Melon prosciutto salad

This is such a quick and easy salad. Place slices of melon on a plate, drape over torn prosciutto. Add wild rocket leaves and pecorino cheese sliced using a vegetable peeler. 

Mix 3 tablespoons of olive oil with 1 table spoon of balsamic vinegar and drizzle over the salad and you are done.

Arrabiatta pasta sauce

This is our favorite pasta sauce recipe this summer. All you need is 2 cloves of garlic chopped, 1 chilli chopped, leaves from half a pack of basil, 3 tomatoes peeled and cubed. Olive oil and seasoning. Parsesan cheese and a few basil leaves to serve.

Heat the olive oil - about 2 tablespoons - in a pan and once hot add garlic and chilli, fry for 1 minute. 

Add the basil leaves whole and wilt in the oil for 1 minute.

Add chopped tomatoes and seasoning and bring to boil. Then let it simmer for 10 minutes.

Serve over cooked pasta with grated parmesan cheese and a few leaves of basil.

Courgette fritters / Mucver

Weather has been exceptionally good this summer which means I get to have picnic lunches at work. This was my picnic lunch today.

Courgette fritters leftover from last night

Yogurt to dip the fritters

Sweetcorn

Cherry tomatoes 

Strawberries

Here is the recipe for the Courgette fritters which is called Mucver in Turkish.

5 medium size courgettes, top and tailed and grated (in food processor) 

1 medium onion diced

1 big bunch of dill chopped

3 medium eggs

3 heaped table spoons plain floor

50 gr (1/4 pack) feta cheese grated

salt and black pepper to season

Olive oil

Put the grated courgettes in a colander and leave for 15 minutes for the juices to drain. You can help it by squeezing the juices out.

Put everything except the oil in a bowl an mix well with a spoon.

Heat the oil in a frying pan, put enough oil to have 1/2 cm deep oil at the bottom of the pan.

Once the oil is hot take a table spoon full of the mixture and put in the oil and flatted in by tapping with the spoon. fry each side until golden brown on medium heat, takes about 2 minutes each side.

Take the fritters off the pan and put them on kitchen paper to drain. You can eat like this or if you prefer a bit well done you can pop them on a baking dish and bake in oven 200 C / fan 180 C/ gas mark 6 for 8-10 minutes more.

Serve them with tomato salad and yogurt to dip.

Jason Atherson's avocado, baby gem and sauteed carrot salad

Here is this week's second summer salad from Jason Atherson's coloumn on Guardian last Saturday; avocado baby gem and sauteed carrot salad. Tried and tested tonight. 

Recipe is here.

http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2014/may/23/summer-salad-recipes-jason-atherton

Tonight I managed to make the Jason Atherston recipe for the crab, asparagus and radish salad that I mention on my last post. 

As I was serving the salad straight away I didn't bother to put the apple and the turnips in cold water, just diced them and plated up right away. 

This is a very nice salad, however I still have a few radishes left from the bunch that I had in the fridge.

I need to come up with more ideas to use the remaining radishes. 

But before I embark on further radish salads I guess I will take a break and try the next summer salad recipe from Jason Atherstones coloumn in last weeks Guardian: Avocado, baby gem and sauted baby carrot salad.

Zingy radish salad

We bought radish from farmer's market this Saturday. I was looking for a salad recipe and came across this recipe on BBC Good food website.

We all loved it and I will definitely be making this salad again, it is bursting with colours and flavour. Such a pretty looking salad.

I still have some radishes left to use up. I would also like to try Jason Atherton's summer salad recipe as soon as I get hold of some crab meat. Oh how I miss the days when I was living next to Billingsgate fish market!

Beetroot feta salad

Our new favorite is the beetroot feta salad.

It has 1/2 iceberg lettuce shredded or other salad leaves, half a pack anout 100 gr feta cheese crumbled, 3 spring onions chopped, chopped leaves from 2 mint twigs, 2 fairly big cooked beetroots cubed.

For the dressing you will need juice from a lemon, half table spoon dijon mustard, 3 tablespoons olive oil, half teaspoon of honey. 

Mix all salad ingredients well and pour over the dressing.

This would serve 4.

Easter bread

This plait is bread the one thing that comes to my mind when I think about Easter's in Turkey. This is called "Paskalya çöreği" in Turkish which means "Easter bread". It is actually available all year around and can be found in most of the bakeries. It has been one of my favorite foods to eat when I am in Turkey.

It is a sweet bread flavoured with a spice called mahlebi, which is made from the seeds of a species of cherry. This spice is available in most of the Turkish and Middle Eastern shops in London.

Ingredients

400 grams white bread flour

1 tablespoon dried active yeast 

150 ml water (1 part boiling 2 parts cold)

1 teaspoon caster sugar

25gr butter

200 ml milk

1 egg for the dough

1 tablespoon mahlebi

3 tablespoons caster sugar

200 ml sunflower oil

1/2 teaspoon salt

1 egg yolk for glazing

Flaked almonds to sprinkle

Preperation

Start with preparing the yeast, mix 1 teaspoon of caster sugar in 150ml water (1part boiling, 2 parts cold) and leaving to come to life for 15 minutes.

Sift the flour in a bowl and add the butter & salt, then rub together with your fingertips until completely mixed and crumbly.

Make a hole in the middle and add milk, sunflower oil, egg, activated yeast mix, mahlebi, sunflower oil, 3 tablespoons of caster sugar.

Bring everything together until they form a sticky dough and leave to rest covered for 10 minutes.

Lightly oil your worktop. Gently knead the dough for 10 seconds or so, then return to the bowl and leave covered for about an hour, or until risen by half.

Line the baking tray with baking paper and take the dough out of the bowl and divide into 3 to make a big plait. Make each part into a strip almost as long as your baking tray.

Seal top of the three strips and start braiding. Braid and seal the other ends of the strips and shape the braid a little bit with your hands and place it on the baking tray.

Leave to raise an other 30 minutes. In the meantime warm the oven to gas mark 7 / 200 C fan.

Once the plait is risen, brush it with the egg yolk and sprinkle with almond flakes.

Bake in the oven for 30 minutes or until it is golden. Fill a metal dish of boiling water and place on the lowest shelf of the oven to help give the your crust a golden colour.

Yotam Ottolenghi's lentil, bulgur and aubergine pilaf

We had Yotam Ottolenghi's lentil, aubergine and bulgur pilaf this evening. Photo doesn't look very pretty but the taste was lovely and the aroma of the spices that filled the kitchen was sweet. Will definately cook again. 

I was worried about deep frying the aubergines but drained them back into a mesuring cup and there was about 200ml of oil/juices drained back into the cup and the aubergies were actualy not heavy.

Here is the link for the recipe;

http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2012/oct/19/meatballs-aubergines-pilaf-recipes-ottolenghi

 

Etli yaprak sarmasi

Mince meat and rice stuffed vine leaves

Ingredients

250 gr lean steak mince

1 large onion chopped

1 cup of rice washed and drained

2 table spoon tomato paste

3 table spoon vegetable oil

1 teaspoon butter

1 teaspoon dried mint

1/2 jar of vine leaves in brine 

(soaked in fresh water overnight or at least 1 hour to reduce the salt)

Preparation

Mix all the ingredients except the vine leaves and mix until evenly combined.

Take the vine leaves out of the water and carefull unwrap them. You may tear a few of them when unwrapping the lot. Don't worry you will use the torn ones to line your pan.

 

Here is a little sketch I made showing the steps to stuff the leaves. First lay one leaf on a chopping board, nip the stalk off the leaf.

Place roughly a teaspoonfull of stuffing and carefully wrap the leaf around the stuffing.

Repeat until you finish all your stuffing.

 

 

Cover the base of a pan with the torn leaves and place your finished stuffed and wrapped leaves as you go along.

 

Add 1 1/2 cup of hot water to the pan. Cover and keep on high heat until the water starts to boil then lower the heat and let it simmer in low heat for 40 minutes.

 

Here is the result.

Serve it warm accompanied with yogurt.

 

Rainbow themed party food

Last week we had my daughter's 6th birthday party. It was a rainbow themed party and we had colurful food for the party. We had rainbow fruit sticks, rainbow vegetables with houmus.

Cake was a rainbow cake from BBC good food magazine. 

We made a rainbow backdrop to take photos of the kids as well. Kids had fun when we were taking the photos.

Crunchy red cabbage slaw and mustard chicken

I made this red cabbage slaw and mustard chicken couple of times now, it's lovely and light. Very quick to make on a week night.

Not sure if the nutritional info is right on recipe though, with that much chicken it definately feels more than 100 kcals.

Recipe here;

http://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/1543/crunchy-red-cabbage-slaw

Corn bread

I love a piece of fresh baked corn bread at breakfast or at lunch with a soup.

Ingredients

125 gr organic cornmeal

125 gr plain flour

5 spring onions chopped

Optipnal 1-2 chillies deseeded and chopped (leave chilles out if you don't like spicy)

150 ml sour cream

2 eggs

125 ml sunflower oil

1 tablespoon baking powder

1/4 tablespoon salt

Line a 20 cm cale tin and heat the oven to gas 7.

Sieve the organic cornmeal, plain flour and baking powder in a bowl. Add the salt, spring onions, chillies and mix with a spoon.

Put the eggs In a measuring jug and whisk with a fork. Add the sunflower oil and sour cream measing them as you go along. Mix everything well with a fork.

Add the wet ingredients into dry ingredients and mix until combined. Pour everything in the tin, level the top of the mixture in the tin with a spoon.

Bake in the oven 25-30 minutes. 

Enjoy served with cheddar cheese slices at breakfast with your tea or have a piece at lunch with your soup.

Citrus herb cookies

 

I stumbled across this recipe last week and I was curious to see how will mint and tyme go in a sweet cookie.

 

I tried and and the result was delicious cookie which leaves a very pleasant fresh after taste in your mouth.

 

My 6 year old daughter loved it as well, she couldn't believe that there was mint and tyme in it.

 

I cut the cookies to shape before serving though as they were a bit flat, next time will add a bit more flour to the dough.

 

Menemen

 

 

This is a very common Turkish breakfast dish which is simply scrambled eggs with fried peppers and tomatoes. This dish always reminds me of a holiday where I went to stay with my cousins at my teens. After a long and fun drive in my uncles car reaching home and getting to peel tens of tomatoes and chopping twice as many chillies. Of course then none of us knew how easy it would be to peel tomatoes if you left the tomatoes in boiling water after marking a cross the bottom with a knife. So we were trying to peel the tomatoes with the blunt side of the knife which took ages.

 

 

image via irum

 

Ingredients

15-20 Green Turkish chillies or green peppers, deseeded and chopped (like the ones on above photo, you can get these from the Turkish shops, the darker greens are usually the hot ones and the light greens are milder)

Leave  seeds of couple of them if you like it hot

750 gr tomatoes (6-7medium sized) peeled and chopped

An easy way for peeling tomatoes is to make a cross at the bottom of the tomatoes and put them in a bowl pouring boiling water over it and let them sit in the water for a minute

4 eggs

3 table spoons of olive oil

Method 

Heat the olive oil in the pan and add the chopped chillies. Cook them in medium heat for about 10 minutes or until they are soft and before they start to turn brown.

Add the chopped tomatoes and bring to boil. Simmer about 2-3 minutes.

Crack the eggs in the pan one by one and mix at the same time with a spoon so they don’t set and they get scrambled.

Bring to boil and simmer for further 2-3 minutes until eggs are cooked to your liking.

Enjoy.

 

 

 

Rye bread

We have gone on an intermident fast diet recently and our lunch will be sardines on toast.

I baked this bread this morning from Nigel Slater's rye bread recipe, but without the walnuts and parmesan cheese.

I was in a rush last night so did not have a change to add anything to it but next time will add sunflower seeds and maybe walnut to it.

If we continue with this diet it looks like I will be baking more of rye breads. Next time I will try to make a sourdogh version of this.

Here is the photo of the lunch later with the sardines.

Courgette chilli pasta

A quick recipe of my lunch, courgette and chilli pasta.

You will need 4 cougettes, 3 garlic cloves, 2 chillies and a pack of pasta 500gr. 

Pack of creme fraiche about 150 ml pack.

Olive oil for frying the garlic and chillies. 

Parmesan for sprinkling.

This will serve 4-6.

First of all get ready by grating the courgettes skin on and chopping the garlic and chillies. Leave the seeds of the chilli if you like your pasta hot.

Put a frying pan with lid on high heat and add 3-4 table spoons of olive oil.

Throw the chopped garlic cloves and chopped chilles to olive oil turn the heat to low and swirl around to flavour the oil.

Once you see the garlics are starting to change colour add the grated courgettes and mix with the flavoured oil making sure most of the courgette has a bit of oil and not left dry. Put a lid on the courgettes and cook for 10-15 minutes.

While courgettes are cooking put booling water in a pan with salt and little bit of olive oil and boil pasta as pack instructions. 

Just before draining the pasta take a laddle of the pasta boiling water and add to courgettes.

Drain the pasta, leave aside and while pasta is waiting add the creme fraiche to courgettes season and mix everything well. Put the heat high until the cream is heated  and then put it to low to simmer while you deal with pasta.

Put the strained pasta back in to the pot and add the cougette sauce to the pasta and mix well.

Serve with grated parmesan cheese.

Carrot and sesame sandwich bread recipe

This is an other most loved bread recipe, carrot and sesame sandwich bread, of course Dan Lepard recipe.
Good way to use up the old carrots.
Recipe is here.

Thai chicken cashew stir fry with charred lime

I made thai chicken stir fry with cashews and charred lime for lunch. I used the thai green curry paste I had in the freezer. Recipe is from BBC good food magazine november issue.

I got this book from the library today, "thai food" by David Thompson. I am very excited about this. It looks like I will be able to cook tom yam soup at last. Here is what the book says about tom yam sopu, which actually is dtom yam according to the book.

This is good timing that I got this book as we are about to start alternate day low GI diet and will be having just soup 3 days a week. Will try the chicken tom yum soup soon.

Easy marble cake

I make marble cake quite often, here is the recipe.

225 grams stork

225 grams golden granulated sugar

4 eggs

2 tbs vanilla extract

225 self raising floor (or plain floor + 2 tsp baking powder)

50 gr cocoa powder

I use Stork instead of butter, and first thing to do is take it out of the fridge. It is quite soft so doesn't need to wait outside for long. 10 minutes is usually enough.

While Stork is getting to room temperature, heat the oven to gas mark 5 and line a 20cm round cake tin first.

Then cream 225 grams of stork with electric food mixer in a bowl and add 225 grams of golden caster sugar to it and mix until light and fluffy.

In an other bowl, whisk 4 eggs with 2 table spoons of vanilla extract then add this to Stork and sugar mixture slowly while continuing to beat the mixture. 

Continue to mix with electric mixer until everything is light and there is quite a lot of air in the mixture, this makes the final cake light.

Sift 225 grams of self raising flour (or plain flour and 2 teaspoon baking powder) in a bowl and then sift for the second time into the cake mixture. With a spoon slowly fold flour taking care not to knock the air out of the cake mixture. Sifting the floor twice makes the cake even more lighter!

Tip half of the cake mixture in an other bowl and sift 50 grams of cocoa powder into this half and fold in with a spoon taking care not to knock the air out of the mixture.

Take spoonful of each cake mixture and place in the prepared tin alternating the vanilla with the cocoa. When finished tap the tin on the work floor lightly so everything settles in.  Then with a skewer swirl the mixtures to give the marble effect. 

Bake in the oven for 50 minutes or when a skewer inserted in the cake comes out clean.

If I get a change to go to the supermarket then I usually make "lime syrup marble cake" Dan Lepard recipe, mostly replacing the lime with oranges.