Leeks in olive oil

Turkish comfort food, perhaps?

The rice ended up a little bit overcooked/mushy for my tastes, making the dish very "sticky" as a whole. Also, I deviated from the recipe and added some chopped inner celery stalks and leaves, which I think ended up dominating the flavor a bit. (Was difficult for me to distinguish between the flavor from the celery leaves and the flavor from the chopped parsley.)

Seemed a bit bland at first, but the leftovers really grew on me. :-)


 
 

Salad of melon, cucumber, greens and cheese with mint vinaigrette

From "Mediterranean fresh: a compendium of one plate salad meals and mix-and-match dressings" by Joyce Goldstein.

Fantastic. A nice refreshing summer salad. I cheated and used some left over, frozen Mexican queso fresco instead of feta -- I think it worked fine. Also, used green leaf lettuce instead of the watercress.

 
 
 
 

Stuffed peppers with lamb

From "Classical Turkish cooking: Traditional Turkish food for the American kitchen" by Ayla Algar.

We ended up cooking the peppers for less than the recommended time (perhaps 25 minutes or so?), Partly because we were in a hurry to beats and partly because the meat thermometer inserted into the peppers said that it had reached a safe temperature of 160°F, or so. The problem is that the Rice was not fully cooked and was overly firm. Next time, I guess we shouldn't worry so much about overcooking the meat and should make sure that the rice cooks through, instead (or we could presoak/precook the rice).

In any event, the flavor was excellent with all of the herbs and spices.

Recipe: 

Black lentil soup with wheat berries and tarragon

I loved this soup -- really hearty, but with some nice herbal flavor from the tarragon. Like almost all soups, it made for excellent leftovers.

My one deviation is that I used canned chickpeas instead of dried ones. As a result, I simply added them at the end instead of soaking and simmering, etc.

Rice Pudding

Like dessert for a baby -- yummy.

Left out the mastic -- who the hell has mastic in their kitchen??

Added a few raisins, which were a nice touch.

 
 

Lamb stew with creamy eggplant sauce

Wow. This was intense. Both the tomato and eggplant sauces end up fairly rich -- the tomato because of the lamb fat and the eggplant because of the bechemel and cheese. I think I made the mistake of adding too much nutmeg to the eggplant sauce.

I bought my lamb chunks from the "Aladdin" market in San Mateo. The butcher took a shoulder of lamb with bone and cubed it up using the bandsaw. Unfortunately, this meant that each chunk had a gnarly shaped little piece of bone it, which were hard to eat around.

From Claudia Roden's "The new book of Middle Eastern food"
 
 
 
 

Bulgar and lentil pilaf

At first, the result seemed disappointing: it felt sticky/heavy and dry, as well as under seasoned, I think.

The leftovers turned out really good, though, when I learned to add a little added water in the dish to continue the steaming of the grains. Also, adding a bunch of chopped parsley to the leftover servings was a fantastic addition -- really lightened the feel.

From Paula Wolfert's "The cooking of the Eastern Mediterranean"

Spinach soup

Man! These Turks really know how to make the soups. This was another soup that used egg yolk and lemon to produce a nice thicker consistency, and richer flavor. It seems to be a very common technique for the Turks.

 
 
 

Char-grilled chicken shish kebab

From "The Sultan's kitchen" by Ozcan Ozan.

Carrot and orange salad

Really easy and simple, but completely exotic. My housemate Mike scarfed it down. Definitely nice and refreshing -- perfect match for a spicy main dish.

Zucchini fritters

"Kabak Muçveri" in the native Turkish. Recipe from "The new book of Middle Eastern food."

I didn't have any dill on hand, but these turned out delicious anyways.  I tried 3 different ways of cooking them:

1.   medium-depth frying -- the recommended approach; not surprisingly, they came out greasier than I would like and needed some intensive drying on paper towels
2. broiling (the fritters sitting on aluminum foil) -- the top side browned nicely, but the bottom side was not brown at all; probably the lowest fat approach
3. very-shallow fry (flipping over once) -- nice, even browning; a few difficulties with them sticking to the skillet; all-in-all, my favorite method; we could also call this the "pancake method"
   

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Rice pilaf with chickpeas (Nohutlu Pilav)

It seems like my last couple of rice dishes have really struggled to get the right amount of moisture/stickiness/fluffiness.  A couple of deviations I made from the written recipe:

• skipped the rinse and soak step at the beginning (supposedly the rinsing washes off excess starch, which helps prevent stickiness of the final product)
• added about 8 ounces of canned diced tomatoes instead of the 2 diced fresh tomatoes
• used 2 tablespoons butter + 1 tablespoon olive oil instead of the 4 tablespoons of butter
  

Another challenge I've had is getting the right amount of salt.  I roughly added 1 teaspoon of salt in addition to the salt in the 2.5 cups of low sodium chicken broth.  In contrast, several recipes I found online for Indian basmati Rice specified 1/4 teaspoon of salt per cup of rice (much less than what I put in).

After bringing the whole mixture to a boil, I covered and steamed at lowest heat for about 10 minutes, then mixed in the 1.5 cups of cooked chick peas. However, after letting it steam for another 5 minutes, the Rice was clearly much too wet, still. I let it go for another 5 minutes (for a total of 20) and then turned off the heat and let it rest, covered for another 5.

The end result was still slightly wet, with a couple of very firm grains still. In hindsight, it probably just needed to go a bit longer to finish the cooking process and cooking off the excess moisture.

Despite my disappointment initially in the dish, the leftovers pproved to be fantastic. I think after a couple of days, the excess moisture evaporated away leaving it somewhat fluffier/lighter.

Fish (tuna) cooked with tahini sauce

In the native tongue: "Tajen Samak bi Tahini". This style of fish is said to be very popular in Syria and Lebanon.
From "The new book of Middle Eastern food."

Housemate Mike took the lead on this one. We used some of the frozen tuna fillets from Trader Joe's, which I've been generally disappointed with in the past. As is often the case, these fillets ended up fairly tough and dry.

Thankfully, the sauce in this dish is nice and rich and thick, although fairly mild in flavor. All in all, a tasty meal.