Braised Chicken with Green Chiles, Chorizo, Turnips, and Leek "Noodles"

I'm not a fan of turnips.  I don't hate them as much as I hated cauliflower, but I avoid eating them.  I think it's because the only way I've ever eaten them is in my least favorite family holiday dish.  It consists of boiled carrots and turnips mashed together with salt and pepper.  Blech!  However, this Turkish recipe appealed to me because it left the turnips in larger pieces and there was no mashing involved.  Plus, it involved spicy sausage, which is always a good thing. The original recipe calls for sucuk, a Turkish sausage.  I couldn't find one, so I substituted another spicy sausage, chorizo.  I thought it worked really well.  But, I've never had sucuk so I have no basis for comparison. 

The chicken is braised with turnips, onion, tomato, long green chile peppers, and a bay leaf.  I thought the vegetable mix looked quite pretty in the bowl.   This was a great dish to eat on a cold night.  It was very hearty and had a nice kick from the chiles and chorizo and a little tang from the few squeezes of lemon juice.  It also made my kitchen smell wonderful!

This combination of vegetables is great for a cool fall night.

Manti!!

One of my favorite restaurants in DC, Zaytina, used to feature a dish called manti, which were tiny Turkish dumplings filled with ground meat topped with an amazing salty garlic yogurt sauce and paprika.  Sadly, the manti disappeared from the menu for a while, and is only offered as a special now, from time to time.  Ever since trying them, I've wanted to make them myself, especially for the sauce.

Over the weekend, I had enough time to finally try the manti recipe from Turquoise.  All I can say is wow, these things were good.  The sauce was even better than what I had at Zaytinya!  The manti themselves were very labor intensive, and were worth making for the experience.  Apparently, the smaller the manti, the better the chef, but I made large ones to save time.  In the future, I'd probably use wonton wrappers to speed up the process.  But the sauce!  So. Good.  It's really two sauces: yogurt sauce and paprika butter.  I'm going to make it to serve with other dishes, like kofte kebab and Turkish chicken with tomato rice pilaf.  The sauce is salty, garlicky, and the paprika butter gives it a great spicy, smoky taste.  I topped my manti with some Aleppo pepper.

The finished product, with the tasty, tasty sauce.

Antep Lamb Not-Kebabs with Sumac Onions and Asparagus

Okay, so the plan was to make Antep kebabs from Turquoise, my awesome Turkish cookbook.  Too bad we forgot to turn the gas grill off the night before and all the propane escaped.  Since the grill was out of commission, my only choice was to use my Le Creuset grill pan.  The problem is that my metal skewers are way too long for me to use them with it.  So, kebabs were out of the question.  Also too bad: I bought lamb loin, not ground lamb, because apparently I don't know how to read.

But, this dish was still very good, and eliminating the step of skewering the meat may have made it easier to prepare.  The Lamb Spice Mix is fabulous, and would work really well outside of this dish. 

Since I wasn't skewering my meat and onions, I decided to thinly slice the onion and cook it with a little sumac for a tart punch.  I wanted some side dishes, so I made simple steamed asparagus and used some previously made hummus with pita. 

This salvaged meal turned out pretty awesome!

Chicken, Vermicelli, and Lemon Soup

I'm back!  I was away on vacation last week and did absolutely no cooking whatsoever.  :)  This meal is from right before I left for my trip.  After a week in St. Barth, my cooking focus will shift to healthy meals for a few days since I need to make up for all of my gluttony.

This is a Turkish chicken, vermicelli, and lemon soup.  It reminds me a little bit of avgolemono since it has a similar egg and lemon flavor.  So many of my soup recipes admonish me to make my own stock, but I don't have time.  I use Kitchen Basics low sodium chicken stock and it works fine to make this quick dish.  This soup is very hearty because of the egg and noodles, and I sometimes prefer the vermicelli to the rice in avgolemono. Another thing that makes this soup interesting is that it uses grated red onion as part of the base, which I think gives it a complexity that avgolemono doesn't have. 

Lamb and Smoky Chili Lahmacun (Turkish "pizza")

I'm a bit of a pizza snob and consider delivery pizza to be cardboard smeared with red sugar paste tomato sauce and fake cheese.  So, I've always wanted to make my own.  When I found this recipe for lamb lahmacun, I was intrigued because it involved a very thin, crispy crust and lamb, which I've always got in the freezer.  Lahmacun originated in Syria, but is popular throughout the Middle East.  Translated, it means "meat with dough." The first time I made this, I didn't think it was very pretty.  Then I did a google image search and saw that mine looked pretty good.  ;)  I make this every time I've got 5 oz or so of ground lamb in my freezer.  It's a treat on a weekend when I've got some time to let the dough sit for 2 hours.  It's also a great excuse to drink a light to medium bodied red wine. 

The dough has to sit for a while, but making the lamb paste doesn't take very long at all.  I add a little extra smoky paprika since I use more lamb than a normal portion would call for (a proper half recipe for this would use 3.5 oz of ground lamb and I use 5).   I could never figure out what a "long red chili" was when it was called for in this book.  Further, Wegmans never has red chilis other than the tiny Thai chilis, and I don't think they belong in Turkish cooking.  So, I substitute a long green chili hoping that they're similar.  The combination of lamb, onion, tomato, spicy chili, and smoked paprika is absolutely wonderful!  And it makes my kitchen smell good. 

As Close to Pi as I'm Going to Get

Yesterday was Pi Day, 3/14.  I should probably turn in my nerd card since I didn't bake a pie.  I think I've baked approximately 3 pies in my entire life (4 if you count the Meringue Debacle of 2003).  While they were good, they can't hold a candle to my mom's pies.  Last night I got home from work and had a choice.  I could attempt to cobble together some sort of pie-shaped thing with ingredients already in my pantry.  Or, I could just cook dinner and then play computer games.  I decided to make a dish that most closely approximated pi(e).  Behold, kofte kebab over crispy pita with tomato sauce and spiced yogurt!  I am the first to admit that this dish isn't the prettiest plate in the world, but it tastes awesome.  And although it requires a decent bit of chopping, the cooking time is relatively short, about 10 minutes for the lamb and tomato sauce.  The yogurt doesn't require cooking and is spooned on cold. Since it's not cooked, nonfat yogurt works just fine.  I adapted the yogurt sauce a little to make it more flavorful. 

Chicken with Pistachio and Sumac Breadcrumbs

This chicken recipe is from Turquoise: A Chef's Travels in Turkey by Greg and Lucy Malouf. This is a beautiful book, part cookbook and part photographic journey through Turkey.  I use it frequently, and everything from it has been amazing.  That said, I've gotten hooked on a group of core recipes and I really need to explore the book more. I had no idea that the Maloufs wrote similar books about other countries.  There's Saraban: A Chef's Journey Through Persia, and Saha: A Chef's Journey Through Lebanon and Syria.  I've been interested in Middle Eastern food for a while.  It started with the Mediterranean ingredients in Lebanese food and spread from there.  I didn't know anything about the differences between Lebanese, Persian, Egyptian, Moroccan, and Turkish flavors until I started buying cookbooks.  I love the idea of breaded chicken, and this Turkish recipe caught my eye because although it starts in a frying pan, it's finished in the oven, which is healthier than frying it the whole time.  The salad dressing is something I made up to complement the chicken and to use my lemon and harissa mustard. 

Turkish Chicken with Tomato Rice Pilaf

This is a dish that I make a lot.  It's simple, easy, and tastes amazing!  The original recipe is from the first Middle Eastern/ North African cookbooks I bought, Arabesque: A Taste of Morocco, Turkey, and Lebanon, by Claudia Roden.  Every recipe I've tried from this book has been delicious.  I've adapted this dish since the first time I made it, when I followed the recipe to the letter.  This picture is of the dish as I make it now.

Originally, the recipe did not call for the chicken to be spiced with sumac, zatar, and paprika.  Even though zatar contains sumac, I really like the tartness and so I add extra.  The spicing could work just fine without a separate layer of sumac, though.  The rice pilaf is interesting because instead of cooking the rice with water, peeled, liquefied tomatoes are used.  So a blender or food processor is necessary to make this dish.  Peeling tomatoes can be a pain in the butt.  I have an electric kettle, so I just cut an X in the bottom of each tomatoes, boil some water in the kettle, and then pour it over the tomatoes.  Alternatively, water can be boiled on the stove and the tomatoes can be dropped in for 30 seconds or so.  The pilaf as presented in Arabesque is quite tasty, but I love lemons, and so I added lemon juice to the pilaf to blend well with the lemon juice on the chicken. 

Normally, I intend to make salad with most meals, but last night I worked out and was feeling lazy.  The red peppers are something I make when I want a vegetable, but don't feel like cooking a side dish or making salad.  I'm sure that the idea of them is not completely original, but I didn't consult a cookbook to make these.  They're "pickled" in white wine vinegar and seasoned with Aleppo pepper, a Turkish spice (which strikes me odd since Aleppo is in Syria) that looks like regular crushed red pepper but is more mild and flavorful.  It packs a little heat, but won't overpower a dish like crushed red pepper.