heh.. a cooking corner. sweet. ok, I'll reserve this spot for the turkish cuisine recipe I mentioned. have to translate it first..will do so tomorrow.
ok here it is:
Recipe for vegetables+beef a la turka (
made up name, of course)
Ingredients (for 4 portions):
Sauce:
- 250ml low fat joghurt (3.5%)
- 2 cloves of garlic
- half a (salad) cucumber
- various herbs (I used a frozen mixture from the super market that contains parsley, dill, cress, chervil, chives, sorrel, borage, and salad burnet)
- lemon juice/squash (I used one of these little yellow lemon juice bottles from Sicilia)
Filling:
- 2 table spoons of olive oil
- 2 onions (red and white)
- a handful/a bundle of leek ("Lauch")
- half a zucchini
- one red paprika
- 200g ground beef (replace it with e.g. tofu if you're a vegetarian)
- 2 tea spoons of dried paprika (sweet) (bell pepper in english?!)
- 2 tea spoons of dried thyme
- 1 tea spoon of cumin (jeera?)
- 2 tea spoons of black pepper
- 2 tea spoons of sea salt
- 1 can of chopped tomatoes
- 1 table spoon of tomato paste
- ~120g of feta cheese
- white cabbage salad (at least here you can get this in the super market)
Side dish:
4x lahmacun (turkish pizza)
If you cannot buy that then just make it yourself, just like you would make pizza dough (
mix flour, water, and a little bit of yeast, and place that in the fridge over night). Roll it out very thinly and bake it for only a short time so the dough remains flexible/rollable.
Alternatively, you can serve this with pita (flat bread), or tomato rice.
Instructions:
- Cut up the garlic into fine pieces, then mash it with the flat side of the knive (or use a fork)
- Cut the cucumber lengthwise and use a tea spoon to remove the seeds. Then cut it up into very small pieces but spare a small part of it for later
- Pour the joghurt into a bowl and stir in the garlic, the chopped up cucumber, and a good portion of the "various herbs". Then add a bit of lemon juice. You want to stir this mixture occasionally during the next steps.
- Heat up the olive oil in a pan (medium heat), and chop up the onions in the meantime
- Gently roast the onions and wash, then chop up the zucchini, leek, and paprika in the meantime, and add them to the onions.
- After ~10min remove the vegetables from the pan (put them on a plate, for example), then fry the ground beef (maybe add a little bit more olive oil if needed). (I like my vegetables soft, so you may want to reduce the frying time if you don't. Also keep in mind that the longer you fry the vegetables, the more vitamins are lost)
- Add the vegetables, then the spices (the amount needed really depends on the quality of your spices and your personal preference, you may need/want to add twice as much). Stir the whole mixture well.
- Add the can of chopped tomatoes
- Add the tomato paste to bind the remaining water (you don't want a sauce, the consistence of the mixture should be rather tight). Turn off the stove but leave the pan on the cooking plate. Heat up the bread in the oven (for just a short time, it must not become crisp)
- Place the bread on a plate, add a few (2-3) scoops of the filling, then a scoop of the joghurt sauce, then some of the white cabbage salad (you probably want to drain it before doing so), then add a few slices of the remaining cucumber, plus a cut up cherry tomato (if you have one at hand), finally add a bit (one quarter of the aforementioned amount) of the feta cheese. Roll it all up ("dürüm") and enjoy your meal.
These are merely suggestions. As always with cooking, feel free to vary this to your liking.
Regarding "Döner": Haven't cooked that, yet, so I will keep this short:
The basic idea is that you have to cut up the beef into very thin slices (
putting it into the deep freezer for a short time makes it easier to cut it up afterwards), then marinade it in a spiced (paprika, ..) milk/oil/onion sauce for an extended period of time (
e.g. over night in the fridge).
You can mix two sorts of beef, e.g. the marinated beef (e.g. lamb), and some ground beef, which you place in saran wrap and then use a bottle (or rolling pin) to roll it out to a thin "beef paste". Then you stack the marinated beef and pieces of the "beef paste" (in turns), again place the result (tightly packed) in saran wrap and deep freeze it for a short time (half an hour maybe). Then you cut it up into small slices again and fry it (no extra oil). You can use above-mentioned recipe to create the joghurt sauce. For Döner, raw vegetables are used (i.e. not fried, no tomato paste), but I probably will try the fried approach, anyway
p.s.: had to use the dictionary _a lot_. If you end up looking for ingredients in your tool shed you know I made an error in the translation.
