All posts tagged: Fish

Chasing the Season: Sardines Wrapped in Grape Leaves

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These days a lot of photos of Ahi Tuna are circulating on social media, teasing me who can’t even get any fish. Commercial fishing is banned from May to September in Turkey to protect fish population. You can still get farmed fish, though. However, I won’t resort to Norwegian farmed salmon, so I’m hanging in there waiting for the healthiest little fish to appear. And they have! But my stubborn FIL keeps saying firmly, “Not tasty yet. Wait till July!”  Ahhh~~~ I know if I’ll be rewarded with big fat sardines if I wait a bit longer. I’m usually great at delayed gratification but not with fish. So one day I decided to risk upsetting him, – he’s very serious about fish – and bought some without telling him. They were not as big as FIL would have liked but still pretty fat. The farmers market is full of goodness. Look at the 5 different kinds of cherries! And here you go, the fresh green chickpeas. This is one of those vegetables that you buy …

Palamut(Bonito) Freekeh Sarma with Tahini Soy Sauce

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Let’s have a break from the Sicilian story and talk about what I’ve been cooking. I’ve been cooking more Asian foods lately and experimenting a combination of Korean and Turkish flavours. I have affinity  to everything wrapped or rolled, which is ‘sarma’ in Turkish. It sounds even similar to the Korean word for wrapping, ‘ssam’! You’ll see this stuffed leaves or stuffed vegetables everywhere in Turkey, and they are usually made with rice and meat. Of all, the most common type is stuffed vine leaves and I have a very funny story to tell. We had a big row over the vines in our garden over the summer. Some friends of an upstairs granny came around to pick vine leaves from time to time but I ignored them, finding it rather cute that people even in the city go around foraging. Also, the vines needed pruning anyway. But then one day I came home to find the ladies in the garden and the vines stripped naked of leaves so I told them not to pick the leaves from inside. One day while our helper lady was …

Cauliflower-Crusted Baked Fish Nuggets / Kayra Allure

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Everyone went to bed with the forewarning of a Siberian snowstorm and of closing of schools last night. It’s a privilege not having to walk to the bakery for the morning bread. If you’re crazy about fresh morning bread like me, you’d plan the hours of buying bread and never mind going out early in the morning to pick up bread. Whenever I think of fresh morning bread, I think of my Bordeaux time with my mentor, who buys bread 3 times a day and is very strict about the morning bread. Life is too short to eat bad bread, he says. Well, one can’t eat a whole loaf of baguette, though one easily can if one doesn’t hear the inner voice that nags you “Eat Healthy!”, but if you can’t finish it all, well, it’s a big food waste, which will be banned in Seattle from this year and which has been restricted in Korea for a long time. Most households have a dehydrator like this at home but in Turkey, they have street …

Pink Radish Leaves Salad, Grilled Fish – No Waste Food

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I’ve been looking through the bible of French gastronomy, Larousse Gastronomique. This book has everything about food and wine, including history and recipes. One of the things that strikes me the most is the precise catagorisation of different varieties of ingredients and detailed descriptions of how to prepare each type. Incredible! It has a list of French cheese and world cheese, too. I can proudly say that I’ve tried quite many types so I know well but there are still a lot to try. Recently I came across a blog where a woman listed all the French cheese she tried and the number up to date is 221.