Today, I decided to give up having sweet things for breakfast for a while. Why? Because I gained some weight. Why? Because apparently, the sweet breakfasts increase my blood sugar level (and don’t keep me full until lunch), and since I basically eat vegetables, fruits and yogurt during the day, my sugar level drops. And when the dinner time comes, I am so hungry that I binge on everything I can find. So, I’m going to try for savory breakfast options for a while. And guess what, it worked well this morning!

This morning, I kept it simple. I had some “lor” cheese (similar to ricotta) with tomatoes, cucumbers and a slice of whole-wheat bread. And a cup of tea (of course!)

This was actually a simplified version of a traditional Turkish breakfast, which includes a lot more things. Unlike all the sweet breakfast options in other countries, Turkish breakfast is simple, filling and healthy. And actually, traditional breakfast is what I need in the mornings. However, breakfast is like a ritual in Turkey, and I also like to have my Turkish breakfast in peace, not rushing for work. So, instead I invent myself options (often including peanut butter).

But today, I really wanted to have some cheese and juicy tomatoes, so I packed my breakfast and ate at work. Simply delicious! I should do this more.

Long time no see, as usual. I’m guilty. I didn’t have time for Kitchen Impromptu, and I didn’t care because I wasn’t in my writing mood after all. Yet, I think that’s OK because 1) I’m not a full-time blogger, 2) I don’t have to write in predetermined frequencies and 3) I don’t believe in forced blogging, because I do it for fun. But I really like to talk, so  for me, blogging is simply not talking out loud, but talking to my keyboard. That’s how I managed to write 30+ posts over the past 1.5 years. But let’s face the facts: keyboards aren’t human, and since I don’t have thousands of readers who leave 200 comments per post, I don’t feel the pressure to write. Is it good to be by yourself, being free to write anything anytime, or is it good to have thousands of readers and feeling pressure? I can discuss this for hours and come up with no solution..

No, we are off-topic right now. Today I want to talk about my latest obsession: mini veggie burgers, or MVBs. Now, I have to indicate that I’m a burger lover,  I like to look at AHT during my office breaks, which makes me think about burgers everyday. So I get burger cravings very often. However, eating blobs of animal fat doesn’t always seem appealing all the time. Veggie burgers rescue me in those times. They are little, heavenly patties made of chickpeas, kidney beans, lentils or more. Moreover, veggie burger has a very simple base recipe, which leads to millions of variations.

Here’s a mini lentil burger I made for work.

And here’s my previous Saturday&Sunday lunch:

I ate my mini burger with oven fries, a lot of ketchup (I’m a Heinz addict) and a glass of kefir. Yes, kefir. If you don’t know what kefir is, it’s a fermented drink made of milk, and it’s both delicious and healthy for you. You can either buy it, or ferment your own. It’s like the milk version of kombucha. Since I can easily find kefir in Turkey, I didn’t bother making my own. By the way, I really want to try kombucha, but I don’t want to make it at home, because apparently it’s a very time-consuming job! But I couldn’t find any brand in Turkey that sells kombucha, although a lot of people sell the mushroom for home-fermenting. It’s really sad not to have a brand like Synergy Drinks in Turkey:(

Veggie Burger Recipe:

Ingredients:

• 3 cups desired legume (kidney beans, lentils, chickpeas, black beans, peas, etc.), cooked
• 1/2 cup desired nuts (hazelnuts, walnuts, almonds, flax seeds, sunflower seeds, etc.)
• 1/2 cup oats
• 1 egg (or 1 tablespoon ground flaxseed, soaked 15 minutes in water)
• desired spices (curry, dried thyme, pepper, chilli, etc.)
• salt
• optional: 1-2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil (use if you don’t like the burgers dry)

Directions:

Process everything in a blender. If you don’t have a blender, use your food processor, process the nuts first, then oats, and then the other ingredients.

Form 5 cm (2 inch) patties. Store in the freezer or eat immediately by cooking in the oven or in a lightly greased pan.

Assemble your burgers in any way you want to. I highly recommend using Smitten Kitchen’s Light Brioche Burger Buns (I changed the recipe and used honey instead of sugar, reduced the amount of butter and used whole-wheat flour). Also, I like to make mini burger buns for my mini burgers.

For oven fries, I simply drizzle 6 potatoes (cut into strips) with 2 teaspoons extra virgin olive oil and spices (salt, pepper, dried thyme and chilli). This time, I also sprinkled some grated parmesan cheese. Yum yum yum! Bake the potatoes for 30-40 minutes in the oven at 200 degrees C (390 degrees F).

I haven’t been around here for quite a long time.. I wasn’t that busy to write anything, though. I just couldn’t decide about the blog’s future. As I wrote before, I was thinking about opening a Turkish food blog with an emphasis on healthy eating, but couldn’t find a proper name for the blog (or couldn’t find any empty domains for candidate names). Then, after waiting endlessly for an idea to pop into my mind in bathroom or before I sleep (where creative ideas usually come to me) I decided to stop trying to be always creative and perfect, and just open the Turkish blog under kitchenimpromptu domain. So, for Turkish readers, my new blog is tr.kitchenimpromptu.com, until I find a better name.

Other than my new blog, a lot of things and a lot of cooking happened in the last couple of weeks. My cousin got engaged, and most of the food served was homemade by us! My contributions were: hummus, spinach strawberry salad, sweet and salty avocado dressing from Choosing Raw (killer!), strawberry lemonade soda adapted from here (also killer!), chocolate barks, homemade bounties, chocolate covered peanut butter and chocolate covered fudge babies. And a cute cheese plate!

Closeup on table:

Hummus (recipe will come- I promise!):

Spinach strawberry salad was so easy to make; I blended some chopped spinach with chopped strawberries and walnuts, and sprinkled with grated parmesan cheese. For balsamic vinaigrette, I blended 3 parts of olive oil with one 1 part balsamic vinegar, and drizzled over the salad. DELICIOUS:

Sweet and salty avocado dressing:

Strawberry lemonade soda raised some different comments. Some said it was good, and some said I should have used less mineral water. But I do agree that it cannot be called “lemonade”, as in Martha’s recipe, because it was more like a soda with an emphasis on strawberries. I liked the taste, though I’m planning to make a honey sweetened version. And I think the others liked it as well, because there wasn’t any left at the end of the day!:

Wait, there’s more!

Like my cute little cheese plate:

And the dessert table (Notice the baklavas?):

Chocolate barks were a big hit! And they were so easy to make. First, I melted some milk chocolate. Then I spread it onto a tray with parchment paper. After that, I topped the chocolate with chopped hazelnuts, raisins and orange zest. Orange zest is the key to great smelling chocolate barks! Then I chilled the chocolate for 5 minutes in the freezer. Finally, I put a second layer of melted chocolate and chilled for 10 minutes. When the chocolate is completely solidified, I broke them into pieces, and voila! I also made another variation with dark chocolate, pistachios and raisins.

Homemade bounties (recipe coming soon!), chocolate covered peanut butter and chocolate covered fudge babies:

Oh, we ate so much that day. So much that I wasn’t that hungry even the day after!

I also experimented with a lot of recipes. For example, I made Smitten Kitchen’s Light Brioche Burger Buns with some changes. I used honey instead of sugar, reduced the amount of butter and used whole-wheat flour; and I was very pleased! I even made kidney bean burgers with them, but the burgers looked more like bean paste (I should have used an egg and more flour to bind the burgers). And when I decided to make some burger buns for my cousin’s engagement and doubled the recipe, it didn’t work! I must have missed something, but I’ll definitely try again.

I also made Gena’s macaroons, and they were fantastic, but somehow since I used my oven instead of a dehydrator like Gena does, their shapes were not good enough to put in an engagement menu. But I’ll work on that too, because they were so easy to make, so delicious and healthy! And do you know that I made my own shredded coconuts for that recipe? Yay! I don’t know what took me so long to make them, I guess I was skeptical about breaking and shredding coconuts. But if you have a hammer, it’s easy to break the coconut, and I used food processor instead of shredding the coconuts, which made no difference. Then, all you have to do is roasting them in the oven. I strongly recommend making your own shredded coconut, it’s much much better than the things we buy from store.

I hope to write more often. We’ll see..

]]> http://kitchenimpromptu.com/engagement-food-new-blo/feed/ 3 http://kitchenimpromptu.com/easy-mushroom-dish/ http://kitchenimpromptu.com/easy-mushroom-dish/#comments Mon, 21 Feb 2011 07:50:17 +0000 ulya http://kitchenimpromptu.com/?p=953

I love mushrooms! But, I wasn’t always a mushroom fan. In fact, when I was a kid, I used to hate mushrooms. Why? I don’t know, because I had never tried them. I just judged the mushrooms by looking at them, and somehow decided that they are ugly and tasteless. I know, I was a strange kid. I didn’t even eat vegetables. I thought they were like “grass”, so I used to eat only meat. How ironic!

I think my first encounter with mushrooms was during a dinner with my parents. They were eating fish (I also didn’t eat fish that time. I thought they “stink”, so I was eating some beef!), and as an appetizer, they decided to eat some mushrooms with melted cheese. They forced me to try it, and guess what? I liked it! Since then, I’m a big mushroom fan.

This recipe (I cannot even call this a recipe, because it’s so simple!) was an improvised one I came up last week, and it became my dinner. Enjoy!

Easy Mushroom Dish

Ingredients:

• 20 mushrooms
• 1 onion, sliced
• 2 cloves of garlic
• 2 tablespoons ground thyme
• 1 tablespoon olive oil
• 75 gr (2.6 oz.) string cheese, diced
• salt and pepper
  

Directions:

Put the mushrooms to a baking tray, along with onion, garlic and ground thyme. Then drizzle it with some olive oil and season with salt and pepper. Cook in the oven at 200 degrees C (390 degrees F) for 20 minutes.

Sprinkle the tray with string cheese and cook for 5 more minutes. Eat immediately!

Remember the super easy pumpkin soup I was talking about? Well, here it is! It’s really easy to make, but tastes fantastic, and what’s more fantastic is that this soup requires only five ingredients (excluding salt and water, of course)!

And good news, I found my brownie recipe! I’ll post it soon!

Creamy Roasted Pumpkin Soup

yields 3 servings / 150 calories per serving

Ingredients:

• 2 cups diced pumpkins
• 1/4 cup cream
• 1/4 cup low-fat milk
• 3/4 – 1 cup boiling water
• 1 tablespoon olive oil
• 1 clove of garlic
• salt

Directions:

Spread the pumpkins and the garlic on a baking tray. Drizzle with olive oil.

Roast the pumpkins at 220 degrees C (430 degrees F), about 20 minutes.

Put all the ingredients (excluding the water) in a food processor and blend! Add some water (the amount depends on your preference).

That’s it! Enjoy!

Oh, I’ve been so busy with everything that I couldn’t enter one post. Actually, I was going to post a brownie recipe, but I lost it! I have the photos, but I cannot find my recipe! Ha!

But, there was one thing that doesn’t have a recipe, and that is homemade butter! It’s nothing like those smell-less and taste-less things you buy from the groceries. It’s real butter and super easy to make.

You have three options to make butter. First two are the best ways, but they take longer time. So, there’s a third way for the lazy ones;)

1- (I tried this one) First, you have to buy raw whole milk. Yes, it should come directly from the cow’s boobies! You can search for local suppliers, but make sure that they don’t take away any excess butterfat from the milk. That’s what we use to make butter.

Boil the milk, so any harmful bacteria gets killed. But you know, also the good bacteria gets killed during this process, so if you’re OK with it, you can use the raw milk directly, but I boiled my milk anyway. When the milk boils for good 30 minutes, just take it away from heat let it cool, then chill it in the refrigerator for at least 6 hours.

When you look at your milk bottle, you should be able to see a fat layer at the top. Take this “chilled” butterfat using a scoop and put it into your electric mixer and start to whisk the mixture. You will start to see the butter clumping together. Whisk a little more, and take this “butter clump”, rinse in water to get rid of the excess milk (actually what you’re left is buttermilk). And your homemade butter is ready!

If you don’t have an electrical mixer, you have to use the grandma method. Put the chilled butterfat in a bottle, close the lid, and give it a good shake for about 15 minutes. Work your muscles a bit!

2- This method is similar to the first one, but it gives a different type of butter (I don’t know the name). You use the same electrical mixer (or bottle) method, but instead of butterfat, you use the fat of yogurt. This may sound weird, but in Turkey, when you buy a package of yogurt, it usually has a layer of fat, which is called “kaymak”. So, if you want to make your butter this way, you have to make some homemade yogurt with the milk you just boiled, and then you have to whisk the chilled butterfat of the yogurt.

3- This is the lazy method. Buy some heavy cream, chill it for 6 hours in the refrigerator and whisk it using an electrical mixer. You’ll still get some delicious butter, though!

So, what did I make with my homemade butter?

Fİrst of all, I of course ate some with a bite of bread. Then, I made some whole grain cereal brownies and lost the recipe. Brava!

And today, I made some popcorn! I had recently bought some non-GMO corn kernels, so I used them.

For recipe, just try the grandma version in Simply Recipes. It really works! Instead of oil, I just used my homemade butter, and it worked well. The popcorn tasted really good, if you don’t mind the few burnt ones.

But popcorn is never complete without its best friend: chocolate! For me, they’re one of the best food couples in the world: one bite of salty popcorn and one bite of sweet chocolate, then one bite of salty popcorn again, and it goes on like that! So, I topped the popcorn with some dark-hazelnut chocolate I recently bought from the duty-free. I had never heard of this brand, Starbrook Airlines, but the packaging was cute enough for me to buy it!

So, here’s my after-dinner snack for today. I’ll compensate the extra calories, don’t worry. One less slice of bread and more workout for tomorrow!

I love chickpeas. Have I told you that before? I guess so, probably about hundred times.. Anyway, I bought some dark baby chickpeas, also known as “desi chickpeas” or “kala chana”. They are quite smaller than regular chickpeas, and they look like little chocolate drops when boiled. Wikipedia says they are higher in fiber and they have a very low glycemic index. So they are good for you!

Instead of cooking these chickpeas plainly, I decided to make the best chickpea product and one of my favorite dishes: hummus! I haven’t tasted dark chickpeas before, so I was curious about the results. My mum told me that it might not work, but I didn’t care that much, because chickpeas are chickpeas! They can be light or dark, big or small but they are chickpeas. And I wasn’t wrong!

I roasted the chickpeas with olive oil, garlic and some walnuts before blending in the food processor, because I wanted the garlic to cook a little bit, and give its nice flavor to chickpeas. Making hummus is really easy, and this recipe can be done with regular chickpeas too. I also like my hummus less lemony. You know, some people think hummus should be sour, but I don’t like it. So, you can double the lemon juice if you like your hummus that way. Enjoy!

Dark Hummus

Ingredients:

• 3 cups desi chickpeas (or regular chickpeas, if you can’t find), boiled
• 1 cup tahini
• 1/2 cup olive oil
• juice of one lemon
• 2 cloves garlic
• 4 walnuts, optional
• salt

Directions:

Spread the boiled chickpeas on a pan. Add the garlic, walnuts and pour the olive oil. Mix the chickpeas so the oil spreads evenly among them.

Roast the chickpeas in medium heat for about 15 minutes.

Blend the chickpea mixture, tahini and salt in the food processor. Pour the lemon juice until the consistency and sourness is enough.

Spread the hummus on a slice of bread or use it like a dip sauce. Or if you’re like me, just eat it directly!

Last Monday, Kitchen Impromptu turned one, which means I’ve been blogging for one year. Unbelievable! I was planning to celebrate my blog’s birthday with a fancy cake that writes “1” on it. But no, I didn’t have time for that.  Besides, it may seem funny to you to celebrate the blog’s birthday like it’s a hugely-read blog, since only like ten people follow the blog, and all of them are the friends & family. But, I don’t really care how many people read it. I write it for myself, and I feel good to share my recipes, even if nobody cares. And yes, I’ll still make some carrot cupcakes with “1” decorations, don’t worry. I started the blog with my famous carrot cake, and I’ll celebrate its first year with some more carrot cakes.

I also made some decisions on my first year. First of all, I’ll start my blog also in Turkish, under a Turkish name (“Oh well, now all your family and friends will start to follow the Turkish one, and nobody will follow your dear Kitchen Impromptu”). But it will have a slightly different purpose. It will be more focused on healthy eating and healthier alternatives to that greasy comfort food.

The other news is, I’ll start putting up guest posts every month. I asked my friends, and they accepted to share their gastronomical experiences all around the world.

I also made some decisions about my life, my eating habits. I decided to eat only cruelty-free and free-range meat and dairy products. I call them “happy animals’ happy products”. This is because I recently discovered that I feel uncomfortable when I eat some meat and found myself telling: “God knows how this cow lived in a dark, uncomfortable barn, fed with unhealthy food, injected with hormones and died in agony and fear.” Luckily, we can buy all these products from some farms we know, and therefore I can eat meat and dairy products at home. However, I know that 99.9% of the foods I consume outside are “guilty” products, so I decided not to eat them.

Being a vegetarian outside is not hard, since you can always eat some pizza margherita, Mediterranean salad, grilled vegetables, or pasta. However, being a vegan outside is the hardest thing. In fact, there’s simply nothing for you to eat, because everything has cheese or eggs in it. You can only eat grilled vegetables, but eating a dish without proteins is not healthy. So, it was easy for me to be a vegetarian outside, but I couldn’t manage to be a vegan outside yet. Maybe I can bring my own cheese to the restaurants and manage to eat them quickly before the waiter notices and stares at me like I’m mad (Because it’s something mad! I’ve seen many vegetarians in Turkey, including my mom, but I’ve never seen a vegan!).

And lastly, I want to give a quick vegetable and chicken pot recipe that uses leftover free-range chicken. It has a cream cheese mix that I like to use both in baked vegetables and in salads.

First I made that sauce by mixing one tablespoon low fat Turkish cream cheese called “labne” (you can use half tablespoon yogurt + half tablespoon cream cheese instead), ½ teaspoon Dijon mustard, drop of balsamic vinegar, salt, pepper and 1 tablespoon olive oil. Then I mixed the sauce with some sliced vegetables (onion, eggplant and zucchini) and the leftover chicken and put them into four small pots. I cooked them for 30 minutes in the oven. Before taking the pots out of the oven, sprinkle with any cheese that can melt. And that’s it! As I said, that sauce goes well with salads too (but with only ¼ teaspoon mustard).

So, that’s it for today, and I’ll post the pictures of my celebration cupcakes ASAP.

Happy Birthday Kitchen Impromptu!!!!

]]> http://kitchenimpromptu.com/kitchen-impromptu-turns-1-a-quick-vegetable-pot-recipe/feed/ 2 http://kitchenimpromptu.com/swee-potato-meal/ http://kitchenimpromptu.com/swee-potato-meal/#comments Tue, 26 Oct 2010 15:19:02 +0000 ulya http://kitchenimpromptu.com/?p=876

I’ve never seen sweet potatoes in Turkey. Although potato is something widely consumed here, we only know the yellow ones. There are small and large varieties here, but always yellow, as far as I saw. Therefore, when I saw the sweet potato recipes in blogs (sweet potato soup, fried sweet potatoes, sweet potato pie, etc.), I could only imagine how they taste like. I was guessing it tastes like something between yellow potato and pumpkins. I wasn’t wrong, though. Last week, mum bought me one large sweet potato from the grocery store, which was, and therefore expensive.  After seeing that, I wondered why they’re not grown in Turkey, is there something about the weather conditions or the soil type, but they didn’t make sense at all, because we have yellow potatoes, and Turkey has some very productive lands and has many types of plants. So, I made some research, and I found that sweet potatoes originated from South America, and somehow never managed to come here. But, in Southern Turkey, they have started to grow sweet potatoes. So, we’re planning to buy some seeds and plant them in fall (that’s when they’re grown).

Actually, there are a lot more things that should grow in Turkey (because of the climate), but somehow don’t, or couldn’t manage to be discovered by the farmers. The first (and I think the most important) one is blueberries. We cannot buy blueberries in groceries (I don’t talk about the expensive, tasteless, imported ones). But they actually grow by themselves in Northern Turkey. My grandma is from Trabzon (a city in the northern region of Turkey), and they go to their plateau house in summers. When we visit them, we collect blueberries from the hills, which are naturally grown there. They grow in bushes, so they’re smaller, but they taste amazing.

That’s where my grandparents spend six months of the year:

And, that’s where they spend their summer:

The naturally-grown blueberries we picked two summers ago:

The second one is the purple-colored vegetables, like purple potatoes, purple corns or purple carrots. I have also never seen them in groceries, and but my grandma told me that some of the corns she plants come out purple. I’ll advise her to plant the purple ones and see what happens! These things surely grow somewhere in Turkey, but not massively grown or commercialized. So, here’s a shout out to all farmers, and groceries: we want varities OK? We want to see fancy colored vegetables!

But we’re lucky in some aspects, I’ll have to say that. For example, pomegranate is cheap here and you can find it everywhere. In winter time, there’s nothing better than a glass of freshly juiced orange and pomegranates and I fully use the advantage of the availability of pomegranate in Turkey!

Turning back to the story, when mum bought me the sweet potato, I knew I had to use it wisely. So to experiment its taste for the first time I decided to make my grandma’s potato meal with this potato.

Don’t be fooled by the name. Potato meal may seem to be a fancy food and require a lot of work, but it’s very simple. It’s very similar potato puree. It can actually be a type of potato puree, but I eat it as main dish! My grandma always makes some for me when she visits us, and it’s nice to eat it with some yogurt. It’s my favorite grandma recipe. And you know what, it turned out that it’s ten times better when made with sweet potatoes!

My next attempt will be making “kumpir” (Turkish style baked potato) from sweet potatoes. I cannot imagine how delish they will turn out. I really liked the sweetness of these potatoes. Yum!

Sweet Potato Meal

makes for 2

Ingredients:

• 1 large sweet potato
• 1 large onion, chopped
• 1 clove of garlic, chopped
• 1 tablespoon tomato paste (It’s widely used in Turkish meals, try to find it. It really makes a difference in this recipe.)
• 1 tablespoon olive oil
• ½ tablespoon butter (I used clarified butter, that’s what my grandma uses.)
• salt
• pepper
• yogurt – for serving

Directions:

Peel the potato, and cut into small pieces (to make it cook faster).

Cook the potatoes in boiling water. Meanwhile sautee the onions and garlic with olive oil and butter. When the onions turn pink, add the tomato puree, salt and pepper.

When the potato is cooked, mash it coarsely. This is important. You shouldn’t get the consistency of purée; you should just coarsely mash them, but not that coarsely of course. There’s a thin line between them, just stay on that line!

Add the potatoes on onions and mix them. Cook this mixture for 3 more minutes.

Serve the meal with yogurt.

Ok, so I was wrong about nut butters. In fact, it was a big mistake to eat nut buttered breads every morning. Result? Pimples on my face! I think my face couldn’t tolerate such amount of nut butter. I don’t know, I gave up eating them for now.

But now I have a new candidate! These breakfast muffins are nutritive yet not so fatty as nut butters. My mom really love them, so do I, which is an unusual thing because I normally don’t like savory muffins that much, but they have potatoes and goat cheese in them, and I’m a huge potato lover- who doesn’t like potatoes anyway? So, here’s my updated breakfast. Enjoy!

Breakfast Cake with Potato and Goat Cheese

Ingredients:

• 3 eggs
• 2 cups whole-wheat flour
• 1 cup mashed potatoes*
• 1/2 cup low-fat milk
• 50 grams goat cheese
• 2 tsp baking powder
• Salt

* I mashed the potatoes with one tablespoon of milk, half tsp allspice, half tsp curry and some pepper.

Directions:

Preheat the oven to 175 degrees C.

Beat the eggs, add milk and potato purée and mix them.

In another bowl, mix the dry ingredients and add it to the liquids.

Mix a little until you get an even enough batter.

Pour the batter in muffin cups and bake for 25 minutes, or until cooked.

I’m recently obsessed with chickpeas. I always find myself eating something that is made of chickpeas. One example is hummus. The other one is leblebi. And now I have my own homemade leblebi, which was easier to make than I expected.

Leblebi is a Turkish snack, and it’s simply roasted chickpeas. It’s traditionally made by roasting the chickpeas two or three times and resting it after each time for days, which is a complicated process, so you basically buy it from your grocery. But there are two easy ways to make it in your home: using the oven or using the pan. I tried the latter one. I boiled some chickpeas, and I put them in a pan with oil, sea salt and black pepper. Than I sauteed them for about an hour in low heat, and I got some crispy leblebi, which are different from the storebought ones, since they are roasted in special ovens. But if you want to have your leblebi that taste closer to storebought ones, you can roast them in your oven for an hour.

Sauteeing the chickpeas:

Finished:

You may notice in the photos that I FORGOT to peel off the chickpea skins. That’s no problem for me, but you can sure peel them off..

Storebought leblebi:

Comparison:

And what about the leftover chickpeas? I made some chickpea burgers, similar to the ones that I made last year. This time, I processed two cups of chickpeas with 1 teaspoon of tomato paste, couple of walnuts, 2 tablespoons of wheatberries, some sea salt, some black pepper and some nigella seeds. Then I made patties and covered them with some whole-wheat flour..

… and I made a delicious sandwich! You cannot see it in the photo, but I also drizzled some aceto balsamico over the top. Yummy!

Da-da-da-daaa! Here is a recipe that I made up. I was actually going to bake some vegetables, and decided to make the dish more fun by adding some cream in it. And then I told myself “Why don’t you add a little bit of mustard?”.  And guess what! It was super-delicious and it was really easy to prepare, so I think I’ll put this recipe to “Ulya’s favorites”.

Baked Zucchini & Eggplants with Mustard Cream

Ingredients:

• 3 eggplants
• 3 zucchinis
• 1 onion
• 1 cup cream
• 1 tablespoon dijon mustard
• 2 cloves of garlic
• extra-virgin olive oil
• pepper
• salt
• some cheese to sprinkle on top (like mozzarella)

Directions:

Slice the eggplants and zucchinis to thin stripes. Put them in a mid-sized tray, and sprinkle with sliced onions, and some mashed garlic. Add some salt and pepper.

In another bowl, mix cream and mustard. Pour this on the vegetables.

Bake the vegetables for about 20 minutes in the oven preheated to 200 degrees C (390 degrees F). After 20 minutes, sprinkle the tops with some grated cheese, and bake for another 10 minutes.

With the leftover vegetables, I made some pasta. I simply baked one diced eggplant and one diced zucchini along with some diced potatoes. Then I sautéed them with little oil and added to my pasta. Yum!

Woaaa! Long time, no see my dear blog. I don’t know what happened to me, I just want to sleep all the time. I actually made this recipe about a week ago, but I was so lazy to post it. But that’s enough. From now on, I’m focusing on my blog. So, I’ve promised to make some savory recipes, and this is one of them.

For the New Year, I bought myself a lot of cookbooks, and one of them is called “Cooking Light Way to Cook”, and it’s really an interesting one. It’s just the book I’ve ever wanted. All kinds of recipes (from salads to desserts) in a healthier way! And I found the pizza dough recipe from that book.

About the sauce, it is a recipe that I made up myself. It is actually another version of the sauce in my bruschetta pizza recipe. This time, I added some flaxseed in it (I always find something interesting in the kitchen and if appropriate, add use it in my recipes).

Thick Crust Whole-Wheat Pizza

adapted from Cooking Light Way to Cook

1 big or 2 small pizzas

Ingredients:

For the dough:

• 2 ¼ cups whole-wheat flour
• ¾ cup warm water
• 2 ¼ teaspoons active dry yeast
• 2 teaspoons honey
• salt
• any other herbs you want

For the sauce:

• 2 large tomatoes
• 1 tablespoon tomato paste
• 1 tablespoon pepper paste (optional)
• 2 tablespoon olive oil
• 1-2 tablespoon water, depending on the thickness
• 2 tablespoons flaxseed
• 1 clove of garlic
• pepper
• salt

For the topping:

• 150 gr. (5.3 oz.) mozzarella, or any kind of cheese that can melt

Directions:

Mix honey, water and yeast and let it sit for 5 minutes.

Knead 2 cups of flour with yeast mixture. Add the remaining flour after 3 minutes.

Coat the dough with some olive oil (not to make it dry) and rest it for about an hour in a warm place.

Using your hands (it doesn’t have to be in a perfect shape), make 2 mini pizzas (or 1 big pizza). The thickness depends on you, but mine was about 1 cm (½-inch) thick.

In a food processor, mix all the ingredients for the sauce and spread it over the top. Be sure to leave some empty space on the edges (I actually made the dough a bit thicker on the edges). Sprinkle the tops with grated cheese.

At this stage, you can wait for 30 minutes to make your pizzas more spongy (that’s what I did). Bake the guys for 10-15 minutes in a preheated oven (250 degrees C – 500 degrees F).

Being a senior year in college, I have to make my senior project (obviously). Our team is doing a “green” project for Unilever’s Heartbrand (ice-cream), and we have a project proposal meeting tomorrow. Since we are the host of this meeting, we thought it would be nice to serve some treats, other than the usual ones bought from a patisserie.

So, we decided to make some savory and sweet treats for the participants: the sweets are mini cupcakes and sugar cookies, and the savories are two types of cheesy canapés. We made all of them so improvisational that they don’t have any recipe. So, you have to enjoy the photos only..

Making Sinem’s cupcake base:

We filled the cupcakes with ready-to-use cake filling (Normally, I never use ready-to-use stuff, but we had no time!):

Decorating the cupcakes with an impromptu frosting (it has melted chocolate, whipping cream and some cake filling):

Sugar cookies from Joy of Baking:

Mozzarella, tomato and basil canapés on Wasabröd crispbread:

Herbed mild cream cheese canapés with olive & walnut topping:

And the leftovers:

My homemade refrigerated pizza stock is over now, and I am too lazy to make new pizzas (Waiting for the dough to rise is nervecracking!) And yesterday, when I needed something that can satisfy my usual “pizza-cravings”, I made these bruchetta-pizzas, and they require bread instead of pizza dough. This quick dish is also my parents’ favorite for a Sunday brunch at home.

I didn’t use too much cheese for the topping, but for a more pizza-like taste, you can double the amount. Enjoy!

Bruschetta-Pizza with Thyme, Olive and Walnuts

2 servings

Ingredients:

• 4 slices of whole-wheat bread
• 1 large tomato
• 80 gr. (3 oz.) mozzarella (you can double it if you like your pizza cheesy)
• 1 tablespoon tomato paste* (optional)
• 1 tablespoon olive oil
• 1 tablespoon water
• handful of walnuts, coarsely chopped
• 1 clove of garlic
• 5 green olives
• fresh thyme
• pepper
• salt

* Tomato paste (“salca” in Turkish) is a commonly used ingredient in Turkish cuisine. It is basically concentrated tomato puree. Follow this link for more information, or order from Amazon.

Directions:

Preheat the oven to 200 degrees C (390 degrees F).

Mix all the ingredients (except bread, mozarella and the olives) in a food processor. This will be the pizza sauce.

Place bread slices in a pan. Spread the pizza sauce on the slices evenly. Sprinkle the tops with mozzarella and sliced olives. Place a few pieces of fresh thyme for a better look & smell.

Cook for 10 minutes (or until the cheese is melted) in the oven.

It was only a year ago when we had our first onion soup in Paris with my mother. It was a traditional French onion soup with beef stock and large onion slices and was very delicious.

Back in Turkey, I ate some other onion soups, and tried to cook it using beef stock. I also added some vinegar according to an anonymous recipe I found on the internet. The result was horrible..

But, here I am, with my own onion soup recipe with heavy cream and milk, which is inspired by the soup I had in a pizzeria (I think they were using coconut milk, but I’m not sure- trade secrets!!). The idea of making creamy onion soup was nice, and I had to come up with my own recipe! This soup is not something traditional, but I like it more than the traditional one. It is also very easy to do, but don’t forget that this soup is delicious only with bread and cheese over the top!

Onion Soup with Cream and Milk

4-6 servings

Ingredients:

• 350 gr (12.3 oz.) onions*, sliced
• 4 tablespoons butter
• 1 cup heavy cream
• 1 cup low-fat milk
• 2 cups water
• 2 tablespoons flour (I used whole-wheat flour)
• 1 tablespoon brown sugar
• a pinch of ground nutmeg
• pepper
• salt

• 1-2 slices of bread
• cheese for the top (you can use mozzarella, or any other cheese that melts. I used a Turkish string cheese called “dil”)

*Why 350 gr? Well, I don’t know. I had only 350 gr onions left in the kitchen.

Directions:

Put the butter into a heated pan, and add the onions. Cook them with in medium-heat until the onions have a pinky color.

Add the sugar, and cook for a minute or two, until the onions are caramelized (Don’t overcook!).

Add the cream, milk and water. Also add the spices, and mix well. Cook the soup in low-heat for 10 minutes.

Using a blender, process the soup until no onions can be seen. Cook for another 10 minutes.

Slice the bread into 3 cm (~1.5-inch) squares. Put cheese slices over the tops, and cook in the oven just until the cheese is melted.

Serve the soup with cheesy breads over the top. Bon appétit!

I used to be a total carnivore, eating meat two times a day, and considering a meal without meat not a “true meal”. But those days are over now, and I have been eating healthier things for a couple of years. And I really love playing with legumes and creating new recipes. One of my favorites is this lentil chickpea patties recipe, and I make veggie burgers with them. Yummy! They’re easily stored in the freezer, and whenever you need them, just cook in a pan or grill for few minutes and prepare your burger. Yummy!

Lentil Chickpea Patties

makes 25 patties

Ingredients:

• 1 cup lentils
• 2 cups chickpeas
• 1 large onion
• 1 clove garlic
• 75 gr. (2,65 oz. or 3 slices) bread (use just the soft inner part of the bread)
• 1/2 cup walnuts
• 1 egg
• 1/4 cup olive oil
• 2 tablespoons tomato paste* (optional)
• 1/2 teaspoon ground cloves
• 2 teaspoons allspice
• 1 teaspoon ground red pepper
• 2 teaspoons cumin
• 5 teaspoons ground thyme
• pepper
• salt

* Tomato paste (“salca” in Turkish) is a commonly used ingredient in Turkish cuisine. It is basically concentrated tomato puree. Follow this link for more information, or buy from Amazon.com.

Directions:

Boil the lentils and chickpeas. Process them in a food processor (You don’t have to process them well. I like some texture!)

Wash (yeah, wash!) the bread with water, and squeeze it (It should be moist but not wet).

Process the onion, garlic and walnuts together in a food processor.

Mix all the parts and knead the mixture well. Form 5 cm (~2-inch) patties.

Grill the patties or cook them on a lightly greased pan. You can dip them in flour before cooking.