by Sam Tackeff | Sep 12, 2012 | Eggs, Turkish
Yesterday was a long day. I tried to avoid the television, but the tweets and messages and blogs of my friends remembering 11 years ago were sobering. I made the mistake of turning on NPR while in my car, and choking up while driving and listening to the short memorial stories.
And then I met my mom for a walk on the ocean. The air was the warm end of summer air, the sky was bright. The Atlantic was flat and deep blue, and seemingly endless. We talked about life, food, her first day of preschool. This walk – the same one we’ve gone on since I was a small child – always puts me in a better place.
Reluctantly, I came home again to an empty house, and although it’ll be the two of us again tonight, it was lonely. It was also late, and I was tired. My mom had given me several ripe tomatoes from her garden, and some fresh parsley, so I set to work putting together a riff on Turkish menemen – scrambled egg with peppers and tomato. Because I was pepper-less, I just added an extra tomato. I find that you can never eat too many tomatoes at the end of summer, because soon they’ll be gone, and you’ll regret your missed opportunities.
This is one of those dishes that I come back to again and again, the type of food that I eat alone. It’s dead simple, cooks up quickly, and works just as well for dinner as it would for breakfast. It also, for the record, tastes great when you come back at 2 am after a long night out.
Turkish Tomato Eggs
serves 1
1 tablespoon olive oil (or 2!)
2 or 3 ripe tomatoes, chopped or grated
salt
pinch of chile flakes (Such as Urfa Biber or Piment D’espelette)
pinch of thyme
3 large eggs, whisked
small handful of chopped parsley
In a non-stick skillet over medium heat, pour a generous amount of olive oil (a tablespoon or more if you can rationalize it). Add the chopped tomatoes to the pan, and season with a little bit of salt, a large pinch of chile flakes, and a small pinch of thyme. Stir, and let it bubble for three to five minutes.
In a bowl, whisk three eggs with a small pinch of salt. Pour the egg mixture over the tomatoes, and let it set for a bit, and then stir gently for a few minutes. This dish is fairly soupy, and not dry, but you are looking to cook the whites. When cooked, add a large handful of chopped parsley, and eat right away.
by Sam Tackeff | Aug 30, 2011 | Local stores, Restaurants, Sandwich, Turkish
Have you been in a convenience store lately? It used to be that you could only find sad packages of stale sunflower seeds, Slim Jims, or half smushed Hostess snack packs, but not much else. You may have been able to buy your late night desperation pint of ice cream, but usually it wasn’t the good flavor. For decades, convenience stores weren’t filled with what one wanted, but rather what one, in a moment of irrationality, believed they needed.
Now I have certainly been grateful at times for the salvation of convenience stores: that Snickers bar in Fort Bragg after driving unintentionally three hours up the Pacific Coast Highway without having eaten all day, and the air conditioning in a Buttonwillow gas station when it was 120°F come to mind. But these experiences have been few and far between. It used to be that I wouldn’t stop in one unless I was truly desperate.
I am here to share that times are ‘a changing. In New England, a curious thing seems to be happening. This region has hopes and dreams for convenience stores, and is pushing for a small revolution. Taking it a new level. The ultra-convenience. Superlative convenience. Or more to the point, actually convenient. In New England, our convenience stores are marvelous and full of happy surprises. We have affectionate names for them too. Cumby’s anyone? Ours come with or without gas. And, some of them house restaurants.
Take, for instance, my latest experience: Turkish Kebab’s, located in Jay’s Newmarket Convenience.
Jay’s Convenience Store is actually a converted house. You can get your gas and your cigarettes and your six-packs, but what you really want to come for is the food. Real Turkish food. I’m not really sure which I would have found more unlikely a decade ago – having great food in a convenience store, or finding Turkish food in Newmarket, New Hampshire.
Turkish food is my comfort food, the food I crave. I grew up spending summers in Istanbul. We would visit the city where my grandmother lived, and then spend weeks on Büyükada, the biggest of the Princes’ Islands. The setting was idyllic: a beautiful island in the Bosphorus, with centuries old houses, no cars, and horse drawn carriages. You’d take your tea in the afternoon on the waterfront, watching the ferry boats come in from the city, their passengers visibly relaxing as they got off the boats. We’d swim, and bike, and walk through the neighborhoods. But mostly, we’d eat.
The street food culture in Turkey is diverse and enticing at every corner. There are Dönerci’s selling döner kebap – meat cooked on a rotating spit, and shaved thinly (similar to schwarma). You can get kebabs in sandwiches, or midye tava (fried mussels) with a nut sauce called tarator, or stuffed mussels taken straight from the Bosphorus and cooked on the sidewalk. Or you can get lahmacun, (lah-ma-joon) a thin Turkish flatbread with lamb, filled with lettuce and lemon, and wrapped up to eat on the go. There is Tost – which is the best grilled cheese you will ever eat, stuffed optionally with sucuk, a spicy sausage. Or if you need something sweet, there are pudding shops nearly everywhere, and more ice cream and waffle sellers than there are Starbucks in Manhattan.
I tend to feel sorry for myself that I live so far away from Turkey, especially in the summertime, so I was ecstatic to find Jay’s so close to home to fill myself up on the foods I was missing. I try to do a lot of Turkish cooking but you just can’t recreate döner without a large spit and a qualified chef. (It takes years of training to become a proper Dönerci).
Jay’s is filled with all sorts of treats that I crave. Kebabs – which loosely refers to almost any meat cooked on a stick – are their specialty. I’ve heard good things about their falafel, although I haven’t tried it. You can also get almost anything in sub form. They do Italian style subs as well, and some Italian home-style dishes.
They also have a large variety of Turkish salads, including Kısır, a bulgur wheat salad similar to Tabouli (they actually label it as Tabouli, but technically it is different), and hummus, and a very good eggplant salad. They have “popular” New England favorites including seafood salad, but why you would purchase that when you had Jay’s other options, I have no idea.
Turkish people also consume a lot of pastry and fried foods, and Jay’s carries many of these as well, including flaky Börek (turnovers) filled with white cheese and parsley, savory meat pies, zucchini fritters, and even some Italian arancini (rice balls) as big as your fist.
I was excited to hear the grocery section had a small collection of imported Turkish foods, because I always find myself missing things like Turkish honey, jams, and olive spreads. We typically travel over an hour to stock up on these things at Sevan in Watertown, Massachusetts, and I was looking forward to the.. erm.. close to home convenience.
Unfortunately, when we went, the entire Turkish grocery section in the back had been decimated. It turns out they had received a visit that week from a group of Turkish high-schoolers spending the month at Phillips Exeter Academy’s summer school. At least I can completely understand their impulse!
And apparently, students can also get a 15% discount on food if they show their ID. It’s probably better that they weren’t open when I was in highschool, otherwise I would have been in twice a week abusing their generosity.
This trip we all decided to order the same thing – thinly sliced döner in a Turkish lavash bread, rolled with lettuce, tomato, pickled onion, and yogurt sauce. While very tasty, I found myself finding the ratio a little off – there was actually too much meat for my preference, and I would have liked a little bit more sauce. Next time, I think I might actually get the tomato sauce their Italian cook makes rather than the more traditional yogurt. Nothing wrong with a little fusion!
We also took home some smoky Turkish eggplant salad, and some kisir, as well as some kadayif – a crispy pastry similar to baklava, except with vermicelli-like dough filled with pistachio nuts. (At some point, I’ll write a 5000 word essay on my love of Turkish pastry… the stuff is glorious.)
The one flaw of Jay’s is the lack of seating: when you are hungry, you want to eat food right away! Some quick thinking led us to the benches at Stratham Hill Park. And here, I leave you with a shot of my mother, a real live Turkish person, enjoying her sandwich. Authenticity folks, I like it.
Turkish Kebab’s Subs & Grill (in Jay’s Newmarket Convenient Store and Gas)
35 North Main Street, Newmarket, New Hampshire
603 – 659- 1500
by Sam Tackeff | Apr 8, 2009 | Farmers Market, Turkish
Growing up, one of my favorite foods from my mother’s kitchen was the Dolma. Dolma in Turkish really refers to pretty much anything stuffed, rather than just the stuffed grape leaves it has become synonymous with in the States.
Some of my favorite dolma were her stuffed tomatoes, peppers and zucchini: vegetables from our garden ubiquitous in the summer time, that truly sang with a little bit of added filling. At home, my mother would make them with a traditional Turkish style filling of ground meat, rice, onion, chopped tomato, mint, dill, parsley, and toasted pine nuts.
After finding some spectacular peppers, and some Kokuho Rose brown rice this week at Alemany farmer’s market, I set about gathering ingredients for my dolma. I already had some left over cooked ground turkey that I had sauteed for a frittata filling that needed to be used up, and stuffed peppers seemed to be a natural receptacle for using up my leftovers. While these stuffed peppers don’t follow the traditional recipe, they are still incredibly delicious, and bring back so many good memories of home and excitement for the summer to come.
The best part about these stuffed peppers is that you can make them well in advance, and they taste equally good, if not better, the next day for lunch. And, they are the perfect size to pop two into a bento and have a filling lunch at work. Finally, in the spirit of adding as many vegetables to my diet as possible, I decided to add some roasted cherry tomatoes to the filling, and pop in a few extra scored tomatoes into the final dish to roast alongside my peppers. If you have any extra vegetables that need some cooking, this isn’t a bad dish to pop them in alongside.
Roasted Tomato and Brown Rice Stuffed Peppers
serves two, with extra for lunch
2 cups cooked brown rice
1 cup cooked ground turkey (seasoned well with cumin, salt, pepper, chile powder)
1/2 onion
olive oil
2 cups cherry tomatoes
2 cloves of garlic
a few tablespoons of freshly torn basil
salt and pepper
4 red bell peppers
A good glug of balsamic vinegar
a few teaspoons of fresh thyme and oregano
olive oil
plain yogurt (optional)
Method:
Making the filling:
1. While brown rice is cooking, pop a few handfuls of cherry tomatoes in a pan with some olive oil, garlic cloves, salt, pepper, and freshly torn basil. Cook at about 300 degrees F, until the rice is done, about 40 minutes. They should get all jammy and delicious.
2. Right after popping the tomatoes in the oven, start the ground turkey, first sauteeing a half an onion in a little bit of olive oil for about 15 minutes until soft, and then adding the ground turkey, and cooking until well browned. Season with salt, pepper, cumin, and chili powder to taste. (I usually use about a teaspoon each of cumin and chile powder, but I like these with a little kick.
3. When the rice, tomatoes, and turkey are done, stir together in a bowl, and add a good glug of balsamic vinegar, and a few teaspoons of fresh thyme and oregano.
Assembling the peppers:
4. Preheat the oven to 400 degrees Fahrenheit. Line a deep baking tray or roasting tray with foil, and grease lightly.
5. Cut the peppers lengthwise, leaving the stem in place, but scooping out any seeds and excess white bits. For smaller peppers, feel free to lop off the top instead of cutting lengthwise. My mother bakes her peppers with the tops on, but I personally enjoy how the filling gets crisp on top when left uncovered. In a large baking pan lined with foil, place the peppers, season with a little salt, and pour on a little bit of olive oil.
6. Stuff the peppers with the mixture, place in the pan, and cover with foil, cook for 45 minutes at 400 F, uncover and cook for about 10 more minutes, or until top has lightly browned. Serve immediately, with a lemony herb salad. If you like, top with some plain yogurt – a very traditional Turkish accompaniment to this dish. I just spoon it over the top, it’s not fancy, it looks a little odd, but it tastes delicious. (It’s like the middle eastern equivalent to sour cream or mexican crema.)
by Sam Tackeff | Feb 24, 2009 | Candy, Challenge, Turkish
Sugar High Friday is a monthly food blogging event created by Jennifer, The Domestic Goddess and is hosted each month on a different food blog. This month’s host for the event is Palachinka, and the theme is “Copycat”, where you copy one of your favorite store bought candies.
I spent a good couple of weeks thinking of the best candy I could copy. Would it be Snickers, my favorite bar candy? Pecan Divinity? Nutella? (I was seriously considering Nutella, until I realized that it would completely ruin any semblance of a healthy diet if I made it and then ate the entire concoction in two days.)
Finally I turned to Turkish candies, because Turkey happens to have some of the best confections: Lokum (Turkish Delight), Dragees (chocolate covered nuts and orange peels), Pişmaniye (a type of wispy candy floss that I can’t describe with any justice). My mother happens to be in Turkey this week, and now that I live across the country from her, I know that I’m going to be depressed when she returns and I get calls of what wonderful things she has brought home. Maybe she will send me a care package (hint).
And so, after thinking of all the candies that I wouldn’t be getting, I decided – why not create one of my favorites here at home? I finally settled on cezerye, a Turkish candy made of carrots! Now, although they have a lot of vitamin A and B from the carrots, they also have enough sugar to fully sweeten your blood, so I wouldn’t exactly qualify them as health food, but they certainly are delicious.
Home-Made Cezerye
makes about twenty five candies
Ingredients
2 cups grated carrots
3/4 cups loosely packed dark brown sugar
1/4 cup white sugar
about 1/2 cup water
1/2 cup ground walnuts
1/2 cup ground petit beurre biscuits
1/2 cup shredded dried (unsweetened) coconut
Method
1. Grate a few medium carrots and put into a medium saucepan with the sugar. I simply took my cup measure, loosely packed it three quarters of the way with brown sugar, topped it with the white sugar, and added water to wet the sugar (as much fit in the cup).
2. Simmer on low heat for a half hour or more, covered. Add the ground nuts and petit beurre cookies, and continue to cook uncovered for a few minutes. Take off the stove, and let cool enough to handle the mixture.
3. To make the carrot balls, roll the dough balls in some shredded coconut, as you would if you were making truffles. Place in the fridge for at least an hour, and eat!
These come out a little bit moist, but they should dry as they sit.
