Yogurt Soup with Chicken

November 08, 2019 by Gizem in Soup

Last week’s temperature drop in Seattle resulted in me making soup in the middle of August. Given my love of all things with satisfying broths, breaking the rules around soup is totally acceptable, right? Like that time two weeks ago another temperature drop resulted in me getting ramen for lunch followed by a bun bo hue the day after. As long as you have soup in life, everything will eventually be ok.

This yogurt soup, known as “yayla” soup in Turkish is very common in home cooking and is extremely easy to make. The classic recipe only uses rice, but I had some leftover chicken so I threw it in as well. This is the perfect soup to repurpose leftover rice and that rotisserie chicken you bought last week that you are tired of eating.

Soup holds a big part in Turkish cuisine and eating culture. In home cooking, it is a nourishing and economical meal that can feed a large family. It is also a big part of street culture, with late-night soup restaurants frequented after a long day of work or a night out drinking. To this day, nothing makes me feel more at home than a bowl of warm soup. So without further ado, here is my family’s recipe for Yayla Soup.

Yields: 6-8 servings Time: 20 minutes

Ingredients

2 tablespoons vegetable oil

3 tablespoons all purpose flour

3 cups chicken stock (preferably homemade)

2 cups water

1 egg

1 cup plain yogurt

1 lemon’s juice (about 1/4 cup)

2 cups cooked rice

2 cups cooked and shredded chicken (optional)

1/2 tablespoon salt

1 tablespoon dried mint flakes

1/2 tablespoon red pepper flakes (preferably Marash or Aleppo)

Preparation

1. Put the vegetable oil and the flour into a large pot. Cook over high heat, stirring, until the flour is a little toasted for 3-5 minutes.

2. Pour in the chicken stock and water into the pot and give it a stir. Bring to a boil, reduce the heat and simmer for 10 minutes.

3. While the stock is boiling, prepare the yogurt mixture. In a large bowl, whisk the egg. Add in the lemon juice and the yogurt and whisk until everything is combined.

4. If you add cold yogurt to hot soup, the temperature difference will cause the yogurt to curdle. To avoid this, take one or two ladlefuls of simmering stock and add it into the yogurt mixture. Stir well. This will help warm up the of yogurt and avoid curdling.

5. While stirring the stock with one hand, slowly pour in the warmed-up yogurt mixture into the stock. Keep stirring. Add in the cooked rice, shredded chicken and salt. Bring the soup to a boil again and simmer for 5 more minutes.

6. Turn off the heat. Sprinkle with all the dried mint and the red pepper.

7. Serve while hot with a couple slices of bread on the side. Enjoy!

Summer Fruit Jam, Five Ways

November 08, 2019 by Gizem in Breakfast, Snacks

I grew up in a big city but I spent almost every summer down in the Mediterranean coast of Turkey, staying with my grandparents. My grandparents built a gorgeous white house with a gigantic garden for their retirement. The garden, and calling it a “garden” is definitely an understatement, grew pretty much every fruit and vegetable you can imagine. Strawberries, peaches, kiwis, blackberries, figs, plums, tomatoes, avocados, quinces, beans, peppers, and many more.

I learned pretty much everything I know about plants, soil and food at that garden. When I was 4 years old, I knew every single tree, plant and weed so well that I used to give detailed garden tours to all of our visitors. I learned that earth is bountiful, plants are resilient, animals are resourceful, growing food is lots of sweat and hardwork and that fresh hand-picked produce is unlike any other. Some mornings we had to wake up at 6 am to harvest the strawberries to avoid the scorching heat of the day. Some days we had to get down on our knees and pick weeds for hours and sometimes we just could not compete with the birds that ate all the fruits and learned to let go.

The garden has given my family so much produce over the years and sometimes, it was a little too much to eat. Imagine a house with six (maybe even more) peach trees. If every family member ate 2 peaches a day, we still could not go through weeks worth of harvest before the fruits started going bad. Those were the times when the kitchen turned into a jam factory, filling jars with sweet summer sunshine. Watching the vivid colors of fruit lava bubbling away followed by tasting a fresh batch of jam, spread on a warm slice of bread with butter. So satisfying.

In Turkish culture, preserving food is a very common practice. We pickle, can and ferment produce, make jams and vegetable pastes, and dry fruits, vegetables and herbs. We use preserved food throughout the year, making up for the cold seasons that are not as productive as summer. Some of these activities, like making large amounts of tomato paste is a group undertaking where every family member has a task. Jam making on the other hand, is pretty easy unlike what you might think.

For this post, I used five different fruits that are still in season (at least in the PNW): peach, apricot, strawberry, blackberry and sour cherry. The best time to make jam is when the fruits are in their peak season. I like to buy fruits from my local farmers market. Farmers know which fruits are at peak season. If they have three types of peaches for instance, I ask them which kind would work best for making jam. Many people think that leftover, almost too ripe, about to go bad fruits should be used to make jam. Your jam tastes as good as the fruits you use. So I always try to use the best fruits for jam, cutting off and discarding any bad bits if there are any.

Tips:

Traditional jam recipes call for 1 part sugar to 1 part fruit. For example, if you have 2 lbs of peaches, you need 2 lbs of sugar. I like my jams to taste like fruit so I use less sugar than recommended. If you use fruits at their peak, fruits will be sweeter so you can get away with less sugar. If your fruits are very sour, such as sour cherries, you can use 1-to-1 ratio of sugar to fruit.

I don’t like to write recipes that require a lot of special tools. But, in the case of making jam, a kitchen scale and a jar lifter come extremely handy. You need a kitchen scale because it is crucial to weigh the fruits and the sugar to ensure you have a great tasting jam. Without measuring, you can easily end up with an overly sweet, syrupy tasting jam. Kitchen scales are pretty cheap, ranging between $10-20. Here is the one I own. You can also use a kitchen scale to measure out ingredients for making bread and portioning food. Overall, they come handy and you will definitely use it for other recipes. Jar lifters are also useful if you want to be safe while handling hot jars and boiling water. Here is the one I have and they are as cheap as $6.

Always weigh the fruits after they are washed, cleaned and chopped. You might buy 3 lbs of peaches but, once the pits are removed and the peaches are peeled, they might weigh around 2 lbs. Now, if you use 3 lbs sugar thinking that you have 3 lbs of fruit, you are going to have an extremely sweet jam. So to adjust your sugar amount, know the actual amount of fruit you are using.

I don’t recommend making jam with more than 4 lbs of fruit at a time. Not only you need a very big pot, the jam also takes much longer to cook. Increasing cook time might result in burning the sugars and ruining the taste of your jam.

I don’t add pectin to my jams. My family never uses it and we always made amazing jams. Some fruits have pectin naturally and for the ones that don’t, I cook them a little longer. Also, lemon juice naturally has pectin anyways.

Yields: 3 pounds of prepped fruit results in approximately six 8 oz jars of jam. Here are the jars I use. It can be plus/minus one jar, depending on the fruit, so it is always good to have a couple of extra jars just in case.

Time: 12 hours (overnight) + 1.5 hours

Ingredients

1 part fruit

0.75 part sugar

1 lemon’s juice

Preparation

I highly recommend you read the tips section before starting to make the jam.

For strawberry jam:

1. Wash the strawberries. Cut off the leaves. Chop strawberries into halves (or quarters if the strawberries are large). I like chunks of fruits in my jam so I don’t mash the strawberries.

For apricot jam:

1. Wash the apricots. Cut them into halves and discard the pit. Cut the halves into wedges.

For sour cherry jam:

1. Wash the sour cherries. Remove the pits by splitting the cherries using your fingers or if you have one, use a cherry pitter.

For peach jam:

1. Wash and peel the peaches. Cut them into halves and discard the pit. Roughly chop the peaches into large chunks.

For blackberry jam:

1. Wash the blackberries and make sure there are no stems left attached to the berries. You don’t have to chop or mash the blackberries. I like to leave them whole as they explode and lose their shape when cooked.

2. Put the prepped fruit in a large dutch oven. Cover it with 0.75 part sugar. Basically, if you have 1 pound of prepped fruit, use 0.75 pound of sugar. If you have 1 kilo fruit, use 750 grams of sugar. You get the idea. Close the lid and let it rest overnight, until the fruits release all of their juices.

3. Next morning, start making the jam. Turn the heat to medium high and slowly stir until the sugar has fully melted. Bring the jam to a boil and reduce heat to medium-low. Be careful with boiling jam and keep an eye on it. If you leave it unattended, it can boil over. Trust me, it is no fun cleaning hot, molten sugar off of your stove.

4. Stir every 5-10 minutes to check on your jam. At this stage, the jam should be simmering and bubbling quite a bit.

5. While boiling, the jam is going to produce lots of thick foam. Remove the foam with the help of a spoon and discard. I check on the foam every 10 minutes or so and remove it. Continue simmering for about 1 hour.

6. While the jam is simmering, sterilize your jars. First, wash them with hot water and dish soap. Then, put the empty jars and their lids into a deep pot. Cover with water, until the jars are fully submerged under water. Bring the water to a boil and simmer for 10 minutes. Turn off the heat, but leave the jars in hot water to keep them hot. This way, the hot jam won’t crack the glass jars.

7. To check whether your jam is ready, take a spoon of jam and set it aside to cool for about 2-3 minutes. You can also pour it on a cold surface like a plate. If when cooled, the consistency of the jam is thick when you run your finger through it, your jam is almost ready. If not, keep simmering for another 5 minutes and check again.

8. Once the jam is ready, add in the lemon juice, stir and boil for another 5-10 minutes. Lemon juice will help thicken the jam and avoid sugars from crystallizing over time.

9. Remove the empty jars and their lids from hot water, using a jar lifter. With a ladle (a funnel helps here), fill the jars, leaving 3/4 inch headroom. Wipe off the edge of the rim of the jar. Cover with the lid and tighten just a little such that you can easily open the jar with your fingertips. If you tighten it a lot, the air won’t be able to escape the jar in the next step.

9. Return the filled jars back into the pot with water. Bring the water to a boil and simmer for 10 minutes. Remove the jars from the pot with a jar lifter. Let them cool on the counter. Within minutes, you should hear a “pop” sound from the lids. This indicates that they are perfectly sealed.

10. Sealed jars can last in your pantry for up to a year and a half. Sometimes I want to have a jar of jam for consuming right away. I don’t bother processing that one jar but I still sterilize it.

Put a dollop of jam on plain yogurt, spread them on biscuits and breads, sauce up your ice cream, add them on your cheese board and serve them with french toast or pancakes. Options are endless. Enjoy!

p.s. Please note that this post uses affiliate links. I only recommend products I love and use.

Braised Eggplant and Lamb with Yogurt

November 08, 2019 by Gizem in Dinner

It is finally eggplant season! Nothing makes me happier than seeing all types of purple magical goodness all over farmers markets. I already told you that fried eggplants are my absolute favorite but I love eggplants cooked in any way, braised, roasted or broiled. Also who doesn’t like a purple vegetable!?

I cooked this braised eggplant and lamb for the monthly cookbook club at World Spice. I love bookclubs and used to have one back in New York but, a cookbook club? Sign me up please! Every month World Spice picks a cookbook to cook from and every member of the club brings a dish from the featured book. This month’s cookbook was Joshua McFadden’s award winning book Six Seasons. When I saw this braised eggplant and lamb recipe in the book, the stars were aligned. I sent an email to Sherrie (the cookbook club’s organizer) crossing all my fingers that no one has signed up for this recipe. The dish was so yummy and it was such a hit that I asked Joshua for his permission to publish the recipe here. He was super nice and said yes.

The cookbook club was so much fun. We arranged all of our dishes on the counter and they looked like a rainbow of vegetables. I tasted over fifteen dishes from Six Seasons and each and every single one of them was delicious. The book is split into six chapters, highlighting vegetables through their peak seasons using various cooking methods. I love cookbooks but I am very picky about which ones I purchase. I don’t want to commit to buying a book (given they are not cheap) only to end up not using it. If I buy a book, I want the recipes to be a part of my repertoire. World Spice cookbook club was an awesome way to test many recipes from one book and I can confidently say that Six Seasons is going to be a go-to book in my library. If you are in Seattle, you should join us for the next gathering in September where we will be cooking Korean recipes from My Rice Bowl.

I cook lamb very rarely because it is hard to cook it right and raw lamb has a distinct smell which I am not a huge fan of. This recipe is not quick but it is so worth it. The lamb cooks to perfection and melts in your mouth without stealing the spotlight from the eggplant. Joshua recommends serving this dish with Israeli couscous or flatbreads (for which he has a recipe in the book as well). I made the flatbreads for the cookbook club. They tasted very authentic and they were easy to make. For the flatbread recipe you need to buy Joshua’s book (do it!) but without further ado, here is the recipe for braised eggplant and lamb.

Keep in mind that I made this recipe enough for a large group so that everyone can have a taste. As it is, the recipe should be enough for 8 full servings or 16 mini-servings for a gathering like a potluck.

Yields: 8 servings Time: 2.5 – 3 hours

Recipe from Six Seasons by Joshua McFadden

Ingredients

3-4 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil

3 pounds lamb shoulder, chopped into large chunks

3-4 eggplants, peeled in stripes and chopped into large cubes (about 2 pounds)

4 garlic cloves, smashed and peeled

1 yellow onion, diced (about 3/4 cup)

1 tablespoon ground cumin

1/2 teaspoon ground allspice

1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon

1/2 teaspoon ground coriander

3/4 teaspoon Aleppo or Marash pepper

1 bay leaf

2 cups water

Kosher salt

Black pepper, freshly ground

1 cup plain yogurt, to serve

Preparation

1. Heat the olive oil in a large dutch oven over high heat. Pat dry the lamb shoulder chunks and season them generously with salt and pepper.

2. Cook the lamb chunks, in batches, until brown on all sides, for 5-7 minutes. Set the browned lamb chunks aside. In between each batch, add a bit more olive oil if needed. At this point, we want the lamb to have a nice brown color but we don’t want it fully cooked through.

3. Reduce the heat to medium and add 1 tablespoon of olive oil. Peel the smashed garlic and cook for a couple of minutes, until fragrant. Add in the diced onion and cook for another 4-5 minutes, until the onions are golden.

4. Add in all the spices, the bay leaf and a pinch of salt. Give it all a stir and cook for a minute, until all the spices are mixed and fragrant. Pause for a second and inhale the amazing scent of spices. At this point, my kitchen smelled amazing.

5. Return all the lamb with their juices, back into the pot. Add in 2 cups of water to barely cover the lamb. Don’t forget to reduce the amount of water if you are cooking a smaller portion of lamb. Bring the water to a simmer, cover and cook on low heat until the lamb is almost tender. This part took approximately 2 hours for me because I wanted a melt-in-your-mouth texture. Check on your lamb every 30 minutes or so to test its tenderness and to make sure there is enough liquid in your pot.

6. Peel the eggplant lengthwise, in stripes of black and white (see this pic). I like to leave on some of the peel as it adds some color to the dish. If you prefer, you can peel it all off.

7. Chop the eggplant in large chunks and add into the pot. Cover the pot and continue simmering in low heat for 30 more minutes. Every 5 minutes or so, I gave everything a stir to make sure the eggplants are evenly folded into the lamb.

8. You can add more salt and pepper to taste before serving. Serve with a large dollop of yogurt on top and with a side of Israeli couscous, flatbreads or white rice. If you like spicy flavors, this recipe can carry hot sauce really well. Joshua serves it with his spiced green sauce (recipe in the book) but I also recommend a serrano or habanero based hot sauce like Secret Aardvark. Enjoy!

* Looks like I had a mini brain freeze and forgot to photograph steps 6 and 7. I am very sorry! I will do better next time, I promise.