Two years ago, we were finishing up our trip through Turkey. Since then, I’ve been obsessed with making dishes we had on the trip, and ones found in the cookbook I bought there.
This dish is a disturbingly simple carrot and yogurt salad/dip. If you saw it in a cookbook, you would think it was boring. You would be wrong.
Continue reading Turkish Carrot and Yogurt Dip (Yoğurtlu Havuç)
This month’s Daring Cooks’ challenge asked us to make some form of ‘patty’. I used it as an opportunity to dive back into my Turkish cookbook…
The end result is a mashup of a couple of different dishes – a great way for vegetarians to experience köfte. Most people know Turkish köfte as football-shaped meat balls, full of spices and a little bit crispy on the outside. This is my attempt at making them vegetarian.
Continue reading Daring Vegetarian Köfte (lentil and bulgur patties)
I finally tried to make the bulgur salad I was obsessed with on my trip to Turkey.
This salad is the reason I bought the cookbook I bought. There were a few different cookbooks in the tourist shops, and I found that this one was the only one that had the bulgur salad in it.
One problem – I couldn’t find it in English.
Continue reading Kısır – Bulgur Salad : Turkish Food Log Pt. 4
There weren’t many dishes I ate that contained bulgur. Until recently, the only thing I could think to make was tabbouleh. Fair enough – tabbouleh is tasty!
Eating my way through Turkey, I realized that you could get bulgur in different sizes, in many stages between fine and coarse. The coarser bulgur was used much like rice, and bulgur pilaf was a common side for many dishes.
I bought a bag of coarse bulgur, ready to make some delicious pilaf… and it sat in the cupboard for almost a month. J finally dug in, and used some in a bread, and I decided I couldn’t let him show me up.
The basic bulgur pilaf is fairly plain, since it’s meant to be a side dish for more flavourful main items, like kebab and kofte. I used the recipe from the cookbook I bought in Turkey as a jumping off point, adding some spinach and lots of yummy herbs and spices. I also had to change the cooking instructions a little bit — this will vary depending on the coarseness of the bulgur you buy. There are many variations, and I’m not sure there’s a standard way that all brands differentiate between the varieties.
This is a great alternative to a rice side dish – it has a nice chewiness to it, and is fantastically tangy from the mix of tomato, fresh mint and sumac.
It’s also amazing as leftovers.
