substitute.

Sabiha Gökçen

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