Since the start of my grain-free experiment I have been thinking about a quote from Fyodor Dostoyevsky: “Man grows used to everything, the scoundrel!” Being this very scoundrel, I don’t miss pilaf, and my heart doesn’t beat faster when I bake with my cooking classes’ guests. Maybe because I know my grain-free state is temporary. But I long for the textures often associated with the grain baking. I imagine biting into a fluffy something made of butter, goat cheese and dill. And I fancy a crunch of home-made crackers. To make both possible in the grain-free existence, I started baking with bean and nut flours.
Nut and Seed Crackers
Whole Wheat Puff Pie with Beet Greens
When buying beets, have you ever though with happens its beautiful lush greens? The ones with the purple stem, purple veins and the leaves green as the forest at a summer dawn. Some of them may be fed to the animals, but a lot of the greens get tossed. A few weeks ago I was walking through the Kadıköy market at an early hour when the vendors are still setting their stalls. I spotted a huge box of assorted stems and leaves, and asked the greengrocer (who was peeling off very edible, but not so good looking layers from the leeks) what was going to happen with them. “We are tossing them”. I recognized beet greens and black radish stems in the box. “Can I take some?” “Go for it. What are you going to do with them?” I did know make my mind, “Soup? Börek?” For me it was ridiculous he even asked: what would you not do with the greens like that? “I took a bunch of mixed greens and headed home.
Mardin Hayat Çöreği: How We Bake in Turkey
Living abroad for the past 10 years, I have learned one certain thing: you should never take for granted how people go about routines. Think about street crossing. In Norway any car, however big and cool, will slow down to let you cross the street. In India no car will ever stop to let you cross, but if you find the courage to start crossing and signaling where you are heading, the drivers will take you into account. In Russia a car may run over you crossing the road if the driver is an oligarch. In Turkey you play chicken with an approaching car to see who has more self-confidence - you crossing the road or the car driver running over you. These differences come from the different chips we were born with and the different conditions we grew up in, so don’t assume that you and me bake in the same way.
My Mother-in-law’s Mahlep Biscuits
Do you keep a cookie jar? I try not to, but in winter it is hard to resist the temptation and to overlook the practical side. On a cold day the need of a comforting snack is more pressing and the cost obtaining one is higher (putting on the coat alone is an undertaking). That’s why I feel right to go back to the long-standing tradition of baking ahead and keeping the bake treats handy in a cookie jar or even a sack if we speak of a large household like the joint family house where my mother-in-law was born.
Poğaça (Turkish Cheese Turnovers): Delight of a Baking Geek
My life was easier when I knew just one kind of homemade poğaça, infamous Turkish cheese turnovers. Like any Turkish kid (in my case - adopted one), I was convinced that what your mother does is the golden standard by which you measure food made by the others. This was until I tried poğaça that Aysel Hanim prepares at her little bakery Serger in Moda: hers was large, short and airy at the same time, with dill mixed in the dough and a tiny bit of pungent ezine cheese hidden inside. First I got hooked myself, and then I made all my guests keen on that poğaça. Over the past summer, I developed an early morning routine: I would stop by Serger on the way to the ferry and get a mandatory poğaça to share it with my culinary walk participants at the breakfast we indulged at a local cay ocaği (shop brewing and selling tea all day long).
Zapekanka (Russian Cottage Cheese Bake) with Tel Kadaif
I have not seen my friend Yulia for exactly a year, and what a year it was: I got married and she gave birth to the twins Anastasia and Sofia. There was occasional catching up over skype, and I even got to see the girls - yet the proper meeting was overdue.
When we stopped by Yulia’s in Moscow I did not know what to expect. Has my friend changed after her family doubled and she took on much anticipated yet a completely unknown role of a mother? And most importantly: does the change in her life mean I have to change something in mine?
Antakya Olive Oil Cookies (Kerebiç)
I knew I had to make kerebiç cookies since the first time I saw the molds. There was a strange familiarity in these wooden beauties carrying geometrical messages carved on their shaping cavity. Some of those carvings had a clear reference to the cross, an archetypal sign that for any Christian including myself has am important religious reference that I would least associate with the South-East of Turkey where the cookies are coming from. Also, kerebiç molds remotely resembled gingerbread molds used in Russia to make pryaniki, or what outside of my home country goes by the name of Russian tea cakes.
Clearly, kerebiç cookies had to happen, and I bought a few molds. Little I knew back then how this purchase would bring me to the discovery of endless cultural, religious and culinary bonds between so many countries.
