Tahini Cookies

November 08, 2019 by Gizem in Dessert

Argh, I can’t believe summer is coming to an end soon (at least for me). I have had the most glorious summer 50% working on Mint and Sumac, 25% exploring Seattle, 10% exercising, 10% playing Stardew Valley, and 5% socializing. Also fit “reading to hit my goodreads challenge” somewhere in this breakdown. But soon (as in 2 weeks soon) I am going to go back to being a real adult and start working full-time again. So in the last few weeks, I have been trying to maximize my socializing time and catch up with all my friends before I disappear into long commutes and book-me-4-weeks-in-advance schedules.

With that spirit, last week, I had two friends over for Turkish coffee at 1:30pm on a Thursday (soon unimaginable scheduling) and made these tahini cookies and boy, they were delicious. Turkish coffee is generally served with a sweet bite like a cookie or Turkish delight. This helps balance the strong flavor of coffee and cleanses your palate. My goal was to find a tahini cookie recipe that melts in your mouth because I think it pairs perfectly with the texture of Turkish coffee. When I saw this recipe from Mamaleh’s on Bon Appetit, I knew I had to try it. These cookies have a texture very similar to shortbread cookies and they are also a little soft and chewy inside thanks to the tahini (I think I drooled a little just thinking about it).

Tahini is one of the staple ingredients in my pantry. For those of you who might not be familiar with it, tahini is basically sesame paste. I use it for dressings, sweet spreads, baked goods, mezes, smoothies, so basically everything. Its creamy texture and versatile taste that works in both sweet and savory dishes makes it a popular ingredient in my kitchen. Nowadays, you can find tahini at almost all grocery stores. Look for it in the baking or nut butters/spreads aisle.

Tips:

I highly recommend dipping these cookies into sesame seeds as the recipe suggests. You can even mix in some black sesame seeds. But, if you want to try something different you can also dip them in crushed walnuts or pistachios.

Do not overcook these tahini cookies. When you take them out of the oven, they might look a little undercooked but they harden as they cool.

Yields: 18-24 cookies Time: 40 minutes

Recipe from Bon Appétit by Mamaleh’s in Cambridge, MA

Ingredients

3/4 cup unsalted butter, softened at room temperature

3/4 cup sugar

3/4 cup tahini

3 tablespoons honey

2 cups all purpose flour

1 teaspoon baking powder

1/2 teaspoon kosher salt

1/4 cup sesame seeds

Preparation

1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F.

2. Beat the butter, sugar and honey in a bowl, until creamy. Add in the tahini and mix until all the ingredients are well incorporated.

3. Mix flour, baking powder and salt in a separate bowl.

4. Add the flour mix into the wet ingredients, slowly, in 2-3 batches, mixing after adding every batch. I mix the dough with my hands to make sure all the ingredients are combined well.

5. Pour the sesame seeds in a small bowl.

6. Scoop approximately 1 tablespoon of dough and roll it into a ball in your hands. Press gently with your palm to flatten the dough a little. Dip one side of the dough into sesame seeds. Place the dough, sesame side up, on a baking tray lined with parchment paper.

7. Bake for 15 minutes, until the cookies are golden brown. Let the cookies cool before serving. Serve with a cup of coffee or black tea. Enjoy!

Turkish Flatbread (Lahmacun)

November 08, 2019 by Gizem in Dinner

When it hit me that it is August already, I paused for a moment and thought how great of a month July has been. We started the month pretty strong with a 4th of July BBQ surrounded with friends and family at our new home. We got to see Mt. Rainier and marmots up close when my brother-in-law visited from Chicago. I spent a bachelorette weekend in Santa Cruz, kayaking alongside otters and sea lions, making flower crowns and baking everything bagel biscuits. Then, it was our second wedding anniversary which we celebrated with an amazing meal at Canlis. A couple days later we were at a mountain cabin for a friend’s 30th birthday and glow sticks and costumes were involved. When we got back, I dragged my butt out of its comfort zone and met some amazing new people which ended up in coffee shop explorations, picnics and Turkish coffee gatherings. To top it off, we got our hands dirty and learned how to bake sourdough bread. I am looking at you August, you better deliver!

With my newest knowledge of bread making fresh in my mind, I wanted to keep the ball rolling and make a Turkish style bread. If my oven could talk it would be whining non-stop about how tired it is from baking one thing after the other. I chose to make a traditional Turkish flatbread with ground beef topping, also called lahmacun because it is a classic and I missed it having it so much. The last time I had lahmacun was probably in 2015, in New York at a tiny Lebanese place on MacDougal Street called Manousheh. It has been so long!

Some recipes and books also call this flatbread Turkish pizza but to me, that just feels wrong. We don’t eat lahmacun by cutting it into slices and most importantly, it doesn’t have any cheese on it. We squeeze fresh lemon juice all over it, stuff it with herbs, tomatoes and peppers and roll it up like a wrap. So it definitely doesn’t fall into the pizza category for me (I am dangerously close to starting another version of “is burger a sandwich?” dilemma here).

Depending on the region, lahmacun recipes and ingredients vary. Some recipes use peppers, garlic, pepper paste and pistachios. The kind of meat used can vary from region to region as well. In this recipe, I used ground beef, but you can also use ground lamb or a 50/50 mix of both. I recommend using slightly fattier meat so try not to use 90% or above lean ground meat.

An authentic lahmacun is cooked in a brick oven which is essential for the crispy texture of the flatbread. A hot oven is also key to make sure the meat is cooked through. If you are going to make this recipe, I highly recommend a pizza or bread stone. It makes a big difference in the texture of this flatbread. If you don’t have one then, use a baking tray but it would be best if you heat the baking tray while the oven is preheating.

Yields: 8 lahmacuns, 3-4 servings Time: 1 hour 45 minutes

Ingredients

For the dough:

300 grams all purpose flour (about 2 cups)

200 ml warm water (a little less than 1 cup)

1/2 tablespoon dry yeast

Sprinkle of salt

For the ground beef topping:

1 pound 80% ground beef

2 tomatoes

1 yellow onion

8-10 sprigs of flat leaf parsley, minced

1 teaspoon Marash or Aleppo pepper (or red pepper flakes)

1/2 teaspoon salt

1/2 teaspoon pepper

Preparation

Make the dough:

1. Mix the yeast with warm water and set aside for 10-15 minutes for the yeast to activate.

2. Add the yeast-water mixture and a sprinkle of salt to the flour and start mixing with your hand until all the wet and the dry ingredients are incorporated. The dough is going to be very sticky at first. After a couple minutes of mixing, the dough is going to stick together.

3. Transfer the dough to a lightly floured work surface. Knead your dough by stretching and pushing the dough away from yourself with the bottom of your palm, then folding it over the middle. Give the dough a little turn and repeat. Continue kneading for about 10 minutes.

4. Put the dough in a lightly floured bowl, cover it with a kitchen towel and let it rest for 1 hour, at room temperature, until the dough doubles in size.

Make the ground beef topping:

5. Using either a kitchen robot or a grater, grate the tomatoes and the onion.

6. In a bowl, mix the ground beef, grated tomatoes and onions, minced parsley, Marash pepper, salt and pepper. I use my hands to mix to make sure everything is well incorporated. The resulting mixture is going to be pretty wet and loose.

Assemble:

7. Preheat the oven to 450 degrees F with the bread/pizza stone in the middle-rack of the oven.

8. Divide the dough into 8 equal pieces. Fold each corner of the dough onto the middle of itself to create a ball.

9. On a lightly floured work surface, roll each ball of dough to a 10-inch circle. (To save time, I roll all balls of dough before the next step and let them sit with flour sprinkled between them.)

10. Spread generous amounts of ground beef mixture all across the surface of the dough, leaving very little space near the edges.

11. Transfer the flatbread onto the hot bread stone and bake for 8-10 minutes, until golden brown around the edges. (I don’t have a pizza peel to transfer the flatbreads directly into the oven so I take the stone out momentarily, transfer the flatbreads onto the stone and stick it back into the oven.)

12. Serve with a squeeze of fresh lemon juice, slices of tomatoes and fresh herbs.

Chickpea Salad with Feta Cheese

November 08, 2019 by Gizem in Salads

This week I have definitely experienced a writing block. It was potentially because we ran out of coffee at home (disaster!) but probably because I am still exercising this muscle called writing. Blogging is completely out of my comfort zone and I am still very much learning about it. Cooking and photographing the recipes come a lot more naturally to me than writing about them. I haven’t been writing with my own voice, about my experiences and myself since I the diaries I kept until I was 15. On the positive side, writing this blog has already been super rewarding. I love getting text messages from friends who tried my recipes, showing me their creations. It makes me the happiest person on the planet. So with a little delay this week, I am back to writing and I have an amazing chickpea salad to share with you.

This chickpea salad is adapted from Sevtap Yuce’s cookbook Turkish Meze. The book was a gift from my mom for that I can make the recipes whenever I crave a meze spread. I modified Sevtap’s chickpea salad recipe and added some other ingredients I had in the fridge. It is an extremely easy salad to fix up and it makes the perfect lunch or a light dinner.

I feel like chickpeas don’t get much attention unless they are turned into hummus. Once someone asked to me, when they heard that I am from Turkey, “you must eat hummus almost everyday in Turkey, right?” Ummm no. I actually think hummus is so much more popular in the US than it is in Turkey because it is marketed as a healthy snack option. In Turkey, chickpeas are used in so many different dishes in addition to hummus. Don’t get me wrong, I love a well made hummus but chickpeas are so versatile, it is sad to limit their use to just hummus.

Roasted chickpeas, also known as leblebi, is probably a more popular way to consume chickpeas in Turkey. Leblebi has a smoky taste and a crunchy texture. You can get them hulled or dehulled and you enjoy them just like nuts. Instead of buying packaged trail mixes, people go to nut shops and buy nuts by the pound. My mom always used to have a jar of nut mix at home for snacking. She kept it in a cupboard right above the stove and we would snack on the nuts whenever we are drinking a glass of wine or just looking for something healthy to munch on. I would cherry-pick the chickpeas (and the hazelnuts) from the mix all the time.

I can never find leblebi in the United States so I try to incorporate chickpeas into different dishes all the time. They work amazingly well in salads, curries and stews. Whenever I am in a time crunch I use canned chickpeas (my mom would shake her head) but, obviously using dried chickpeas is the best. For this recipe, I used dried chickpeas and soaked them overnight. If you use canned chickpeas you can reduce the time of this recipe by 45 minutes.

Yields: 4-6 servings Time: 1 hour (15 minute if you use canned chickpeas)

Recipe adapted from: Turkish Meze by Sevtap Yuce

Ingredients

1 cup dried chickpeas, soaked overnight (or 1 15 oz can chickpeas)

1 heirloom tomato, diced

1 cucumber, diced

6 scallions

16 black olives (I used cured black olives)

1/4 cup feta cheese, crumbled

1/2 cup fresh mint, chopped

1/2 cup fresh Italian parsley, chopped

1/4 cup apple cider vinegar

2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil

Preparation

1. Start by cooking the soaked chickpeas. Put the soaked chickpeas in a pot and fill the pot with water. Bring the water to a boil and simmer the chickpeas until tender, for about 45 minutes. If you are using canned chickpeas, rinse them well, under cold water.

2. Chop off the root bit of the scallions and slice the rest. Dice the tomato and the cucumber. I use the cucumber without peeling it.

3. Combine chickpeas, scallions, tomatoes, cucumbers, olives, feta cheese, and the fresh herbs.

4. Pour in the apple cider vinegar and the extra virgin olive oil and gently toss the salad.

5. Serve with freshly ground black pepper sprinkled on top.