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.