Turkish Meal

Today I am presenting some of the popular dishes from Turkey that I put together as a meal. My family enjoyed this meal thoroughly. The Pida was without doubt the most favored by my daughter while my husband loved the bulgur pilaf.

I found so many wholesome vegetarian recipes from Turkey it was hard to pick and choose. I chose the bulgur pilav instead of rice as we all like bulgur in our house. I had white beans left over and this white bean recipe seemed like a nice way to use them up. Red lentils are extremely flavorful and it was raining the day I cooked this meal so I made soup. I made the cacik as a Turkish variation of cucumber salad. I decided to keep the dessert simple and chose a rice pudding. This Turkish style pudding is a lot thicker than any rice pudding I have had and I flavored it with Mastic, the Mediterranean edible gum. But the star of the meal was the Turkish pida. I decided on the pida as I wanted to add a yeast bread to the mix. I converted the recipe to use my homemade wild yeast starter. Spinach, feta and onions on overnight fermented dough. Those didn't last long.

As it turned out red pepper paste and tomato paste seemed to be the common ingredient in all the dishes that I chose except the cucumber salad. I did not have any red pepper paste so I made my own. I used red bell pepper as I could not find red banana pepper. The authentic recipe calls for the pepper to be cooked in water, peeled, de-seeded and then the pulp cooked to a paste. I roasted the pepper and covered it in aluminium foil for 15 minutes. The skin peeled right off the pepper. I then removed the seeds, cut it into pieces and ran it through the blender. As for tomato paste I had a can of organic tomato paste but it smelled of citric acid so I pureed a handful of cherry tomatoes and used that where ever tomato paste was called for. The fact that the tomatoes in the paste were not cooked did not make much difference to us.

The new ingredient I used in this meal is banana pepper. The bulgur pilaf recipe called for banana pepper but did not specify the color. I found a green sweet banana pepper and used that.

As they say in Turkey, afiyet olsun!

Here are the recipes for the dishes on the menu

• Ezogelin Corbasi (Red Lentil Soup) 
• Ispanakli Pide (Turkish Boat Shaped Spinach Pizza) 
• Bulgur Pilav (Pilaf) 
• Kuru Fasulye (White Beans) 
• Cacik (Cucumber Salad) 

And for dessert

• Sutlac (Turkish Rice Pudding)