Cena turca

One week ago, Elif was the chef of a wonderful dinner that we hosted at our place. She prepared all Turkish food, so I had the pleasure of seeing her and helping her a bit!
This is what she made:
Salad with navy beans (she boiled them on a side), tomatoes, red onions, black olives, and green bell peppers, seasoned simply with olive oil, red vinegar, salt, and parseley.
Fava beans with red onions and yogurt/garlic sauce, sprinkled with dill. We washed the fava beans, removed the ends and the strings, cut them in half. Then we sauteed some red onions in olive oil, and added the fava beans. We sauteed the beans for ~10 minutes, and then we sprinkled them with quite a bit of lemon juice and a little flour. Then we added enough water to cover them, and let them simmer for almost an hour. Then we drained them, cooled them down, and served with a sauce made with greek yogur diluted with a little water, and finely cut garlic, sprinkled with dill. Delicious!
There was also some rice with pinenuts, very nice and creamy, and the most wonderful thing were these stuffed eggplants:
I will give the recipe for this in the next post.

In general, I was really surprised to see how close Italian and Turkish cuisines are. They're both based on olive oil, onion, garlic, vegetables, tomatoes. The spices are also quite similar (basil, parseley, red vinegar, lemon). I was really happy about this dinner!