Eggplant Shakshouka – For A Breakfast Feast
There are 3 dishes in my life that the word “shakshouka” has been associated with since my childhood. And they all point to different parts of my life.
There are 3 dishes in my life that the word “shakshouka” has been associated with since my childhood. And they all point to different parts of my life.
I must admit that I was slightly suspicious about the idea of “hot hummus” when I first saw a recipe in the mezze cookbook I bought in Istanbul last summer. I am not a big fan of hummus anyway, but when it’s hot, I thought it might feel too heavy. Oh boy, was I wrong.. Not only it is light, but also it is so delicious that I could probably eat the whole pot when I first made it.
I have to admit: I don’t always like recipes with tons and tons of ingredients. It is good to keep things simple most of the time. However, there are moments when you want a perfect flavour festival going on inside your mouth and stomach, and this soup is just the one for that purpose.
On April 24th, 2016, I went to Helsinki Coffee Festival with my friend Helena. While Helena is utterly a coffee person, I am a tea person, however I wanted to go to the festival and check what’s going on in coffee world and taste some things. In the end I just drank a very bitter espresso and ate frrrrresh churros, and I bought a brand new cookbook in Finnish: “Kahvin Kanssa”, meaning “With Coffee”. This crispbread is an adaption of one from that book.
A few weeks ago, while I was looking for food related documentaries or programs on Youtube to spend some time, I found “Food Safari Italy” by Australian TV network SBS. It is actually a series of programs that consist of several seasons, called “Food Safari” and in most of the episodes, they visit another cuisine. For Italian and French cuisines though, they made several episodes. Watching the Italian episodes make you drool so much that if you watch it in the middle of the night, you can’t sleep for long hours because of feeling hungry!
When I saw this recipe in “Anatolia – Adventures in Turkish Cooking” book, I immediately knew that I had to try it. After all, the soup combines two of my favourite ingredients, garlic and almond, in my favourite food form!
The smell of butter inside a warm and cosy bakery in the middle of winter.. It reminds me so much of my childhood. When I was a kid, I didn’t like having breakfast at home before the school. So my mother would buy me one “pogaca”, a kind of flaky pastry that is similar brioche and I would eat that as breakfast, accompanied by that lovely butter smell all around me. Later on when I was a teenager, during high school years, we would go to the bakery behind the school building every morning with my friends sharing the same school bus. The bus would leave us outside the building, so we would first go to the bakery and eat a pogaca fresh out of the oven and then go inside the building..
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.
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!
It’s December 26th, and it’s my 37th birthday. So what can be better than sharing with you the recipe of the most festive dish ever for me – vine leaf rolls?? These rolls have always been there: on birthday table, in new year’s eve, in big family gatherings! If I ever have a family of my own (which I am beginning to doubt that it will happen…) then I will continue the tradition.
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