Kurdish Eggplant and lamb casserole served with toasted noodle and bulgar pilaf

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

This meal served as the finale to my Turkish cuisine cooking segment. Thankfully, the dishes turned out well so we ended on a good note. Unlike other pilafs I've made recently, the texture of this one was spot on: not too dry, not too mushy or wet. Also, I used homemade lamb stock (from the casserole lamb), which obviously gives an extra special flavor.

The casserole was definitely unique and, as Nick pointed out, certainly not your stereotypical Turkish dish. The lamb flavor was very strong and the eggplant was nice and creamy in texture. I was concerned that the layers would not bind together well, given the relative lack of sauce or liquid applied before baking; however, I think the eggplant absorbed much of the juice from the tomato and the meat and ended up pulling it all together.

Collard green salad with yogurt dressing

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

Turkish comfort food? I enjoyed it. Even after braising for a good 20 minutes, the collard greens still had a really robust texture -- not necessarily a bad thing.

The recipe called for 2 pounds of collard greens. I only used one bunch, which I estimated at closer to 1 pound. It seemed like there were plenty of greens in the final product, though.

Böreks with swiss chard and walnuts

From "The Sultan's kitchen: a Turkish cookbook" by özcan Ozan.

I confess to making a bunch of modifications:

• Used regular butter instead of clarified
• used Mexican queso fresco instead of feta (hey, it's still a fresh cheese)
• used olive oil (spray) instead of the egg, milk, butter, oil mixture to bind the pastry layers
• used simple olive oil instead of the egg yolk wash on the top
• used the official "bourek" dough instead of standard filo dough.

Interestingly, the walnuts became very soft after cooking, almost like they had absorbed a bunch of moisture. My cheese substitution did not work very well -- it definitely did not have the nice creamy consistency that warm feta does.

All in all though, they were tasty!

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.

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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