Tag Archives: meze

Barbunya for Quarantine

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Stuck at home with a pantry full of dried beans? Me, too. I don’t regularly prepare cranberry beans, or in Turkish, barbunya, as they lose their pretty speckle after cooking, which, I have to admit, I’ve always found a little disappointing! BUT I’m trying to use things I have in-house during coronavirus quarantine – and this recipe, which also calls for plenty of carrots (check!), can be served hot or cold, making it ideal for leftovers.

dried barbunya

Ingredients

  • 2 cups dried cranberry beans
  • 1 large yellow onion, chopped
  • 6 carrots, chopped
  • 2 medium tomatoes, peeled/diced + 1 tbsp tomato paste OR 1 14-oz can diced tomatoes + 1 tbspn tomato paste (note:  I was out of tomato paste when I made this, so you’ll note below in the photo that I don’t have a more traditional thicker tomato-y juice)
  • 3 tbspns olive oil
  • 1 ½ cups hot water
  • salt and pepper to taste
  • Italian parsley and/or lemon for garnish

Instructions

  1. soak beans overnight in a large pot
  2. the next day, change water, bring to a boil
  3. partially cover and simmer for ~30 minutes (timing may vary – just keep in mind that you don’t want mushy beans, but at the same time you don’t want hard beans either…as my husband likes to say, the truth is usually somewhere in between…)
  4. drain and rinse the cooked beans, set aside
  5. in the same large pot, sauté the onion in olive oil on medium heat for 2-3 minutes, until they’re on the verge of softening
  6. add the chopped carrots, continue to sauté for another 3-4 minutes (if your chopped carrots are thicker, add an extra minute or so)
  7. add tomato/tomato paste/canned tomato, mix well
  8. season with salt and pepper
  9. add beans, mix well
  10. add hot water, mix well, and bring to a boil
  11. simmer pot for 30-40 minutes
  12. add additional salt and pepper, if desired, and serve warm over pilaf or as a cold side with squeezed lemon

New Year’s Resolution Vegetable

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For 2018, I hereby resolve to write more and eat less (cookies).

Last time I blogged, it was 100+ degrees outside, and I was writing about cucumbers. Today it’s 17 degrees, so it’s time to move into the realm of winter vegetables…and one of my new favorites is celery root. If ever there was a vegetable to embody the importance of not judging a book by its cover, celery root would surely be the poster child.

Anne’s celery root salad (kereviz kökü salata) is a refreshing turn from my holiday stockpile of gingerbread and pizzelle. To brighten, I’ve substituted her orange carrots for purple ones, which remind me of the pink in the winter sunrise that warms my window during the cold months…and because my kid will sooner eat a food that is pink than any other color.

Ingredients

  • 1 celery root
  • 3-4 purple carrots
  • 2 garlic cloves
  • 2-3 tbspns lemon juice
  • 2-3 tbspns olive oil
  • 1 – 1 1/2 cups plain Greek yogurt
  • parsley or olives for garnish

Instructions

  1. wash and slice off or peel outer part of celery root, rub root with generous amount of lemon juice; wash and peel carrots
  2. grate celery root and carrots using the large hole side of your grater (this part is laborious – and, you know me, I’d put it into the food processor without thinking twice…except with this, texture does make a difference, and you’re not cooking it to soften, so Anne’s right:  it’s best to grate to get those thin shavings)
  3. add yogurt, lemon juice, olive oil, garlic that’s been minced or pressed
  4. mix well and serve with garnish of fresh parsley or olives

CacIk for Summer Heat

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It’s been HOT.

Dashboard doesn’t lie.

And, until it cools down, that’s all the narrative I can swing…

Turks use cacIk (pronounced JUH-juk) as a refreshing soup-able side or with additional water and ice and mint as a yogurt drink. I’ve used it also as a salad dressing. And thanks to my Uncle Joe, I had the sweetest garden-fresh cucumbers for this recipe!

Ingredients

  • 2 – 2 1/2 cups plain yogurt
  • 1/4 tsp salt
  • 1 large cucumber, peeled, seeded, and grated
  • 1 tbspn olive oil
  • 1 garlic clove, crushed

Instructions

  1. peel, seed, and grate cucumber; lightly salt and put aside
  2. mix remaining ingredients in separate bowl
  3. mix together and chill
  4. serve with sprig of fresh mint or dill

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For thinner cacIk (drink, soup, salad dressing), use a non-strained yogurt. For thicker, use a strained yogurt.

The Erik(calla lilies) are in Bloom Again…

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The erik (a small, green, tart Turkish plum) are in bloom again…it’s that time of year. But this year their arrival is bittersweet. I feel like Katharine Hepburn’s character in Stage Door. “Now I place them here in memory of some[one] who has died…I’ve learned something about love that I never knew before…help should come to people when they need it…” And, thanks to my father-in-law, Oktay Ergunay, who for years until his retirement served as the Turkish government Director of Disaster Affairs and also the General Director of Turkish Red Crescent, help came to countless who suffered under the rubble and rebuild of earthquakes, who were left homeless from floods and landslides and every sort of natural disaster in Turkey, and who suffered neighboring regimes and migrated to Turkey with nothing but the clothes on their backs, children in their arms, and the hope of a better life. Baba devoted his life to loving and serving people through his scholarly earthquake engineering research and teaching, his smart and strategic disaster management, and his huge heart – steadfast in his insistence that every life is worth living, every life is worth saving.

And my father-in-law had a thing for green fruit – kiwi, green apples, and these tart little green plums. This spring, quite unexpectedly, he left this world, much to the devastation of my husband, my mother-in-law, my brother-in-law, our uncle, aunt, cousin, and all the family, friends, and colleagues who dearly loved him. And he left me with an entire climate-controlled refrigerator fruit drawer of erik that had been awaiting his summertime arrival.

I miss him terribly – his voice, his humor, his fatherly reassurance, the boundless love he had for his granddaughter – and start crying (again) when I see these things sitting in my fridge. And here’s the irony: I’m not exactly nuts about these plums. So what do you do when life tosses you erik? Maybe…erik salatasi? This will be the first of hopefully a handful of creative culinary #erikendeavors to help me keep my chin up. Will let you know when I come up with more…

iyi geceler, Baba.  (…iyi geceler, canIm.)

Ingredients

  • ~15-20 grape tomatoes
  • ~2-3 mini cucumbers
  • ~15-20 erik
  • ~12 Turkish olives
  • 1 fistful of Italian flat-leaf parsely
  • 1 tbpsn fresh lemon juice
  • 1 tbspn olive oil
  • pinch of salt
  • dash of apple cider vinegar

Instructions

  1. slice both tomatoes and plums in half (erik have pits, slicing will be imprecise, so my workaround was to munch on the middles while I made the salad)
  2. slice mini cucumbers in rounds
  3. coarsely-chop parsley
  4. toss ingredients with olives
  5. in a small ramekin, whisk lemon juice, vinegar, olive oil, and salt; add to salad
  6. toss and serve

A (carrots) Rainbow of My Very Own

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Once upon a time…before baby, when “date nights” were plentiful and leisurely meals were savored without a second thought as to what we’d owe the sitter if we linger another 15 minutes, we regularly frequented our neighborhood Turkuaz on the Upper West Side. With its warmly-lit, tented ceilings and its vast array of hot and cold small plates (and a spouse who could order in Turkish, which worked rather well for me…think Jamie Lee Curtis’s character in A Fish Called Wanda…), Turkuaz always delivered a delicious escape from the bustling city.

When Turkuaz first opened, at the start of the meal, they served a dip of carrots with yogurt – yogurtlu havuc salatasi – with warm pide bread. Loved it so much I had to run home and duplicate. And today I’m duplicating with rainbow carrots to create 3 different colored carrot dips.

Ingredients

yogurt sauce:

  • 4 cups of plain Greek yogurt
  • 3-4 cloves of minced/crushed raw garlic
  • 1 tsp salt (less or more, as desired)

carrots:

  • 3 pounds of rainbow carrots, separated by color
  • 5-6 tablespoons of olive oil

Instructions

yogurt sauce:

  1. in large mixing bowl, mix yogurt, garlic, and salt
  2. set aside

carrots:

  1. separate carrots by color (e.g., yellows, purples, oranges) – you’ll be making 3 separate dips, so have 3 small mixing bowls on-hand
  2. start with the orange carrots; in a food processor (another example of my culinary laziness – Turks would grate the carrots…but when I grate, I eat skin), finely chop orange carrots
  3. saute finely chopped carrots in 1 ½ – 2 tablespoons of olive oil on medium heat to soften
  4. put aside in small mixing bowl to cool
  5. repeat for purple carrots…
  6. repeat for yellow carrots…
  7. after carrots have cooled, blend yogurt mixture to each of the softened carrot bowls, add additional salt to taste as needed
  8. garnish with fresh dill (my dexterity for garnishing was never…well, just see below…but these dips are so pretty, they can withstand even the clumsiest hand!)

IMG_3520

If at first you don’t succeed…PIRASA

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Nine cycles of in vitro fertilization (IVF).  Nine.  For those who aren’t familiar, a single cycle of IVF medications and ultrasounds and surgical procedures and non-surgical procedures can take anywhere from 4-6 weeks, often necessitating breaks and more tests in between cycles, and the requisite holding-of-one’s-breath for an additional 2 weeks to pee on a stick.  And of course, as you may have already read from Yalya CorbasI, it ain’t over, even then…

So our statistical mantra, borrowed from Aristotle’s Cardinal Virtues, for bringing home baby was fortitude, and persistence.  Then, of course, getting baby to eat pIrasa requires a similar virtue.  PIrasa is a dish of braised leeks with carrots, rice, lemon juice, and a hint of sugar.  It should be love-at-first-bite, but, like many things in our lives, this took a few tries before Ayla looked forward to her leeks.

IMG_3037Ingredients

  • 3 tbpsn arborio rice, washed
  • 8 long carrots, cut on the bias
  • 6 leeks, trimmed and cut into 1-2 inch-wide pieces
  • 4-6 tbspn olive oil
  • 1 tbspn salt
  • 1 tsp sugar
  • juice of 1/2 lemon
  • 1 1/2 cup boiling water

Instructions

  1. remove the outer layers of the leeks and trim off the bottoms and tops, then cut into inch/inch-and-a-half-wide pieces; rinse well
  2. heat olive oil in large saucepan on medium heat
  3. add leeks and carrots, stir then cover, and let them “sweat” as Anne says…about 5 minutes
  4. add rice, cover again for another 5 minutesIMG_8483
  5. add salt, sugar, lemon juice, boiling water; stir and cover
  6. cook on medium-low heat for about 25-30 minutes

This dish is one of my sister’s personal faves and is versatile in that it may be served warm or cold!