I know, I know… My blog is turning into a “50 shades of hummus” book.. But as I wrote in last week’s gluten free thursday recipe when I published “black-eyed pea hummus”, nowadays I like trying new ingredients for hummus, other than traditional chickpeas. Well, this week’s hummus is made with edamame beans, and it is spread on a loaf of delicious, yellowish chickpea bread.
I have a new obsession: overnight oats. I have never been a porridge or cereal person – not in the mornings, not ever. I only had regular oat bran at home to make pancakes when I was on a Dukan diet a few years ago. Other than that, anything oat related in my kitchen was to be used for baking. Until recently…
I love beetroot. I love any way it is cooked, I love any dish that has it. I also love pancakes. You know where I’m going with this, right? Yes well, of course then I love the combination of these two! That’s why I made beetroot cakes because pancakes can only get better when their colour becomes magenta!
Throughout 2016, I made kilos and kilos of different kinds of hummus for my catering gigs. I don’t think I had seen so many chickpeas in my whole life prior to that. Finns love hummus! But since I am tired of chickpeas now, I started to search for different options when it comes to hummus – and I started experimentations starting with 2017. The first experiment, I made with black-eyed peas (nope, not the band, I’m talking about the legume!) and I must say that I liked it much more than chickpea hummus!
The first and only time I ate poppy paste buns was when my sister-in-law’s mother Nafize baked them for us. I’ve loved them ever since and I’ve craved for them all this time in Helsinki – until one day, just by chance, I found poppy paste in Alanya Oriental Market in Itäkeskus in Helsinki!!!
I love searching for old, ancient recipes from around the world. It doesn’t only give me an idea of what people used to eat or how they cooked, but it gives an idea about their life in general and puts food in a historical context.
When I was a kid, whenever I wanted, my mother would make this pastry for me. “Puf Böreği!” I’d say and she would not make me say twice. We call this pastry (börek) “puf” because it puffs like a little balloon when it is fried!
A couple of weeks ago, I had a catering order and we were trying to make the perfect menu with my client Tiina to fit all the dietary requirements, as much as possible. Perhaps you don’t know it, but I do catering for events in Helsinki and I also make my own eating events. Anyway, we had an “almost perfect” menu but there was just one gluten free baked good missing. So I worked on this recipe after watching a video of Farinata in Food Wishes blog and I served variations of this bread – after the event, Tiina said that it was one of the big hits in the menu!
Ever since I started doing catering and other eating events as a full-time job, I’ve been making hummus. The amount of chickpeas I’ve seen since last year has long passed the total amount I’ve seen until then. People love hummus here, and they always want to have it in their events!! So in order to keep my sanity, I started to come up with different kinds of hummus. This one is my favourite so far.
“We’re jamming” – every time Bob Marley says that, I hear “pyjamas”. Luckily a quick google search showed me that I am not the only one. But hey, this was not what I was planning to say.. Ok, I made jam!! And it’s from my most beloved fruit, tomatoes! Yes, I call tomato a fruit because I’d like to support the scientific thinking. A tomato is technically a fruit, but the use of it in mostly savoury dishes makes it a vegetable in practice. This jam, though, is not the regular jam as you know it – this one has a very, and I mean very, spicy sauce in it called “harissa”, coming from Maghreb cuisine.
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