Global cuisine - Turkish

Hmm, it's been a while. We have been following our pledge. I've just been rather lousy at posting about it. After our week in Morocco, we continued across the Mediterranean to Turkey. While I have always wanted to visit Istanbul and Hagia Sopiha, I have had very little idea about what Turkish food consisted of.

[Sorry, no food pic this time - pilaf isn't really that photogenic. Instead, a lovely picture from Lonely Planet of Istanbul, a city I long to visit]

I should admit now, it is a lot more work than I anticipated cooking a country a week. You have to choose a country, thinking about what's in season and available at that time of year. You have to find recipes (my two favorite places have been the internet and the public library) and choose those which coincide with seasonally available produce (at least in my mind you should). Then you have to track down any specialty ingredients you might need (Japan - Saki, France - Duck fat, Turkey - Grape leaves). And each night, after work or school, you have to be up for learning new techniques and trying new things. Don't get me wrong, it's a blast. But it has resulted in me looking for the simplest meals at times - which I suppose is something someone from any country would do after a long day of work. Leading me to admitting that while cooking Turkish food, we ate a lot of pilafs.

Pilafs are awesome. Essentially, rice, barley or couscous cooked in a flavoured broth with tasty bits added in. They take rice to a whole new level for me and the recipe I have below was my absolute favorite of the lot. While it only has 6 ingredients, the flavours are rich and delicious and the ingredients are super easy to find.

Chickpea Pilaf

1 can drained chickpeas (390g net)

175 g long-grained rice*

1 onion, chopped

2 Tablespoons butter

600ml stock (I like chicken)

1 large bunch of spinach, washed and chopped

Pepper to taste (salt is in your stock)

1) Melt butter in large pot, or wok, and add onions. Cook until soft. Stir in chickpeas and rice. Pour in stock, season with pepper and bring to the boil. Reduce the heat and cook, stirring often, until almost all liquid has been absorbed. Stir in spinach until it wilts in.

2) Remove pan from heat, cover with a clean, dry teatowel and press the lid down tightly. Leave to steam 15-20 minutes.

3) Fluff gently with a fork and serve.

*I am learning so much about the different types of rice, how they vary taste-wise and cooking-wise. It's great.

Global cuisine - Morocco

[Olive and lemon display in Meknez souq]

This specific choice was one I had been looking forward to. A few years ago, while still doing my undergraduate degree, I took a month to travel to Fez, Morocco and attend an arabic language school. It was a phenomenal experience and I think of it with great fondness, hoping someday to go back and see more of that magical country. One of the things I loved about the trip was the food.

The first three weeks of my trip happened to coincide with Ramadan, the month of fasting. From sun up until sun down, no food was allowed to pass the lips of any muslim. This is practiced in order to learn patience, spirituality, humility and humbleness before God. My last week there was Eid Al-Fitr, which marks the end of the fasting when the new moon is first spotted. This is essentially a big party with lots of food and celebration. Everyone was decked out in their finery and smiling. It was good fun.

For our week of Moroccan food here I was constantly telling Stephen stories about this meal or that one. He was even thoughtful enough to make up a batch of paratha dough early in the week, which allowed me to slice, fold and fry them up for breakfast each morning and store the remaining dough back in the fridge. Although parathas are not originally North African, one of the other language students at the school whom I lived with treated me to them each morning - slathered in butter and honey.

Moroccan food is about couscous, cinnamon, saffron, dates and olives. The tajine is probably the most recognized food from that area and a tasty one at that. One of the rules I remember learning from my host family was that the meat was always hidden under the mound of couscous which was in turn covered in vegetables. This ensured that children would have to eat through the important bits to get at the meaty treasure beneath. Another important lesson in a land where hands were the tools used for eating was that only the right hand was ever used to take food from the communal plate. And if possible, it was the only hand used at all. This presumably comes from the sanitary requirements for survival in a water scarce environment.

One of the highlights for me of the week was finally trying chermoula. This is traditionally used as a marinade for fish but we used it with delicious results as a sauce for carrots as well.

[Meat and carrot tajine with leftover chermoula on the carrots]

Chermoula

Taken from der Haroutunian, A. (2009) North African Cookery. Grub Street, London.

4 tablespoons oil

75g butter

1 onion, sliced into rounds

2 cloves garlic, thinly sliced

50g chopped fresh parsley

50g chopped fresh coriander

1 teaspoon black pepper

1/2 teaspoon cinnamon

1/2 teaspoon ginger

1/2 teaspoon saffron diluted in 4 tablespoons water (I didn't have any, it still tasted wonderful)

1/2 teaspoon cumin

1/2 teaspoon thyme

1/2 teaspoon paprika

1 1/2 teaspoons salt

2 bay leaves

1. Heat oil and butter in a saucepan and add all remaining ingredients. Cook over moderate heat for 12-15 minutes, stirring frequently. Remove from the heat and serve hot or cold.

I cooled mine to room temperature and then poured over my white fish fillets. Leftover was stored in the refrigerator and used later in the week tossed in with cooked carrots.

Global cuisine - Japan

[Miso rice balls (front) and teriyaki beef rice balls (back) in Diamond Harbour for lunch]

While life is an ongoing interesting adventure full of new things to experience and people to share with, sometimes it's nice to create an environment where you force yourself to try new things and experiment.

Now I consider myself pretty adventurous in the kitchen, trying new recipes and new foods as much as possible. But it's hard not to fall back onto those familiar foods we know how to make and can throw together with our eyes closed after a long day of work. A couple of weeks ago, I thought maybe we could try something to push our comfort and force ourselves to learn new things. So the idea of cooking global came up. For a week at a time, we would cook all our dinners (and lunches if at home) from a national cuisine. Looking at our cupboard and seeing what was in season, we decided our first week would be Japanese.

Now, I've never been to Japan, though I would one day love to go. Probably with my brother, who I would take as a guide as he has been there several times already and has a deep passion for all things Japanese. Despite this, I do enjoy their food, or rather, what has been presented to me by mass media as their national dishes - sushi, ramen, and okinomiyaki (a fried egg and cabbage omlette with shrimp and tasty sauce). Ok, the okinomiyaki is probably not a mass media thing, it was rather a dish my brother and dad brought back with them from one of their earlier trips to Japan. But this was what I thought of for Japanese foods. I knew there was more out there, so one of the 'rules' for this little experiment would be to cook things we hadn't cooked before - so no sushi.

I started by going to the library and taking out the cook books they had there. And, probably unique to Japan, I found a manga (graphic novel, comic book) devoted to the exploration of Japanese food. In each volume, Oishinbo explores a different aspect of Japanese cuisine. I had seen them floating around my brothers room back home, so I picked up the one they had on "The Joy of Rice". With my literary guides chosen I headed home to see what we could conjure up for our week of Japanese eating.

[Oishinbo, or "The Gourmet", looks into various aspects of Japanese food. I got my ideas for rice balls from here.]

The first night, a Thursday I think, we ate beef and udon noodle soup. It was absolutely delicious. The next night it was a bowl of rice with several toppings arranged artfully around the top (aesthetics is an important part of food preparation in Japan). On the weekend, I made three different types of rice balls some stuffed, some just coated in flavours. These worked perfectly for our lunches on our hike and ski outings. No worries about squishing bread, just an easy to eat, flavourful treat ready to go at lunch. In fact, towards the end of the week it was getting easy to experiment with our new understanding of flavours and ingredients to make up our own recipes. Although, on our last night, we fell back to our recipe book and made a simple (most of the food we made was surprisingly simple and non-fussy) and absolutely divine sweet miso marinated cod with noodles and fennel salad.

During this week, I learned a few things. Firstly, that by cooking from a specific cuisine we spent far less money on groceries as we only needed a few choice ingredients that we used up through the week (1x 500ml bottle of miso paste, 3/4 bottle of sake, 1/2 bottle pickled ginger, 1 packet soba noodles and 4 packets udon noodles, among others). Our fridge remained spacious and nothing went to waste. It was a satisfying feeling. Second, Japanese food (sushi) has always been presented (or perceived by me anyhow) as an exotic, fancy food for celebrities and executives. This has slowly changed over time as it has become more the norm to find sushi places around town (heck, in Whitehorse there are two, at one point even three, sushi places. This for a town of 25,000). However, the home cooking that we were doing was far from the complicated, many stepped ritual of preparing and rolling rice. We have put several of our experiments into our own little recipe collection for later use. Eventually, these once exotic recipes will become the easy fall back onto which we will look for sustenance after a long day at work.

Below are two recipes I particularly enjoyed. First, spinach gomaae. Always a favorite of mine when visiting a Japanese restaurant, this spinach salad with sesame dressing was something I really wanted to try and make. Little did I know just how easy it was to make. A word of warning, it does have a strong flavour. Although I love it, poor Stephen does not, which was good for me I suppose as I got to eat it all up. This recipe has been taken (and slightly altered) from the New York Times website (that source for all things Japanese ;-). Their link follows.

Spinach Gomaae

1 large bunch of spinach (younger leaves are more tender)

4 tablespoons of seasame seeds

1/2 tablespoon sugar (more or less depending on how sweet you like it*)

1 tablespoon plus 1 teaspoon soy sauce

1 tablespoon sake

a splash of water

1. First, prepare the spinach by chopping just the very tips of the bottoms off (keeping the leaves joined if they are young and keeping the stems if they are larger) and rinsing off any dirt clinging on. Bring a large pot of water to the boil and have ready a large bowl of ice water along side.

2. Blanche the spinach - In batches, place some spinach in a mesh seive and dip this into the boiling water. Using a large spoon make sure the spinach is submerged in the water and hold it there for about 30 seconds, then remove it from the pot and dump it into the ice water. The spinach can sit in here quite happily for a while.

3. Once you have blanched your spinach, remove it in handfuls, squeezing out any excess water. Chop into 2 inch lengths and throw into a bowl.

4. Now, prepare the dressing. Toss your sesame seeds into a dry frying pan on high heat and toast. Keep the pan moving and shake the seeds around until they begin to turn golden brown and become aromatic. Remove the pan from the heat and pour the seeds into a mortar and pestle and allow to cool.

5. Once cool (or at least mostly), grind the seeds until just crushed. You should have a few still whole, but most will be crushed.

6. Combine the soy sauce and sugar in a bowl and stir until the sugar dissolves. Add the sake and sesame seeds, pour in some water to reach the consistency you prefer. I put in about a tablespoon. Pour this over your spinach and mix.

Enjoy your tasty creation. (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/20/health/20recipehealth.html)

_______________________________

The second recipe is the one we made on our last night, sweet miso marinated cod. You can substitute any white fish you like. This is from one of the cookbooks we got from the library, Japanese Pure and Simple by Kimiko Barber. It is simple and so delicious. And although it might look like a lot of sugar, dessert is not common in Japan, mostly it is just fresh, sliced fruit, so I would recommend following this dinner with just that. We served our fish with some buckwheat soba noodles and a fresh fennel salad (sliced fennel root massaged with 1/2 teaspoon salt and sprinkled with lemon juice from 1/2 lemon).

Sweet Miso Marinated Cod

enough fillets of cod to feed your crew

200ml sake

100g sugar

450g light-coloured miso paste (we only had ~350g but it was still tasty)

1. Make up the marinade by placing the sake into a saucepan and bring to a boil. Allow alcohol to burn off for a few minutes, then remove from heat. Add sugar and stir until dissoved. Add miso paste and whisk together.

2. Place fillets into a flat dish with sides and pour over the marinade. Marinade fish in fridge for a few hours, 2-12 hours (any longer and your fish will start to dry out and become overpoweringly miso flavoured).

3. Heat grill to high and place fish under heat for 3-7 minutes (depending on size of fillets). Turn them over once golden and finish cooking (a little bit of caramelization is not bad, in fact it's pretty tasty).

There you have it. Tasty, miso cod. (Barber, K. 2006. Japanese pure and simple: over 100 health-giving recipes. Kyle Cathie Ltd., London.)

Next week - french. I've always wanted to make cassoulet. . .

Mmmmm - parathas

Food is something both Stephen and I love. Cooking, eating and, most especially, trying new things. This past week, with the arriving spring, we decided to do some tasty and spicy Indian food. But having grown up with a pretty restricted Indian food repertoire (meat and veg in some type of curry sauce) I wanted to try something new and exciting - since there is much more to Indian food than curry, naan and rice biryani (the limits of my Indian food repertoire). I know this because every time I go to an Indian restaurant the menus are huge! So I picked one of my favorite Indian foods and decided to give it a try. Entre the paratha!

Parathas are an unleavened Indian flat bread. They consist of a simple dough (flour, water and salt) folded in layers with ghee (clarified butter) or oil spread between the layers to keep them apart. They are often stuffed with tasty foods like mint, or potatoes or spinach. When they come to your table and you pull them apart, they have the most wonderful characteristic of being hundreds of tiny sheets of tasty bread already slathered in butter. And like naan, they are perfect for mopping up curry. Which takes me to another reason I wanted to try this new food. When I was in Singapore visiting family, I had an egg paratha for breakfast one morning. What got me was that the whole meal constituted one big, tasty paratha stuffed with an egg and a small bowl of very soupy curry sauce. And at the end of it I was full. This was different from any North American (or Kiwi) Indian food I had ever experienced, so I wanted to try it myself at home.

Which brings me to our tasty meal. Aloo parathas (potato parathas) served with lamb curry, lime pickle, mango chutney and yogurt. The recipe for the parathas was taken from my favorite source for Indian cookery - Manjula's kitchen (http://www.manjulaskitchen.com/). She has some great recipes with easy to follow videos. The lamb curry, essentially a side dish tonight, was found at the Asian Food Warehouse here in Christchurch and was much soupier than anything I'd made before, making it much more similar to the one I'd had in Singapore. But now, to the recipe.

Aloo Parathas (Potato parathas) - from Manjula's Kitchen

Dough

1 cup whole wheat flour

1/2 cup water

1 pinch of salf

Filling

1 1/2 cups of mashed potatoes (about 5 small or 3 large)

2 Tablespoons cilantro/coriander

1 fresh chili pepper, minced

1 teaspoon cumin seeds (or to taste)

1/2 teaspoon salt (or to taste)

1.Start by boiling the potatoes until just soft and ready for mashing. Drain, set aside and let cool to room temperature before mashing them.

2. Mix flour, water and salt until dough forms.

3. Dump out on counter and knead with oiled hands until soft (about 2 minutes).

4. Mash your now room temperature potatoes. Add all other filling ingredients and mix together.

5. Dump out onto counter and knead filling until everything is well mixed.

6. Break both the filling and the dough into 6 equal sized balls and set aside.

7. Take one dough ball and roll it out on a floured surface to the size to your palm.

8. Place a ball of filling into the middle of the disc and close the dough around the filling like you would a dumpling. Press it lightly to make a hockey puck shaped disc and set aside.

9. Repeat steps 7 and 8 for remaining 5 sets of dough and filling balls.

10. Place a cast iron pan on the stove and heat up at med-high.

11. Now take your first hockey puck dumpling, place it on a floured surface and roll out to the size of a dinner plate or whatever will fit in your pan.

12. Place your paratha into hot, dry pan and cook for about 30 seconds. Check to see if there are tiny brown spots forming on your cooking side and flip.

13. Smear the cooked side with about 1 teaspoon of oil and flip (when second side has started to brown).

14. Flip one more time to crisp up the second side and remove from pan.

15. Repeat steps 11 through 14 with the remaining hockey puck-dumplings-come-parathas.

Enjoy with a tasty curry of your choosing and any mix of pickles, chutneys and yogurt you prefer. See Manjula's recipe here (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZHqZlKrfbGg) for video instruction.

Golden Bay

After our lovely tramp in the rain and delightful soak at Maruia Springs, we hopped into our car and drove up the island to Golden Bay. One of the teachers Stephen teaches with has a house up there and had invited us to drop by and visit. We drove past flooding rivers and green, green pastures, up mountain roads and through little towns with names like Paenga and Pokororo. We drove and we drove and finally we had one more pass to go. This one was in fact a surprise. We certainly hadn't expected such a steep and winding and seemingly endless (the thick fog didn't help) mountain pass just before our final destination, but we persevered and eventually popped out on top of the hill, blue skies above us, thick soupy fog behind us and a clear view to our final destination.

We arrived a wee bit late for dinner, but our lovely hostess had waited and after a short walk on the beach, we tucked into a true British curry at 9pm. Then it was quickly off to bed and dreaming of sunshine and sand.

And that is exactly what we got the next day. Pancakes for breakfast, then off down to the beach to collect mussels for our dinner. Wainui Beach is one of the boring beaches (or so we were told), but just off-shore was a mussel farm and on one side of the beach there was a collection of boulders that provided home to the more wild mussels. So we wandered on down, picking up seashells and sand dollars along the way.

Eventually we found ourselves in amongst the rocks. The mussels however were about the size of a quarter/Kiwi dollar/British pound - they were very small. Certainly too small to eat. But we kept looking and eventually found some edible looking ones tucked deep into the crevasses of the boulders. So we picked a few of them and wandered on back to the car.

On the way back to Pohara, where our hostesses house was, we were dropped off at another beach (Tata Beach) so that we could enjoy the lovely day by walking home along the coast.

Tata Beach is another beautiful example of the large and plentiful beach found in Golden Bay. We threw the disc around - until I tossed it out into the ocean and Stephen had to go up to his waist to get it back. Eventually, we made it to the end of the sand and the start of the headland that would bring us around to the next beach. This is where our awesome rock-climbing/scrambling skills came into play.

Up - over - around - under - ooooo, cool bug - up again - hmmmm, over or under . . . under - and finally, the last wade through the sea to the beach - oh, that not the beach, there's still a lagoon in the way. . . with very sucky mud.

But finally, we made it (another one of Stephens teacher friends pointed a safe way across the mucky-bottomed lagoon where he and his daughter were fixing their boat). We wandered down Ligar Beach and up towards the road (the next head land looked somewhat more daunting than the last).

We walked back along the road, with a quick stop in at a little coffee and ice cream boat to fuel up and finally made it home. It was suggested we all head out to the nearby fish farm and catch ourselves some salmon to go with our mussels for dinner. It is more than somewhat difficult to say no to a good idea, so we hopped in the car and drove down to Anatoki Salmon.

Anatoki Salmon Farm grows Chinook Salmon for distribution to restaurants all over New Zealand. It also invites people to come by, borrow a fishing rod and net and catch their own fish. Once caught, you can take your fish to their fishmonger, who will clean them for you and if you like, hot smoke them with the flavouring of your choice. We opted for a cilantro-garlic rub for one hot smoked salmon and the other to be simply cleaned for BBQing later. Then it was back in the car and home to rustle up some dinner.

Dinner was delicious - if a little surprising. After a good clean and de-bearding, we steamed our lovely mussels in some white wine with chillis and ginger, then topped them with some beach picked fennel. Stephen, sliced and boiled some potatoes to grill up on the BBQ. And all this was served along side our yummy hot smoke salmon caught just 30 minutes prior and the only two lemons on our hostesses lemon tree. It's always a joy to be able to make up a dinner from the land around you and we thoroughly enjoyed this one - despite the unanticipated extras found in some of the mussels.

Who knew that tiny shore crabs and mussels had a symbiotic relationship, wherein the mussel provides shelter and the crab eats any unwanted rubbish that comes inside.

Lyttleton Market

Every Saturday the Lyttleton Farmers Market fills the Lyttleton School yard with fresh produce, baking, meat, and a range of sauces, jams, pickles, sandwiches and more. Each week there is a live band and each week, a happy crowd of people doing their weekly shopping, sight-seeing, and socializing. It is a happy and jovial atmosphere with lots of little kids, even more smiles and a plentitidue of delicious foods. Last weekend I brought my camera to try and capture some of the feelings the market evokes. Enjoy!

And at the end of the day we go home to fill our pantry with the delicious goodies we purchased at the market. Our dinners on Saturday night are a constant surprise, depending largely on what looks good at the market that day. Last weekend it was the gurnard, caught fresh that morning, cooked with some lemons I found in someones compost bin after they had pruned their lemon tree and some lovely young fennel and cinnamon basil. Delicious!

Introductions

I have found a new love. Stephen was not at all pleased when I annouced this to him. In the end however he came around, even walking with me for his first introduction to this new love. Vegemite. This was not a case of love at first sight. In fact I was terrified to begin with. It was only the tendre coaxing of those already enamoured that got me to take my first bite and lo, the flavour filled me with desire. It truly is a beautiful thing. And oh how perfect on a buttery piece of toast for breakfast (lunch or dinner or even snack). Delicious!

PS the key to this successful relationship is moderation, as with all things.