I love simple tastes and the pleasure that comes from them. Preparing a tartine, aka open sandwich, is a very easy task – even when there is a variety of ingredients involved. And the result, particularly with a good quality bread, is exquisite.
I love salty cakes and I always think of new ingredient combinations for salty cakes. The first time I heard of the idea of a salty cake was when I watched Rachel Khoo’s Little Paris Kitchen programme. Until then, the idea of a cake was always very sweet for me. But… not anymore!
About 2 years ago, I published the recipe of my favourite soup in the world, together with its several stories in my life. That one is a well-known soup in Turkey. However, there is another one that even more people know and eat all the time: red lentil soup.
As I am writing this blogpost, my windows are wide open, I have just a shirt and shorts on me and I’m drinking a cold glass of water with mint. It is, as the last I checked, 21 degrees in Helsinki right now, which means SUMMER! I’m not sure how long this lovely weather will last, so I will make use of it as much as possible.
Last week on Saturday I had a huge catering gig: a birthday dinner for 76 people. It was a big success and people loved the food, but I was utterly exhausted afterwards. So I spent this week giving myself time to rest and lunching out for the first couple of days. Thanks to this, I discovered a very nice little cafe in my neighbourhood and the delicious salad I ate there inspired me to make this one.
In Finnish cuisine, there is a series of laatikkos, aka casserole dishes: porkkana / carrot, peruna / potato, lanttu / rutabaga… and this one right here, cabbage casserole, with ground meat and rice. I knew about this grand “laatikko family” but I never ate any, until I made the first one today.
As I am writing this blogpost, I am eating one of these soft, puffy, melting-in-the-mouth buns and remembering my childhood. Most of my best memories back in Turkey involve food or are around food, and these buns bring out some of them.
I LOVE vegetables. I am not vegetarian, officially. But in practice, I actually lead a vegetarian life. My catering menus and eating events are also almost always vegetarian. Among all, there is one vegetable that I cannot live without: eggplant! (And I cannot go back and check now, but I probably said this over and over again in my previous eggplant recipes…)
I sometimes feel like Bugs Bunny – I cannot get enough of carrots. Then, for a while I completely forget about carrots, after that I remember again.. I generally like to make a simple salad with raw carrots and tomatoes: I just grate carrots, chop tomatoes and bring them together with a bit of salt, olive oil and lemon juice. This recipe though, is a whole new thing for me.
Red cabbage. A vegetable which is rather foreign to me. Sure I ate it many times in salads, but when it comes to using it as an ingredient myself, well, we generally look at each other in the market for a few minutes and then I move forward to another vegetable, continuing our mutual indifference. This weird relationship ended with this soup.
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