Tag Archives: chef

Songul’s Tepsi Kebab

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December has arrived with a bang and I am pulling out my long-johns (I don’t really have long-johns) and turning up the heat here in Mersin.  The skies may be blue right now but there has been a load of snow up in the mountains behind us and enough rain to keep me indoors watching old movies and contemplating cleaning the house.

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Along with the cold weather in Mersin the menu changes to suit.  It’s starting to get too cold for a barbeque so our meat dishes need to be cooked indoors (which kind of ruins my fun).  Our garden is overflowing with Swedish chard so no doubt I will be making borek for lunch over the next few weeks.  We also have leeks, which will mean lots of soup, as well as celeriac which is another weird vegetable that I had never heard of before arriving in Mersin.  These days I serve celeriac mashed with garlic which is delicious.  Finally there is Quince everywhere so I can make my father in law’s favourite dessert and every single pomegranate tree is overflowing with ripe fruit right now so Daughter can usually be found with her cousins pilfering the fruit from the neighbour’s trees and leaving their sticky hands everywhere.  Yummo.

Last night my sister-in-law and her family came over for dinner and so I needed to prepare a dish large enough to feed 7.  Answer?  My sister-in-law’s favourite – the Tepsi Kebab or Tray Kebab.

What you need:

2 finely cut soğan (onion)

4 cloves of crushed sarımsak (garlic)

1 bunch of maydanoz (flat leaf parsley)

Cay spoon pul biber (red pepper flakes)

Cay spoon kimyon (cumin)

Tuz (salt) and karabiber (black pepper) for taste

Tereyağı (butter)

1 tbl Kırmızı biber salça (red pepper paste)

½ kilo kıyma (mince meat)

Like most Turkish recipe’s you need to get your hands dirty so mix all the ingredients really well and I mean really mix them together – your hands should be bright red along with your cheeks due to your efforts.

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Finally I press the mixture onto my kebab dish (or pizza dish or even a large oven dish) and add a couple of teaspoons of butter to keep the dish moist.  I also cut up pieces of chilli, tomato and onion for presentation.

Cooking time varies.  I prefer a low oven (say 150-160) for 30 minutes so it does not dry out.  Once it is cooked my kebab is placed on the table (in the pan) along with lavaş (flat bread) and salads.

Alright it might not look sensational but it tastes delicious!

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Afiyet olsen.

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Turkish Housewife Failure

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I had nothing but good intentions when we first moved here.  I was going to amaze with my cracking culinary skills, real food too not all this Turkish stuff day in and day out.  I was going to make lemon meringue pies, electrify the family tastebuds with my beef wellington and delight them with my knockout gnocchi.  I brought at least 10 cook books with me including a Turkish cookbook – how could I go wrong?  I also intended to keep the house spick and span.  I was going to iron my sheets (my mum used to do that).  I was going to dust away the dust bunnies and my home was going to look like it had come out of a Better Homes and Gardens catalogue – after all I did have a lot of free time.

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Good intentions mean shit when you realise that you can’t cook and you hate cleaning.  I was not designed to be a housewife but even more troubling is I was definitely not designed to be a Turkish Housewife!  They put the super size into every meal and super freak into their cleaning.  Who needs to be like that anyway?

The other morning my teyzer (aunt) arrived as I was making breakfast and she gave me a lesson in boiling eggs.  Truly.  It’s a feking egg for Christ’s sake, “how hard can it be?”  Well it seems I have been doing it wrong for all these years so I sat back and let her boil my eggs (that sounds a lot dirtier than it should).  “Ello darlin’, come here and I’ll boil ya eggs for ya!”  After she boiled my eggs she showed me how to cut up a cucumber.  Yes really.

And it is not just my cooking skill that requires lessons on how to be a better Turkish housewife.  More than once I have had my sister in law turns up uninvited to clean my windows because she could see the hand prints from her home.  Really?  I have also had my neighbour come knocking on my door to show me how to do my laundry as my washing drying in the sunshine did not look clean enough from her garden.  Um, thanks.

Well it seems that I will never make any of the ladies in the village happy with my housewife skills.  Frankly I am surprised that they haven’t taken The Turk aside and given him a speech about how bad of a wife I really am. 

“Maybe they have?” questions my inner demons.

Well maybe I don’t care!

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Take-away

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Do you remember getting take-away when you were a kid.  I do.  We would go to the fish and chip shop up at Narraweena.  We would get fish and chips (duh), hamburgers and potato scallops.  It was always amazing.  Because it was take-away.  Food is always better when you don’t have to cook it.  Then home delivery became an option and my culinary world exploded.  Chinese food!  Wow.  I really am a kid from the 1970’s aren’t I?

Here in Mersin take-away and home delivery is certainly an option.  They have Dominos that delivers as well as Hungry Jacks (which is a disgusting thought).  Many of the little restaurants here in the Village also home deliver and on occasion The Turk has had people knock on the door at odd hours delivering huge bags of food but I have not felt the need to partake – until now.

A couple of nights back The Turk decided it was too hot to cook (it is definitely warming up here in Mersin – I expect I will be complaining about the heat to you sometime soon) so he made a couple of calls and arrange for home delivery.  I was excited.  What would it be?  Obviously Turkish food, no option there but Turkish food could mean practically anything.

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Two hours (!) later and Daughter and I were getting a little edgy.  The Turk is well aware that if I do not eat at my allotted hour I become quite the bitch, well add Daughter into the mix and we were both chomping at the bit for dinner.  Finally a young boy arrived carrying an abundance of food that could have fed a whole army.  He firstly handed over two bags which contained Kiymali pide, Peynir pide, salads, freshly baked bread, rice and Ayran.  Then he disappeared back down the stairs returning with the largest clay plate of Kağit Kebabi I have ever seen.  This huge plate with a circumference of 60 cm was filled with lamb, mushrooms, eggplant and handfuls of spice.  Holy moly this was a feast.  Total cost 25TL (about AU$13).

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Was it worth the 2 hour wait?  Oh.  My.  God.  Yes.  This was a taste sensory overload.  Possibly the best thing I have ever put in my mouth (don’t be dirty).

Girl on Fire – making sarma

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I think you guys already know that I am a terrible chef.  In fact chef is a word that really should not be used when describing the food that is plated up by me at any time but over the past few days I have had the opportunity to learn a few other recipes that I hope I can make by myself over the coming weeks.

With my sister in law right next door the sound of my name “J-j-ja-a-a-n-n-e-e-e” calls me to drop what I am doing and come next door.  It is a win-win situation as I learn something and I eat something.  I prefer just to eat but learning something is good too.

Songul was preparing hundreds, literally hundreds, of sarma (stuffed grape leaves) for a school excursion and needed help with the preparation.  Honestly I was not really sure that I would be doing anything useful but I have now learned that if you do something over and over . . . and over again, you get pretty good at it.

The first part of my lesson was stealing vine leaves.  Yes I was sent on a stealth mission to pilfer vine leaves from the neighbour’s vines.  Up and down the street I went with My Hurley Dog and Songul’s 4 year old to grab vine leaves under cover of taking the dog for a walk (stealing vine leaves is a big sin here as everyone loves their sarma).  After collecting 3 bags full we returned home and started separating the leaves and collecting them into groups.

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Making the dolma is actually surprisingly easy.

Ingredients –

Vine leaves, 2 bags of rice, diced onion, grated tomato (which included part of my hand unfortunately), Nene’s chilli paste (not hot), parsley, sumac, cumin, salt, pepper, dried mint and lemon salt (mincemeat optional)

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Lemon salt is an excellent invention I had never heard of before.  I actually brought some at the market quite by accident, put it in my salt grinder and nearly vomited.  As salt it is filthy but Songul puts it in water for 5 minutes and it becomes a strong lemon juice equivalent without wasting a precious lemon.  Aahhh so that’s what you do with it, shame I threw mine out after the first disaster.

First things first.  Boil some water and drop the vine leaves in it for mere seconds.  This will soften them.

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Mix all ingredients (sans vine leaves) in a bowl and you are ready to roll (literally) and once I got started I was cracking at the rolling.  Really simple.  Vine leave, small handful of mixture, roll ‘em up.  Get in time with the Turkish music that’s blasting in your ear and you really have the motion.

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Now remember that we had to make hundreds of these things so I spent the next 3 hours on the floor rolling vine leaves.  As a fine art I could whip out two a minute.  Every 10 dolmas I would wrap in string and place in the pot.  Once the pot was full it was filled with water (maybe 1 cm above the top sarma) and boiled for 30 minutes.  We ended up filling 4 pots for the school excursion the next day.  I was told that the sarma was excellent (of course) but that mine were particularly sensational (I know they were just being kind).

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I often wonder why I never did a cooking course or why my mother never taught me to cook (although she too was no chef – I didn’t really know green beans were green before I moved out of home as they were always brown *sigh*).

Coucous Kofte

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My next couple of posts may or may not be about food.  My sister in law has been home the last few days so I’ve been going backwards and forwards between houses drinking copious amounts of çay while watching and attempting to learn how to make a few different Turkish dishes.

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In Mersin most of the meals are simple and grain based so I’ve been cooking a lot of couscous, boreks, pirinç (rice) and the like as well as finishing off the last of the Swedish chard.  Daughter loves my sister in law’s kofte (I call them balls) made from couscous and because they are so simple I thought I would take a crack at it myself and you know what?  It really was that easy.

To start I made the couscous.  I used 3 cay cups of bulgur and 1 cup of warm water and then put it aside.  I would say that was the equivalent to 1 metric cup of coucous.

My sister in law’s recipe calls for a couple of large bunches (2) of maydanoz (parsley) and one large bunch of nane (mint).  I chopped them up quite finely and then put them aside.  I also boiled two potatoes and left them to cool.

I think the important part of the dish is the sauce.  A good serving of vegetable oil along with two soğan (onion) kimyon (cumin) for taste, and my mother in law’s chilli paste which we made last spring.  Once all are in the pot I left them to simmer for a good 15 minutes.  I added sarimsak (garlic) into my recipe (I add garlic into everything).  My sister in law was horrified but I don’t think it took away any of the flavour in fact I think it probably made it richer.

Once that sauce has simmered I add the maydanoz and nane and mix it well while it was still on the stove.  The aroma was sensational (I think it was adding the garlic).  I was feeling pretty good at this point, nothing was going to stop this from being a success.

Now it was down to mixing all the ingredients together.  It was hot and messy work and it took some time to ensure that everything did mix sufficiently well.  Once mixed I rolled them into balls and threw them on a plate. 

I had kept a small amount of the sauce aside and added some chilli powder and put it on top to finish the dish.  With a Turkish salad dinner was served. 

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To finish off this post I just want to say that my father in law (famous or infamous for hating my cooking) ate a huge plate and gave me the two thumbs up.  Progress!

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Quince, Quinces or Quinci?

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Those that know me know that I am no chef.  Never have been.  Never will be.  Sure I cook.  It is a necessity when you have a family or even when you do not have a family.  At some stage in your life everyone needs to cook.  I have lots of recipe books here, yes I brought them all over from Australia, but when I look at the photos and read the instructions in these books I scratch my head, get a very confused look on my face, throw my hands up in the air and yell “Feck it”.

Since we arrived in Mersin I relied heavily on my mother in law for our meals.  If not her then my sister in law would always have something that I could incorporate into whatever I was attempting to cook.  Now I find it is a necessity again and I need to learn and learn fast.

Each afternoon my father in law will knock on my door and hand me some fruit that he has bought at the market (or perhaps steals from a neighbouring tree).  Fresh, crisp elma (apple), uzum (grapes) straight off the vine, muz (banana) or whatever other fruit happens to be in season at the time.  A couple of days ago he dropped in and handed me some avya.  He kept repeating to me “Avya, avya.  Good, good.” I had no idea what they were and even less idea what I was to do with them.  He looked so impressed with himself that I searched my limited Turkish for the right response, “Ben avya seviyorum.”  Of course I love avya despite not knowing what it was.

After some sleuthing I find that these strange little fruit are quince.  I have a bag of quince, quinces or quini.  What would the plural of quince be? Not sure.  Searching the internet I found a relatively simple recipe for poaching quince, quinces or quinci –  Avya Tatlisi.

I will start by saying that quince, quinces or quini are hard to the touch.  Unpleasant.  Peeled the fruit is coarse.  Unpleasant.  And believe me do not eat it uncooked.  Blugh!

Here is my final product –

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To be honest it didn’t taste that bad.  Very sweet, in fact a little too sweet for my palate.  Although originally a white fruit they slowly went pembe (pink) while simmering on the stove.  The sugar caramelised nicely and I added a vanilla bean for taste (although I do not think it needed it on reflection) and I did not burn them on the bottom.  I must say they may not look as appetising as the professionally made quince, quinces or quini but they were pretty moreish.  Daughter was not a fan but her cousins tuckered in and even asked for more.

If you are interested in attempting the recipe (after all if I can do it anyone can) have a look here.

Hopefully my father in law brings me apples next time.  I know what to do with them.

Incidentally the correct term for more than one quince is in fact quinces.  Mystery solved.