Baked Eggplant Kebab

November 19, 2019 by Gizem in Dinner, Beef

What makes you home sick? Yesterday I was watching the Netflix show Chef’s Table, specifically, the episode featuring Turkish chef Musa Dağdeviren. I don’t know whether it was the music that plays at all the right moments synchronized with amazing cinematography or all the familiar sights and sounds emanating from the TV screen, I found myself sobbing uncontrollably at every sight of food. And this is the third time I have seen that episode so I knew exactly what was coming. After watching Chef’s Table all I could think about was how much I missed eggplant kebab so I found myself in the kitchen making this for dinner.

Every summer I spent with my grandparents in Alanya I secretly wished my grandma would make some eggplant kebab. It was not her most popular dish compared to her manti or her dolmas but to me it was special. She generally made it right after we harvest some fresh eggplants from the garden. I modified her recipe a bit and converted it from the stovetop to the oven but at its core, it is still the same dish. I know eggplant season is technically over and everyone moved onto pumpkin, cranberries and turkey but if you get tired of all the Thanksgiving food, try this eggplant kebab for a change and I promise you will be coming back for more.

Tips:

I prefer using skinny and long eggplants for this dish. The really big and plump eggplants result in very large slices and they don’t fit into the baking pan.

Pair this dish with some buttery rice pilaf.

Yields: 6 servings Time: 1hr 30 minutes

Ingredients

3 medium sized eggplants

For the meatballs:

1 lbs lean ground beef

1/4 cup breadcrumbs

1/4 cup parsley, chopped

1 cup onion, grated

2 garlic cloves, minced

1 teaspoon cumin

1 teaspoon marash or aleppo pepper

1 teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon black pepper

For the sauce:

1 tablespoon tomato paste

1 tomato, chopped

1/2 teaspoon salt

1/2 teaspoon black pepper

1 cup water

Preparation

1. Preheat oven to 400F.

2. Wash the eggplants and peel them in alternating stripes. You can also leave them unpeeled, completely up to you.

3. Fill a bowl with cold water and add 1 tablespoon of salt. Mix to dissolve the salt. Slice the eggplants in 1/2 inch rounds and transfer them to the bowl with salt-water. Soak eggplants while preparing the meatballs. Salt-water reduced the bitterness of the eggplants and avoids browning.

4. In a separate bowl, combine ground beef, breadcrumbs, parsley, grated onion, minced garlic cloves, cumin, marash pepper, salt and black pepper. Mix the ingredients until everything is incorporated nicely.

5. Using your hands, make flat meatballs that have roughly the same diameter as the eggplant slices. You should aim to have 35-40 meatballs.

6. In a 9 inch round cake pan, arrange the slices of eggplants and meatballs in alternating order, one eggplant slice followed by one meatball. Once you complete the outermost ring, move inwards and repeat until the whole pan is full. If there is a small gap in the center, you can fill it with a tomato slice.

7. In a pan over low heat, mix tomato paste, chopped tomato, water, salt and pepper until tomato paste dissolves. Pour to sauce over the eggplants and meatballs.

8. Bake for 50-60 minutes until the eggplants are soft and meatballs are cooked-through.

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.

Mom's Meatballs

October 31, 2019 by Gizem in Dinner

This quick and easy meatball recipe is what my mom used to make for dinner when she got back from work and needed to whip up something fast. The Turkish word "köfte" which originates from Farsi literally means "pounded" and in Turkish it refers to pretty much any meatball. The Turkish meatballs sold at restaurants mostly use ground lamb. Mom's meatballs are a home cooked version of the same delicious recipe.

These meatballs are a staple in my kitchen and they work with any meat. If you want to impress your guests you can use ground lamb, for a healthier alternative you can use ground turkey or lean ground beef. These meatballs also work great for grilling. If you want, you can also make them ahead and freeze for up to a month.

Yields: 4 servings Time: 20 minutes

Ingredients

1 pound ground beef

1 small onion, diced or grated

1 egg

A handful of parsley, chopped

2 tablespoons bread crumbs

1 teaspoon cumin

1 teaspoon black pepper

1/2 teaspoon salt

2 tablespoons olive oil, for cooking

Preparation

1. In a large bowl, combine all the ingredients. Knead with your hand until everything is incorporated.

2. Pour the olive oil into a pan.

3. Using your hands, form oval shaped meatballs and transfer them to the pan.

4. Set the heat to high and cook for 1-2 minutes until both sides of the meatballs are browned.

5. Reduce the heat to medium-low, cover with lid and cook for 7-8 minutes until cooked through.