TURKISH CUISINE NIGHT

We had the friends over dinner last Saturday evening. It was a night with full of joy and refresment of our memories in Turkey. My menu with flavors from Turkish cuisine and background Turkish music made us feel like we're in Turkey.. My dear friends; thanks for coming and sharing food and feelings!

Yess..Now it's time for the menu and recipes! My menu consisted of a variety of appetizers: sliced cheddar cheese, red bell pepper rolls, stuffed eggplants, hot salsa dipping, roasted eggplant and yogurt salad, vegetables with mayonnaise salad, red kidney beans with olive oil, green salad, and vegetable muffins. For the main entree, I served chicken with broccoli in creamy sauce, rice and roasted potatoes with rosemary. I want to share the ones which were extra special for the night. Actually, the main entree was very special too, but I want to share their recipes next time I cook them. I want to start with these wonderful vegetable muffins. They are salty, healthy and delicious. Here is the recipe:

Ingredients: 1 zucchini, 1 potato, 1 onion, 1 egg, 1 cup plain yogurt, 1/4 cup olive oil, 3/4 cup dill, 2 tsp baking powder, 1 1/2 cup flour, salt.

Directions: You start with beating the egg with salt. Then continue beating after adding the olive oil and yogurt. Dice the onion and grate the zucchini and potato. Mince the dill. Add all of the vegetables into egg-yogurt mix. Then add the flour and baking powder and beat all together. I put the muffin liners into my muffin pan and then split up my vegetable muffin mix into liners. It makes about 12 vegetable muffins. Yummy! Try it :)

My stuffed egglplants are very Turkish and Ottoman. It is very much like "imambayildi", but it's a twist to that with a different shape. In the picture, they don't look very clear, but you can go to the original place of this recipe: http://www.portakalagaci.com/oburcuk/2008/03/malzemeler.html

Thanks very much to Hatice for this wonderful dish!

Here is the recipe:

Ingredients: 4 eggplants, 5-6 green peppers, 4-5 tomates-chopped, 2 onions-chopped in half circle shape, 5-6 garlic cloves-chopped, oil, 3 tbs olive oil, juice of 1/2 lemon, 1tbs salt, 1tbs freshly ground black pepper.

Directions: First, I partly peeled the eggplants, so that eggplants were looking like striped. Then you should cut them into two or three depending on the lenght of eggplant. My eggplants were short, so I cut them into two. Then I carved the eggplants to stuff them with the filling. For the filling, I started with cooking onions, garlic, green peppers with olive oil. Then add tomatoes, and salt, black pepper, and lemon juice. Cover with lid and cook until excess water boils away. When the filling cools down, fill the eggplants with filling. Put them into a baking pan and pour about 1/3 cup boiling water. Bake in a preheated 430F degrees oven for 15 minutes. Serve warm or cold.

My red bell pepper rolls were wonderful combination of cheese, walnuts and red bell pepper. They tasted very nice all together. The recipe is very simple. I first roasted some red bell peppers. Then I cut them vertically by making them about 2 inches wide. For the filling I mixed ricotta cheese and feta cheese half and half. I added some olive oil and walnuts. I put about 2 tbs of filling into peppers and then rolled them up. I put sticks on them just to make it easy to serve. Enjoy!