Cena turca: salsine e 'ravioletti'!

Nicola lent me an amazingly pretty Turkish cookbook, and so last week I decided to prepare an all-Turkish dinner. Most of the things that really inspired me were the appetizers: in Turkey there are a lot of interesting so-called 'Meze', which include dips, finger food, and nice little dishes to start the dinner with. If you make enough of them (like I did....), they seem to provide by themselves a wonderful dinner. I loved the dips in particular: so easy to prepare, different in taste, and delicious!
I'll show here a few of them, starting with this delicious walnut and pomegranate dip, which will also be my entry to the 'A fruit a month' event, based on pomegranate!

Salsina di melograno e noci / Pomegranate and walnut dip/Muhammara

'Muhammara' is Arabic in origin, and can be also made with lemon juice instead of pomegranate juice. This recipe and the following ones come from the wonderful book 'The complete book of Turkish cooking', by Ghillie Basan, which I strongly recommend to anyone interested in learning about this great cuisine.

To make this dip, you can either use a mortar and pestle or, if you're lazy like me, a blender. :) Pound/blend roughly one cup of walnuts, 1 garlic clove, and 1 tsp cumin seeds, roasted. Add ~1 slice day old bread, soaked in water, and 2 tsp tomato paste. Add also 1-2 tsp sugar, 1-2 fresh chillies or 1 tsp chili powder and 2 tbsp pomegranate syrup. Instead of buying some premade syrup, I blended one whole pomegranate and added it to the dip.. So my dip looks quite different from the picture in the book, as it is less liquid. Finally, add ~1/2 cup olive oil (I added much less than that), and serve with a decoration of parsley leaves and warm pita bread! I made this dip twice (both times using the whole pomegranate, as I thought it made it really good). The second time I didn't add any hot spices, and it was still delicious!
So this dip goes to Sra at 'When my soup came alive' for the 'A fruit a month' event that she's hosting, themed on pomegranate.. great choice, Sra!

The second dip I'm presenting is based on cheese and yogurt.
Salsina di formaggio e yogurt / Cheese and yogurt dip/Pasa Ezmesi
This is even easier than the other dip: just mash a ~9 oz piece of feta cheese or 'Beyaz peynir' (I couldn't find the latter, unfortunately), add ~1-2 tbsp yogurt (I actually added more, as I thought it was too solid otherwise), 1-2 tsp hot paprika, 1 small bunch parseley leaves, finely cut, and salt to taste. Serve with hot pita bread and lemon wedges, to sprinkle on every bite.. Again, this dip was so good that I already made it twice, once hot and once not, with great results in both cases. Not sure why I decorated it with mint instead of parsley.. :)

I prepared a few more delicious dips, but I have no pretty pictures of those. So, instead, I'm going to describe the last meze we had: Manti! I was very excited at the idea of making manti since I first read about it on the blog 'I love Turkish Food'. Recently, also my friend Elif posted about them. I thought of them as a sort of 'ravioli' Turkish style, but after I really looked up the recipe, I found out about a fundamental difference: Mantis are baked! Ravioli are boiled. Also, the dough for Mantis is spread a little thicker than ravioli, and the traditional shapes are a little different, although I'm sure there are many possible others. The filling that was recommended in the book is not a very traditional one (I was told by Elif), but we all thought it was delicious - and it's vegetarian!

Manti ai ceci / Chickpea parcels
To make the dough, mix 4 cups flour, 1 tsp salt, 1 egg yolk and 1 whole egg. Add as much water as you need in order to obtain an elastic dough. Knead for ~10 min, and then let it rest for ~ 1 h. Prepare the filling: you'll need to have ~14 oz pre-boiled (better than canned!) chickpeas. Mash them (I had to add water for this), and add 1 tsp cumin seeds, crushed, and 1 tsp red pepper or paprika, and salt to taste. For the sauce, saute one onion and 2 garlic cloves in 1 tbsp olive oil + 1 tbsp butter. Add 1 red chilli, finely cut, 1-2 tsp sugar, and 1-2 tsp dried mint (I added fresh mint instead). Then, stir in 14 oz canned chopped tomatoes, and cook until thick. Adjust with salt and remove from heat. For the yogurt sauce, you'll have to mix ~6 tbsp thick yogurt with 2-3 garlic cloves, crushed.
By the time you're done with all this, one hour should have passed, and you can start making the manti: roll down the dough till very thin (we used a rolling pin), and cut it into small 1" squares. Spoon a little of the chickpea filling, and close the edges forming a litter pyramid:
Place the mantis in a buttered oven pan, and bake at 400 F for ~15-20 minutes, till golden. Then, add vegetable stock to it. For this dose of mantis, you should add a total of ~2 1/2 cups stock, so divide it depending on how many pans you made. Cook for another 15-20 minutes, till almost all the broth is adsorbed. Then, serve with yogurt, tomato sauce, and chopped parsley on top.

These mantis are addictive! Elif told me that the dough was right, and also the slightly crunchy consistency of the manti. She never tried the chickpea filling and she really liked it too! So, I was very pleased at this success. To give credit to the right people, I only prepared the sauces and the filling for this - Lucas, Vardha, Filipe and Vlasta did all the rest of the job while I was finishing to prepare the dinner!!! Great job guys!

Un brunch particolare

Some time ago I made a really nice brunch for Lucas and myself, using a recipe that I found on my favorite 'San Francisco flavors' cookbook. I never had time to post about it, and this is now the perfect occasion, as it sports the fruit chosen for this month 'A fruit a month' event: papaya!
To be really honest, I don't usually like papaya too much. This is strange, because I like almost anything. Papaya has a strange aftertaste that somewhat bothers me, when I eat it raw: after the sweet feeling, there is something that remains in my mouth and reminds me of fermentation and, somehow, cheese. I know it's just a weird idea that I have, but I cannot it too much of it raw. But, in this particular dish I'm showing, I really liked it. Maybe because the person who thought about it somehow read my mind and decided to accentuate this 'aftertaste' by just combining it with.. brie! So, here I present to you...

Quesadilla con brie e papaya / Papaya and brie quesadilla
(Recipe adapted from 'San Francisco flavors' - originally, the quesadillas are baked, and more fats are used).

Prepare the filling by mixing one papaya, peeled and diced, one onion, thinly sliced, the juice of two limes, 1 jalapeno chilli, minced, and 1/2 bunch cilantro. Melt 1 tbsp butter in a separate bowl. Lightly butter (with a separate piece of butter) an anti-sticking pan, and place it on the stove on moderate heat. Place a large tortilla on it, and add some of the papaya mix on half of it. Add a few pieces of brie (you choose how much). Close the other half on top, and brush with some of the melted butter. After ~5 min, flip the quesadilla paying attention not to pour the filling everywhere in the pan. Brush more butter on top of the quesadilla, and cook for a few more minutes, till the brie is melted. Repeat till all the filling is finished. I used only half of it, it was enough for a brunch for two. The quesadillas should be eaten hot.. They can also be used as appetizers, if you cut them in wedges before serving. I made them a few times, as they are really quick to prepare and delicious, and unusual too!

Torta di mandorle

I love nuts of every kind, and this month seems to be dedicated to nuts and dried fruits in the food blogsphere! I'm very happy, I just have to decide which of my treats goes to which event. So here is one of them:
Torta di mandorle e cioccolato a conchiglia / Shell-like almond and chocolate cake

The recipe for this cake is a mixture between a traditional recipe that I found on my piemontese cookbook and another that I found online. Both of them actually used hazelnuts, which are common in Italy, but I decided to use almonds instead, as hazelnuts here are way too expensive. The thing that inspired me in these recipes was that they required NO flour. One of them required no butter at all either, but I decided to use half of the dose suggested by the second one. What makes this cake is really just the mixture of almond flour and eggs. You wouldn't believe it, but it turns out extremely moist and soft. I think this is one of the best nut cakes I ever had. I strongly recommend trying it. So here is the recipe that in the end I came up with by combining these two that I found:
Ingredients
200 g ground almonds (I have a scale that I used; if you use cups, you have to have about 1 and 1/4 cup of ground almonds)
100 g dark chocolate, ground (after you grind it, it should be ~ 1/2 cup)
4 eggs
100 g sugar (1/2 cup)
50 g butter (1/2 small stick)
Procedure
Mix butter, egg yolks and sugar. Add the ground almonds and ground chocolate. Whip the egg whites very firmly and fold into the mixture, till no more white is visible. Pour this batter in a small (8 inches or less) buttered and floured pan, and bake at 320F for 45 min.

As you see, it's really easy. In the most traditional version, there's no butter and six eggs instead of four, 250 g of almonds instead of 200 and no chocolate. I'm going to try that next time.

Now maybe you're wondering why my cake has that shell shape. Well. Ehrm. When I took my cake out of the oven, I had the unpleasant surprise of noticing that the rack I was using was slanted. My cake had cooked crooked!! So of course, it was sort of triangular, if you will, in section. I was really sad at first when I saw it. Then Lucas suggested cutting it like a fan... I thought it was a good idea, and I decided to add whipped cream between the slices and at the border, to make it seem like a seashell. Would you have thought it was an accident? :) :)
Well, next time I will probably make sure the rack is flat before I bake something, and I'll double the doses of this cake, as it was anyway too little batter for the big baking pan I had.

This cake will go to the Yum blog for this month's 'A fruit a month' event, centered on dried fruits! And I've now decided that it will also go to this month 'Click - nuts' event! I kind of like the picture of this unusually shaped cake :)

Marmellata di fragole e uva

As I already said in the previous posts, there are two events centered on grapes this month, so I'm experimenting various recipes hoping I can get two that are good enough.
This jam I made a few weeks ago was really good, so I'm going to present this for the 'A fruit a month' event hosted by Swapna at Swad this month!
Here in California the season of strawberry lasts forever. During the whole summer we've had amazingly good strawberries for really cheap. So when the season of grapes arrived, it overlapped with the strawberries! That's why I decided to try to make this jam.

Marmellata di fragole e uva rossa / Strawberry and red grapes preserve
It was really easy: just clean and cut ~2 lb ripe strawberries, place them in a pan and add ~4-6 tbsp sugar and ~1 lb red seedless grapes. Squeeze the juice of one lime in it. Cook for ~ 1h, covered. You don't need to add any water. After one hour, blend everything with an immersion blender. Cook for another ~30 min, uncovered, or until it gets to a nice spreadable consistency. It's absolutely delicious.
In the picture above, it's served on a spelt/tapioca bread that I baked with a recipe that I made up (I can post it if someone is interested, it was a really good bread). But it goes wonderfully well also with pancakes, such as in the example below:
I'll give you the complimentary recipe of the pancakes, as they were particularly good. It's taken from one of the books I like the best, 'San Francisco Flavors', by the Junior League of San Francisco.

Pancakes con mele e ricotta / Fuji Apple and Ricotta Pancakes
Combine 1 cup ricotta, 2 Fuji apples, grated, 3/4 cup flour, 1 tbsp honey, 1 tsp lemon juice, 1 tbsp chopped almonds, 1/2 tsp ground nutmeg, 4 egg yolks, 1/2 tsp salt, 1/4 cup frozen orange juice concentrate (I used fresh lemonade). On a side, beat 4 egg whites till stiff, and then fold them in the previous mixture. Melt a little bit of butter on a pan, pour ~1/4 cup of mixture when the pan is hot, and cook until the pancake becomes dry near edges and bubbles form all over the surface. Flip and cook for another minute or so. Do so for all the mixture, and serve the pancakes hot, with maple syrup or preserve such as the delicious strawberry-grapes described above!!

I hope I'll have time to make another good grape-centered recipe for my own event 'Fresh Produce of the Month'.. there's still some time before the deadline (Oct. 15th) - so if you also have cravings for grapes this month, please share your delicious ideas with us!