Chickpeas with Ground Lamb (Kuzu Kıymalı Nohut)

Chickpeas are excellent source of vitamins in addition to being delicious. That’s one of the reasons why I like cooking with chickpeas year round. This meal is probably cooked more commonly during winter months, but in my opinion anything that is fresh and tastes good can be relished any time of the year. We had the chickpeas with ground lamb served with bulgur pilaf cooked with orzo pasta and it was just out of this world. If you’re not into lamb, ground beef or even chicken can be substituted without compromising the taste. Here is the recipe….

3 ¼ cup chickpeas
½ medium onion (chopped roughly)
2 cloves garlic (chopped fine)
1 lb ground lamb
2 tbsp olive oil
2 tbps red pepper paste
1 tsp cumin
1 tsp ground black pepper
½ tsp ground dry mint
1 ½ tsp salt (adjust to your taste)
2 tsp white vinegar
3 cups water


Wash and soak chickpeas overnight. Drain and boil in a pot for about 30-35 minutes. The chickpeas should be soft, but not mushy after boiling.

Heat a skillet and cook the ground lamb until all the juices are released. Remove from heat and get rid of the juices in the pan.

In a large pot, heat olive oil on medium heat. Saute onions and garlic for 2-3 minutes. Add the lamb and stir for less than a minute. Add chickpeas and cook for 5 minutes. Add water, red pepper paste, cumin, black pepper, dry mint, salt and vinegar.

Stir the ingredients in the pot and cook covered on medium heat for approximately 40 minutes. Make sure the chickpeas are soft to eat.

Serve with rice or bulgur pilaf.

Pasta with Turkish Sausage (Sucuklu Makarna)

My comfort food cravings usually appear when my fridge is almost empty and need to use up the food I have on hand. Yesterday after running around all day I started thinking about what to have for our dinner. Eating out was out of the question as I am sick and tired of it lately. When I walked in the kitchen, both the long and short pasta in the clear, glass containers were staring at me from the other side of the counter. Then I recalled seeing Turkish sausage in my freezer earlier in the morning and the milk in the fridge that needed to be used in a couple days. Albeit, it was difficult to decide whether I should cook long or short pasta, I went with the short penne pasta. In my head, I already had created the taste I wanted to acquire for the pasta and it worked perfectly. It was comforting and filling and scrumptious. A bowl of salad and a side of plain yogurt accompanied it very well.

For the Sauce:

1 ½ cups Turkish sausage (cubed)
1 cup milk
4 small tomatoes
1 clove of garlic (chopped finely)
½ of medium onion (chopped finely)
3 tbsp olive oil
1 tbsp tomato paste
1 tbsp red pepper paste
½ tsp ground black pepper
1 tsp salt


For Boiling the Pasta:

1 box Penne Rigate pasta (the pasta that is shaped like a cylinder and cut diagonally)
1 tsp oil
1 tsp salt
Water

In a small pot, boil water for the tomatoes. Place tomatoes and boil for 2 minutes. Turn the heat off. Keep tomatoes in the hot water for 3-4 minutes with lid closed until the tomatoes are soft. Cool and skin the tomatoes. With a heavy fork, roughly smash the tomatoes. The tomato pieces will stay in large chunks. Set aside. If raw tomatoes are used for the sauce, the sauce cooking time will be longer.

In a large pot, boil water. Add pasta to boiling water and follow cooking directions. Usually this kind of pasta requires about 12-13 minutes. Add a little of oil and a pinch of salt so that the pasta does not stick together while cooking. Drain the pasta and set aside.

Heat olive oil on medium heat, in a pot. Add sausage and sauté for 1 minute. Add garlic and onions and sauté for about 2 minutes or until transparent. Add the tomatoes, tomato paste, red pepper paste, milk, salt and black pepper. Stir the ingredients for a minute and close lid. Simmer for 3-4 minutes.

Add the drained pasta over the sauce and stir. Keep on heat for two minutes and serve hot. If preferred, a favorite cheese can be sprinkled on the pasta. Garnish with pickles.

Uncle's Food

During a beautiful summer day in the North of the U.S., my uncle cooked all this food for us when we were visiting a while back. Except the scallops, all the meats were grilled along with corn and red peppers. It was a weekend full of delightful food. Since he does not follow recipes when cooking, I made notes and documented every dish he made. Unfortunately, I lost all the recipes and I am left with only beautiful pictures of these foods. I could not pass without sharing all of them.

Turkish Beet Salad (Pancar Salatası)

Beets never made it to my shopping cart during grocery shopping until this past fall. I had eaten beet slices on salads or as a side dish at restaurants and in dormitory cafeterias during college and the flavor never was desirable to me so I never thought about using them in my cooking. One day this past fall, I read an article about the health benefits of beets which convinced me to try this nutritionally very powerful vegetable.

After the first purchase, the flavor was definitely was much better than what I had eaten before. I believe what was provided in the dorms or restaurants came out of a can instead of recently being pulled out of earth. I bought the organic beets as I do with almost all our produce and meats and they tasted pretty good. Beets have an earthy flavor and I think they are an acquired taste. Since the fall, I have been purchasing them almost every week. I boiled, steamed or roasted them and created wonderful salads alone or with other vegetables. Before the beet season is over, I wanted to share a traditionally Turkish beet salad recipe. Hopefully I will recreate and share the other ones to at another date.

For those of you who hate beets, you may want to try them again with an open mind and you may change your mind.


4 medium red beet roots
1 cup plain yogurt
1 garlic clove (chopped)
1 tbsp olive oil
1 tbsp white vinegar or lemon juice
½ tsp salt (adjust to your taste)
¼ tsp dried mint

Discard stems of beets and wash and scrub the roots. Steam in a pot or pan for 30 minutes. Remove from heat and leave covered for another 30 minutes.

Once the beets are cooled dry with paper towel. Grate beets with skin on. Grating them using a food processor will be much cleaner than grating manually as the red color of the beets will splash everywhere. Place grated beets in a deep bowl.

Add the rest of the ingredients and toss. Serve cold.

Spinach and Feta Borek (Ispanaklı ve Beyaz Peynirli Börek)

Two years ago, I made a spinach and feta börek and prepared the recipe and all the pictures step by step and never got around to publishing it. Just recently, I made this börek and documented it again. This time, I made a few changes in the recipe and I decided to publish this version instead of the previous one. The taste of this one surpassed the previous one, so I decided to publish this version.

Note: The Phyllo dough sheets can be found in the frozen section of most markets. If the Pyhllo sheets are too big for the tray or Pyrex dish you are using, the phyllo sheets can be folded to reach the size of the baking dish.

1 package Phyllo sheets
½ cup yogurt
½ cup olive oil
1 egg


For the Filling:

2 bunches fresh spinach (approximately 2 lb)
2 cloves of garlic (chopped fine)
2 shallots (chopped fine)
1 cup feta cheese (crumbled)
¼ cup olive oil
½ tsp black pepper
¼ tsp cayenne pepper
½ tsp cumin
½ tsp salt (if the feta cheese is not too salty)
Pinch of black sesame seeds

Preparation of Filling:

Wash the spinach thoroughly. In a large pot, boil water and add the spinach in the boiled water for 2 minutes. Do not keep them in the boiled water long as their texture will become mushy. Immediately run the spinach under cold water in order to stop the cooking process. Create small balls from the spinach and give them a nice squeeze to remove the excess water in the spinach. Chop each spinach ball coarsely and with your hands, separate the spinach leaves from each other as sticking together will hinder the salt and spices to get inside the spinach.

Heat olive oil in a large pan. Add onions and garlic and sauté for 2-4 minutes. Stir occasionally.

Add the spinach to the onions and garlic. Add the rest of the ingredients, except the cheese for the filling and sauté for 5-6 minutes. Make sure the salt, cumin, black and cayenne peppers are distributed evenly in the spinach.

Remove the spinach filling from heat and let it cool. When the filling cools down, add the crumbled feta cheese. If the feta is very salty, no salt is needed for the filling as feta cheese may compensate for the salt.


Putting All Ingredients Together:

In a deep bowl, add the yogurt, olive oil and egg. Mix vigorously until all three ingredients are mixed well.

Using a brush, spread a small amount of the yogurt-olive oil-egg mixture in a large Pyrex dish. This is to prevent the Phyllo sheets from sticking to the Pyrex dish.

Open the Phyllo dough package. Place a damp cloth on top so that the Phyllo sheets do not dry out. These are the same dough sheets that are used for baklava.

Place one sheet of the Phyllo dough in the Pyrex dish. Dip the brush in the yogurt-olive oil-egg mixture and brush the Phyllo sheet. Do this one by one until half of the Phyllo sheets are used up. After half of the phyllo sheets are layered, spread the spinach filling on top. Add another sheet of the phyllo sheet on top of the filling and brush with the yogurt-olive oil-egg mixture. Continue the process of brushing each Phyllo sheet and placing them on top of each other until all the Phyllo sheets are used up. If you have any of the yogurt-olive oil-egg mixture left over, pour it on top and spread it evenly with a brush. The result will be a spinach filling in the middle of the layered phyllo sheets. Half of the phyllo sheets will be in the bottom of the filling and the other half will be on top of the filling.Sprinkle black sesame seeds on top.

Bake at 350º F in the middle rack of the oven for 40 minutes or until golden brown. Let it cool before cutting, otherwise the bottom part of the börek may get soggy.

Serve warm or at room temperature.

Dandelion Salad (Hindiba Salatası)

The taste of dandelions my mother picked selectively from the weeds from our garden many years ago has been active in my palate since childhood. After developing a curiosity for cooking, the name of this wild weed that tasted superb was a question in my head. I had guessed that it may have been dandelions, but to me dandelions were bitter weeds that are not very tasty. I purchased them every once in a while just because they were extremely healthy. One day, it was confirmed that the unforgotten weed with a delicious taste reminiscent from my childhood was indeed dandelion and I was not cooking it properly. The good taste of this green weed wasn’t being maximized. The secret was the way it was prepared. I remember every single ingredient in that dandelion salad my mother made when I was still a kid so, I decided to recreate it to acquire the same exact taste.

Most of the dandelions that were available to me at grocery stores and the farmer’s market were more mature and hence chewy. Luckily, recently I found young, whole dandelions not separated by the leaves at my favorite grocery store. The dandelions in my memory were cooked as a whole with all the leaves attached since they were young and tender. The salad in this recipe turned out to be almost free of the bitter taste and very appetizing.

2 bunches dandelions (approx. 2 lb)
3 cloves garlic (chopped finely)
¾ tsp salt
½ tsp red pepper flakes
½ tsp paprika
¼ cup olive oil
2 ½ tbsp pomegranate molasses

Wash dandelions thoroughly and cut off the roots. Bring a large pot of water to a boil. Boil the dandelions for 3-4 minutes. Remove from heat and run cold water over the cooked greens to stop the cooking process. Cool and drain. Gently squeeze the dandelions to remove excess water and place in a bowl. Add the garlic, olive oil, salt, red pepper flakes, paprika and the pomegranate molasses. Toss and serve at room temperature.

Note: If the leaves are tough, they should be discarded as they will be chewy. Young dandelions should be picked.

Green Olives Salad (Yeşil Zeytin Salatası)

One of the indispensible food items for breakfast in Turkey is olives. Whether green or black, plain or with sauce, olives must exist on every Turkish person’s breakfast table. In order to break away the bitterness, green olives are cracked but still served as a whole with the pit. In smaller towns, families purchase large quantities of fresh olives once a year which they crack and cure for the year’s supply. Black olives are not pitted or cracked and cured in such away that there is no trace of the bitterness.

I personally find much more flavor in cracked green olives that are not commercially pitted. If using for salad, I usually pit them myself. Pitted olives rarely enter my house as I think that most of the flavor is diminished when the pit is removed commercially. We purchase some very good quality olives here in the States that are not cracked (can’t find cracked ones) and not pitted and I find them a little bitter. Therefore each time I visit Turkey, I bring cracked green olives with me. The following olive salad is made with olives I brought with me during my recent visit to my hometown in Turkey. Our favorite time to eat olives is breakfast/brunch, but olive salad can be eaten as appetizer or side dish during lunch or dinner. Preferably use fresh thyme for this salad. I did not have any fresh thyme on hand so I used home dried thyme that my mother brought with her last year during her visit.

2 cups green olives (pitted)
1 ½ tbsp pomegranate molasses or lemon juice
½ tbsp red pepper paste
1 tbsp olive oil
1 ½ tbsp thyme leaves (fresh preferable)

Wash and drain olives. Add pomegranate molasses, red pepper paste and olive oil. If using dried thyme, crumble with hands over olives. If using fresh thyme add whole leaves. Toss together and serve.