Bulgur it!

As is generally the way in Turkey, Süleyman works a six-day week, so, on his day off, I like to try and cook something special for our evening meal.

And that was certainly the intention this week. The menu I had planned included a dish of sautéed carrots with a garlicky yoghurt sauce (sarimsakli yogurtlu havuc sote), a bulgur and tomato salad (kisir), köfte and something with aubergines (Süleyman’s favourite vegetable).

However, after a day of running around getting the week’s accumulated chores done, I was too whacked to start thinking about juggling so many dishes in the kitchen. So, in the end, we ate a meal that was more or less a combination of the above recipes ? just leaving the carrot and yoghurt dish for another time.

Remembering a Nigel Slater recipe of old for bulgur and aubergines, I got to work on this one-pot wonder. As I had some beef mince to use, I simply added this to the mix, plus some pul biber paste, and, because I have a rather huge jar of the stuff, I used dried instead of fresh mint.

A good sprinkling of parsley finished it off nicely, and, although a fair way from my original idea of an evening meal, it was nonetheless very tasty ? made all the more so by the fact that I didn’t have to knock myself out cooking it!