PATIENCE DOCK

(English recipe is below. Labada tarifi için burayi tiklayin)

This recipe I posted back in  May 2011 but when I wanted to add the link to the turkish recipe, the recipe appears under February 2012 instead of May 2011. In February you don't find patience dock in the markets, FYI.


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(LABADA)

I am right back from the kitchen to tell you about this new plant dish that I’ve tried! This is something I’ve seen in the open market last Saturday. Happy to discover yet another plant that Mother Nature has offered us and that is prepared in the Anatolian kitchen. 

patience dock

I have to admit that I’ve cheated with this one though. The most common recipe with the patience dock is that they make “dolma” with it (grape leaves stuffed with rice and herbs). I also saw a few recipes of ravioli and pasta. I was impatient and, okay, lazy too so I just chopped the leaves and cooked it with onion and bulgur and spiced it to my own liking. The amount of bulgur is a bit more than what I usually add, but I wanted it to be tasting also more like dolma :-)

Ingredients:

Half a kilo patience dock, chopped

patience dock, chopped

1 big onion, chopped

3 spoons of olive oil

A spoon of tomato paste (called salça in Turkish)

Half a glass of chickpeas, boiled

3 spoons of bulgur

2 glasses of warm water

Half a glass of stock

Flaked red pepper to your liking

Dried mint to your liking

Somak to your liking

Juice of half a lemon

Method:

1. Sauté the onion in the olive oil. Add the tomato paste and sauté some more.
2. Add the boiled chickpeas.
3. Add the patience dock. Add the bulgur and the water and the lemon juice.
4. After it is cooked, add the spices and salt. 

step 2

step 3

happy ending!!!

The result is just awesome! The bit of sourness thanks to the lemon juice and somak, the amount of bulgur, the dried mint - everything is just so well in proportion. Yay!!

FENNEL FOLIAGE

(Text in English is below. Türkçe tarif için buraya tiklayin)

(KUZU ETLI ARAPSACI)

Today I didn’t feel like cooking dinner so I thought let’s order something: sushi? Kebab? Fish? While browsing the menus to choose, I saw “fennel with lamb’s meat” in one of the menus. Fennel? I have fennel leaves in the fridge as well as lambs meat! So back in the kitchen! 

Fennel has a strong aroma, so maybe not everybody’s favourite but we like it very much at home! This dish is quite rich: it has vegetables, meat and a yoghurt based creamy sauce (surprise, surprise J). And the strong aroma of the fennel is balanced with the rest of the ingredients in such a nice way! Already one of our favourites! 

Below you will find the details for the recipe: 

INGREDIENTS:

fennel leaves, carrot, onion, potato

250 grams fennel foliage washed and cut apart from its stem. Chop the leaves fine. 

fennel leaves cut apart from the stem

250 grams lambs’ meat cut in cubes

lamb's meat cut in cubes

1 big onion, chopped

1 medium carrot, sliced

1 small or medium potato, cut in cubes

carrot and potato chopped

200 grams yoghurt

1 egg

2 table spoons of flour

Juice of half a lemon

2,5 glasses of warm water

METHOD:

1. Sauté the meat for a few minutes. Add the onion, continue sautéing for a minute. Then add the carrot and the potato.
2. Add 1 glass of warm water and close the lid and cook till the meat is soft. You will see that the meat soaks almost half of the water.
3. Add the fennel leaves and 1 glass of warm water. Cook till the fennel leaves are soft.
4. While the fennel leaves are simmering, mix the yoghurt, the egg, flour and half a glass of warm water with the help of a blender.
5. When the fennel leaves are cooked well enough for you (you will have to decide for yourself how soft you like them), take a spoon of the remaining water in the dish and add to the yoghurt mixture and mix it well. Do this a few times. The yoghurt mixture should now be ready to be added into the fennel dish! But you have to do it very carefully; very slowly and bit by bit. While you add the yoghurt mixture into the dish, you should stir the dish this time.
6. Let it cook till it boils and then let it simmer for a few minutes.
7. Add the salt the very last.

step 1

Step 3

Step 6

happy ending!!!

BORAGE

(HODAN, KALDIRIK)

borage

This is yet another wild plant that I got to learn thanks to the open air market in town. I had no idea how to use this plant in the kitchen so I had to do a bit of searching on the internet. The most common recipe turns out to be a very simple one yet so efficient! My husband frequently asks me to prepare it for him and with pleasure I do.

I think the season for borage starts in late march or early april if I remember correct. I see it on the stalls in the open air markets for a while already and almost every two weeks we have it on our dinner table. The first time I bought borage was the first time in this season that it was placed on the stalls and I have to admit that cleaning seemed a bit too difficult for me. The guy behind the stall told me to cut the blue flowers and just wash it a few times. The problem was that, as it is the stem and the root of a flower that we eat, there was dark soil on them which was quite stubborn to be cleaned away. The next week when I bought it again, I saw that cleaning was somewhat easier! I think this is because in one week the plant grew bigger and they did not have to pull it out from the soil as such.

Until now, I always cleaned the blue flowers and the leaves on the stem. Last weekend in the market, an old lady told me that nothing of borage I have to throw away! According to her, the flowers are the best part of borage. I have some half a kilo in my fridge now and I’ll give it a try without removing any part of it this time and I’ll let you know!

The dish contains eggs. I add fewer eggs than the recipes I saw on the internet because we are not really big fans of eggs! I highly recommend that you consume it with strained yoghurt to which a small tooth of garlic is crushed!! Just yummy! 

Ingredients:

Half a kilo borage, cleaned

borage still needs to be washed

1 big onion, chopped

2 eggs

egg mix with salt and pepper

Salt and pepper

2 spoons of olive oil

Method

1. Pressure-cook the borage stems for 20 minutes. If they are not soft enough for you, then pressure-cook some more. Chop in small bits like 1 or 2 cm.
2. Sauté the onion in the olive oil. Add the chopped borage, and sauté till softer.
3. Mix the eggs with salt and pepper. Add to borage and mix. After 1 or 2 minutes, the eggs should be ready.

step 1

step 1

step 1, borage cooked and chopped

step 2

happy ending!! (yes, I forgot to make a pic with the plate :-)

MADIMAK (KNOTGRASS)

(English recipe is below. Madimak tarifi için burayi tiklayin)

I heard of its name but I have never tasted it before: Madimak, in Turkish and Knotgrass in English (I hope it is the correct translation for it). Two weeks ago, I have seen it in the open air market for the first time. And it was only last weekend that I bought some to try and make something of this plant. 

My mom who joined us to the market, said that her grandmother cooked this plant for them frequently and that they loved it. I was silly enough not to ask for its recipe but to be honest, I don’t bother anymore. I trust internet! Though, I have to admit that the number of recipes available out there becomes fewer, the more uncommon is the ingredient. I found that they make either dish or either soup of the knotgrass here in Turkey. Some add pastrami, some don’t. Some recipes talk about lentil some don’t. I added, again, carrot and pepper. And I added both lentil and pastrami. I was careful about the amount of the pastrami that I added but if you like you can add more.

All in all, the result was good!

One more thing that I would like to mention is that, I did not remove the stalk of the plant as no recipe I found on the net mentioned so. And I regret that because the stalks are quite rough and does not entirely become soft after half an hour cooking. Next time, I’ll remove the stem as much as I can and try to make soup of it. I think it is worth to try then! Indeed, the stalks need to be picked and thrown away as they do not get soft at all (I steam-cooked a handful of the knotgrass stalks separately in the pressure cooker for half an hour in order to see if they'd get soft at all, but they dont't). The lady at the bazaar also told me that the knotgrass dish made with the leaves only. So, the pictures you see below have the stalks which disturbed us while eating; but next time it'll be without! Anyway, I'd like to note that there's an alternative recipe (slighltly different) for knotgrass and it's with sujuk and bulgur. To see the recipe, please click here. 

Ingredients (serves 6)

Half a kilo knotgrass, the stalks are removed, the leaves washed and drained and chopped fine

knotgrass (madimak) chopped fine

Two medium sized onion, chopped

2 spoons of green lentil, boiled

1 carrot, sliced thin

1 green pepper, sliced thin

3 spoons of bulgur

5 slices of pastrami, chopped fine  

pastrami that needs to be chopped fine

2 glasses of warm water

3 spoons of olive oil

1 spoon of tomato paste (Turkish: domates salçası)

Half a spoon of or less pepper paste (Turkish: biber salçası)

Method:

1. Sauté the onions for 5 minutes in the olive oil. Add the carrot and pepper and sauté a few minutes more.
2. Add the tomato and pepper paste and sauté some more. Add the pastrami and continue sautéing.
3. Add the knotgrass, the bulgur and the green lentil by mixing it with the rest of the ingredients. Add warm water. Close the lid to cook for about half an hour.

step 2

step 3

     

happy ending!!!

happy ending!!!

            

Smakelijk!!!

SOUR AND HOT SPINACH ROOTS WITH GREEN LENTIL AND CHICKPEAS

(English text is below. Türkçe tarif için burayi tiklayin)

In Belgium, I used to buy spinach in plastic bags of 500 grams and washed. The only thing I needed to do was to open the bag and do whatever I want to do with it. Here in Turkey, the spinach that you bought from the open air market will be with its roots. And you have to clean them yourself. Most of the people that I know throw away the spinach roots that they’ve cut off from the spinach with their organic waste. 

But here’s one yummy and quick recipe with spinach roots that I got to learn from my mother. It is not something that I am used to from my mother’s kitchen though; it’s only recently that my mother got this recipe from a friend of hers. And when she made us try the dish, we could only appreciate the success of the recipe! I noticed only then that in the supermarkets, you have these roots in bags. So, it is not only when I want to use the roots I cut off from the spinach that I make this dish. When I feel like it, there are these bags of 500 grams or so. 

You may say that you don’t want to have spinach and its side products in a row of days, then the roots you can keep a few days in a box. I haven’t tried to freeze them yet; but if one day I try; I’ll also let you know! 

Below is the recipe. I added pepper and carrot too, but the original recipe doesn’t include these two ingredients. You are free to add them or not. This time I forgot to boil lentil but that’s not too bad either. If you say, “oh, my dish won’t be perfect without lentil”, you could still boil and add them to the dish later on. 

One more thing that I’d like to say: we like to make things sour sometimes. A bowl of lentil soup? We add a few drops of lemon juice. We make bulgur salad called “Kısır” and to it we add a few drops of lemon juice. The main salad dressing in Turkey is a mixture of olive oil, salt and of course lemon juice. I observed from my Belgian husband and Belgian family or friends that sour is not very much liked there. With this recipe, you can limit the amount of lemon juice to try if you haven’t yet or totally disregard it. What makes the recipe hot is the red pepper paste that I use. If the dish is a bit hot, it's also very nice!

Ingredients (Serves 2 small plates)

200 grams spinach roots; carefully washed and drained

spinach roots, washed and drained

Half a glass of chickpeas, boiled and drained

2 spoons of lentil, boiled and drained

1 desert spoon tomato and red pepper paste (two types of “salça” as we call them)

1 small onion, chopped

1 green pepper, chopped (the original recipe does not include pepper, however I added some and it’s still nice with it)

Half a carrot, sliced thin (see comment above for the pepper)

onion, carrot, pepper and salça (tomato paste)

 



2-3 spoons olive oil

Juice of half a lemon
Half a glass of warm water

Salt to your liking

Method:

1. Sauté the chopped onion on medium fire for about 2 minutes.
2. Add the pepper and the carrots and stir for 2 minutes
3. Add the paste and stir for 2 to 3 minutes till the paste lost its smell.
4. Add the lentil and the chickpeas. Bring to low fire, stir a few times.
5. Add the spinach roots.  Add the lemon juice. Add the water. Close the lid. 10 to 15 minutes should be enough.

Ready to cook for 10 to 15 minutes

The dish is ready when you think your spinach roots are ready (depending on how soft you like them)

happy ending!!!

Enjoy!!!