Turkish Feast

This weekend we made a Turkish feast.  Sofia snagged a sample copy of this wonderful book of recipes and stories from Turkey and lent it to us to peruse.  We got up early (despite enjoying a late night in NYC seeing Patrick's latest play) and poured over it, choosing eight recipes to make:

1) Smokey eggplant, and beetroot and yogurt dips (p14)
2) Warm pumpkin hummus (p29)
3) Tomato pomegranate mint salad (p116)
4) Burghul Kofte with tomato and mint sauce and garlic yogurt (p126) [not attempted due to time constraints]
5) Bulgar pilaf (p140)
6) Slow roasted lamb with apples poached in pomegranate (p215)
7) Pistachio semolina cake (p233) [sadly, not attempted due to time constraints]
8) Coffee custard (p265)

I also wanted to make Simit (sesame seed bread rings) (p73) but decided that would be too much to even shoot for with everything else on the list.
Overall we did quite well in the amount of time we had once we got all our other chores done!  We made six out of eight and they were all beautiful and delicious.  Turkish food is wonderfully different from many other cuisines, featuring lots of yogurt and inverting the usual flavors of ingredients: fruits in savory or meat dishes, tomatoes in a dessert, pomegranate in a salad, cinnamon with grains. 

We realized that we needed to get a jump on things when we read the details of the lamb recipe and the first few steps involved slow-roasting for seven hours.  Our local butcher provided us with a lovely leg of lamb that we slathered in spiced butter and got right into the oven.

A serious leg of lamb, pre-deliciousifying.

Then we got the rest of our ingredients together for the other dishes and got to work.

We started on dessert because the coffee custard needed to be baked and then chilled for several hours.  Todd had fun making a cup and a half of espresso  and Sofia assembled everything easily so we could get it right into the oven.

6 cups of espresso = 1 1/2 cups, plus one sip for the barrista

They have you strain the milk-sugar-coffee mixture, which is a little silly because you really just need to fish out the cardamom pods.

Once we'd gotten the two most important parts of the meal going (the dessert and the main course) we hopped around chopping tomatoes, peeling the butternut squash, charring eggplants, seeding a pomegranate, coring apples.

Butternut squash before sauteeing

These, dear reader, are called tomatoes.

Eggplant charred over high head on a closed grill for 20 minutes. They pop and steam like guysers when you cut into them. It deserves to be on YouTube.

The salad was a beautiful and flavorful combination of tomatoes, pomegranate and mint topped with saffron yogurt. 

The eggplant dip was fun to make because it involved charring the eggplant on the grill to give it a smokey flavor. [Note to anyone who attempts this recipe: don't follow the instructions and try to mush the eggplant with a fork. Just get out a chef's knife and chop it as best you can. Chopping eggplant is easier if you don't make it into stringy mush before chopping.]

The finished eggplant dip.

The lamb recipe included apples cooked in pomegranate juice and stuffed with raisins and walnuts. It was a close second to the coffee custard among our tasters. The apples cooked nearly to apple sauce, but were delicious and well-balanced with the other ingredients. They had us use granny smith apples for a little tang, and this receipt was not as sweet as the ingredients would indicate.

Rounding out the meal we made the bulgar pilaf, which had onions, garlic and cinnamon—a subtle and savory accompaniment to the apples and the lamb.

We never quite got to the burghul kofte with tomato and mint sauce and garlic yogurt, or to the pistachio semolina cake.  But since everything else came out so well and we already bought the ingredients we will have to try them soon.

The hands-down best dish was the coffee custard. The flavor of the espresso accented by cardamom was amazing. It was silky, smooth, aromatic, and it came out a lovely chestnut color inside and out. I hope this book gets printed in the US, because I want to try all its other desserts.

Here we are with our tasty feast, which was not only an adventure in Turkish cuisine, but a dinner celebrating all the hard work my dad has put into recementing and finishing our basement. Thanks Dad!