Green beans, carrot meze salad and carrot cake

We had a veggie dinner tonight. Green beans cooked Turkish way, green salan and a carrot meze salad was on the table.

Green beans are really easy to make. Sometimes I use frozen and sliced green beans then no need to clean or slice the beans either.

500 grams green beans, washed heads and tails off and cut into two.

1 medium onion, diced

4 tomato diced

50ml olive oil

100ml water

Salt and pepper to season

1 teaspoon sugar

Layer the beans, diced onion and tomato in a pan. Pour the olive oil and water over the veg. Season and add sugar.

Stir everything together and cook on high heat until it starts to boil, then lower the heat and simmer for 30 minutes or until beans are cooked and has a soft bite to them.

I use pressure cooker for this recipe and cooks in 20 minutes in pressure cooker.

This is best served cold or in room temprature.

Carrots with yogurt sauce - meze salad

Slice the carrots 0.5 cm thick in an angle. Put carrots, 1 tablespoon olive oil and enough water to cover the carrots in a pan and bring to boil. Simmer for 20-30 minutes until the carrots are cooked. If there is any water left in the pan, get rid of the water and put the carrots in the same pan on the heat for an other minute.

Let the carrots cool.

Make the yogurt sauce by simply adding 2 gloves of bashed/chopped garlic to 200ml of yogurt. 

Pour the yogurt over the cooled carrots, drizzle with olive oil and sprinkle with chilli flakes.

We had Dan Lepard's easy carrot cake as pudding. I used dark muscavado sugar and did not ice the cake as the recipe calls for, instead mixed 2/3 pack of full fat soft cheese, roughly 200gr, with 3 table spoons of icing sugar and spread this mixture in the middle of cake and dusted the cake with a little bit of icing sugar.