Menemen - Turkish scrambled eggs

I cannot think of a better way to spend a Sunday morning than eating these delicious Turkish-style scrambled eggs while sitting at a café in Istanbul's Bebek quarter and looking out at the ships sailing down the Bosphorus.


But even if you're not in Turkey, menemen is a great way to start your day - or end it!! Though it's traditional to have menemen for breakfast, I think it works wonderfully for lunch or dinner as well. It's very simple, and you can add whatever vegetables you want, though tomatoes and peppers are the traditional ones. I made mine with feta and some extra spices like oregano and sumac, but again, this dish is very flexible, so make it in the way that will best please you!

Ingredients (for one generous portion or as part of a bigger meal shared with 3 or 4 people):
2 eggs
1 red pepper
1 large tomato
1 onion
A handful of fresh parsley
75-100 g. feta or other soft white cheese
Salt
Pepper
Oregano
Chile flakes or ground cayenne pepper
Sumac
Olive oil

Wash and chop the pepper, tomato, and parsley, and dice the onion. Beat the eggs well and set aside. In a large pan, heat the olive oil and when it's odd, add the onion. Let the onion cook until soft, and then add the pepper. Let cook about 5 minutes and then add the tomato too.

Cook the vegetables several minutes more, gently crushing the tomato with a wooden spoon to make it more sauce-like. Then add the eggs, and let cook a few minutes more while stirring constantly. Turn the heat to low, and add the cheese then the parsley and all the spices. Cook a few minutes more, stirring continuously, and serve hot with bread. Though it's traditional to eat menemen with pide, a soft Turkish bread, any type will do (but pide is really good, so if you can get some, then definitely use it!)

Spaghetti with tuna and fresh tomatoes

A simple meal for complicated times...


I haven't updated much recently because, well, I haven't been cooking much recently. Instead, I've been moving to Malta (after a brief stop in New York)! Briefly, I'll be studying at the University of Malta for a year as part of a master's program - not something I would have even suspected one year ago!

Life has been pretty hectic these past few weeks, what with seeing all my friends before leaving the country, moving to a new land, looking for an apartment, etc. It was strange to go for two whole weeks without so much as preparing a sandwich, but now that I'm finally settled into an apartment, I've started cooking again, and it definitely feels good!

Whenever I move to a new place or am dealing with a lot of complicated stuff in my life, I tend to fall back to cooking what I know and love best. This has meant I've been eating lots of spaghetti with tomato sauce and vegetables, but I've also been alternating that with this dish, which is even easier to prepare, and is of course, delicious. If you want to make it, definitely do it soon, before all the good tomatoes vanish!

Ingredients (per person):
75 g. spaghetti
1 small can of tuna, or half a larger can
A couple handfuls (about 10) cherry tomatoes or one large tomato
Extra-virgin olive oil
Salt
Pepper
Oregano

Bring a large pot of water to a boil, salt it, and add the spaghetti. While the spaghetti are cooking, wash the tomatoes and chop them in halves, or into small chunks if you're using a large tomato. Drain any olive oil from the tuna can, mash it up with a fork, and add to the tomatoes.

Note that I like to drain the olive oil from the can and add my own because the olive oil used to preserve tuna is generally of a lower quality, and if there's one thing I adore besides really good bread, it's really good olive oil! If you don't care about this, then of course you can just use the same olive oil the tuna came in.

When the spaghetti are al dente, drain them, and add them to the tuna and tomatoes. Add a spoonful or two of olive oil, sprinkle with salt, pepper, and oregano, mix up well, and serve!

I've also tried this with sun-dried tomatoes, and it was great, although rather salty. Adding some fresh mozzarella might help even things out a bit - I'll hopefully try that one out soon!

Bulgur with tomato and feta

A couple of weeks ago, the San Francisco Chronicle Food section ran a big article on bulgur, complete with 6 or 7 bulgur recipes. Always attracted by an interesting grain, I immediately clipped out all the recipes and vowed to buy some bulgur on my next grocery shopping trip.

Well, either I was looking in the wrong places, or the markets I went to were just out of bulgur, but it took until this past weekend for me to find some. And so today I was finally able to make the recipe which had first caught my eye and which I had been dreaming of (really!) since I saw it - a recipe for bulgur with onion, tomatoes, and feta.


It turned out to be just as delicious as I had hoped - the grainy bulgur was complemented by the tomatoes, and the spiciness of the pepper was cooled just enough by the feta. I made some slight modifications to the recipe, but the original, along with the article and all the other bulgur recipes, can be found here. For my version, see below.

Ingredients:
100 g bulgur
4-5 San Marzano tomatoes, peeled and crushed (fresh when they're in season, canned when they're not)
A dollop of tomato paste
A cupful of vegetable broth
A generous chunk of feta - I really like the stuff, so I put in quite a bit but you can vary the amount to suit your tastes
Half a yellow onion
A pinch of red pepper flakes
A spoonful of mint flakes
A spoonful of salt
Pepper
Olive oil
A sprig or two of fresh parsley

In a small saucepan, heat the broth, the tomatoes, and the tomato paste until boiling. Turn the heat down, add the salt and let simmer while you prepare the other ingredients.

Wash the bulgur if necessary (depends on where you got it - I think most commercial brands these days don't need to be washed). Dice the onion.

In a large saucepan, heat some oil. When the oil is sizzling hot, add the onion and let cook a couple minutes until the onion is soft and translucent. Add the bulgur, mint flakes, and red pepper flakes, and stir until all the bulgur grains are coated with oil.


Pour in the tomato-broth mixture and, once everything is boiling, turn heat down very low and cover.

Let the bulgur cook about 10 minutes. Meanwhile, wash and chop the parsley. Once the 10 minutes are up, check the bulgur. It should be of a similar consistency to risotto - tender but not soggy and still a bit resistant. When the bulgur has reached this consistency, turn off the heat and let it sit another couple of minutes.

Crumble most of the feta into the bulgur mixture, reserving a bit to put on top of the dish. Grind some black pepper over everything and mix well.

Serve the bulgur, topping with the remaining feta and the parsley.

Pan Tomate

This Catalan "dish" is about as simple as you can get, and yet it's one of my favorite appetizers because it's so fun to make, especially with a big group of people.


I was introduced to Pan Tomate (literally "tomato bread") while staying with the family of a friend in a little village way up in the Pyrénées. They were wonderful people with a very lively family full of small children and animals. And Chantal (my friend's aunt) certainly knew how to cook! Every meal she served was sumptuous, fun, and far more food than we could possibly eat. But we gave our best efforts!

Even with all the fancy cooking, my favorite dish was this simple appetizer which came, as they told me, from the typical workman's lunch in the region. The way they explained it, the men's wives would set them off in the morning with a hunk of bread and some tomatoes, and at lunchtime the men would use their work knives to slice the tomatoes in half and then rub the halves all over the bread. A very practical way to get a nice, fresh meal without having to come home!

We ate pan tomat in the same way, rubbing the tomatoes on ourselves, and that's what makes this dish so fun, despite the sparsity of its ingredients. I highly recommend this for largish dinners with family, friends, and of course, good wine. As this can be somewhat messy, it is not advisable for fancy dinner parties where you're trying to impress people, but those aren't nearly as enjoyable as the other kind!

You will need:
A couple of loaves of good, fresh bread. High-quality bread is important here (and in my mind, everywhere else as well). The bread should have a good hard crust. Otherwise, tomato juice will get all over you!
Several fresh tomatoes. I recommend medium-sized round tomatoes - the kind you would put in a salad.
Olive oil
Salt
Several slices of prosciutto crudo (or jambon de pays, as we called it there), again of high quality. The prosciutto is optional, but I think it's a nice addition, especially for special occasions.

Cut the bread into largish hunks, and then slice the hunks down the middle, so that each piece has crust on the bottom. Place the bread into one or more baskets for people to grab from. Wash the tomatoes and slice them into halves, or quarters if they're large, and place them into one or more bowls, just like the bread. You could also have people slice their own tomatoes at the table, but that might get a bit complicated. As it is, this dish requires a lot of passing around of olive oil, salt, etc.

Put out the olive oil and salt, along with the bread and the tomatoes, and a plate with the prosciutto if desired.

Pour everyone a generous glass of wine (featured here is a lovely prosecco - carpené malvolti di conegliano).


Next, demonstrate for your guests how to make pan tomat: take a hunk of bread and drizzle a bit of olive oil onto it. It's not important to spread the olive oil out evenly because the tomato-spreading will take care of that. Sprinkle salt onto the olive oil. Then, with gusto, take a tomato half and rub it all over the bread, leaving the leftover tomato on if you want, though that's not necessary. Top the tomatoed bread with a slice of prosciutto, take a good sip of wine, and eat, encouraging your guests to do the same!

Ideally, this appetizer course should go on quite a bit, with lots of tomato-rubbing and merry-making.

Penne with Red Snapper, Tomatoes, and Capers

When it comes to cooking fish, my experience before tonight was just about zero. Apart from canned tuna, I don't think I had ever once prepared a dish that involved fish. It's not that I don't like fish, because I do, quite a bit. It's just that I have a strange aversion to dealing with any kind of raw animal flesh and so I end up eating almost all vegetarian meals when I cook for myself, though I'll happily eat meat that other people have prepared!

However, I have been going through Harold McGee's "On Food and Cooking" which I highly highly recommend to anyone who ever cooks or is at all interested in knowing what's going on in all that stuff you put in your mouth, and I just arrived at the fish section. Reading all about fish muscles and fish preparation made me quite curious (for some reason I find myself fascinated by all the descriptions of the chemical processes involved in the breakdown of muscle by heat). Then at the farmer's market this morning, I noticed a stand with some nice fresh-looking fish fillets. Since I wanted something easy to prepare, I decided this was perfect and, after peppering the fish vendor with questions about the different types of fish, I decided on a fillet of red snapper.

I had some San Marzano tomatoes I needed to use up, and I always like capers with fish, so after going through all sorts of fish recipes online, mixing them all up, and adding a few of my own personal touches, I came up with the following dish, which turned out quite nicely for a first fish-dish!

You will need:
1 fillet of red snapper (or other fish that cooks well in a pan)
80 g penne
4-5 San Marzano tomatoes (you can substitute other smaller tomatoes like cherry tomatoes here, in which case you should use about 10-12)
A couple spoonfuls of capers
1 onion
A couple cloves of garlic
Lemon juice
1/2 small glass of dry white wine
Olive oil
Salt
Pepper
Fresh parsley
Fresh basil

If you're using San Marzano tomatoes, begin by boiling them for about 30 seconds, running them under cold water, and then peeling and seeding them. Cut the remaining pulp into thin strips and set aside. If you're using something like cherry tomatoes, just cut them in half, leaving the peel intact.

Bring a large pot of water to boil for the pasta. While you're heating the water, chop up the onion and crush the cloves of garlic with your hand or the flat edge of a knife.

When the water starts to boil, salt it and add the penne, stirring a bit to make sure they don't stick. In a frying pan, start to heat the olive oil. While the oil is heating, take the red snapper fillet, rinse if necessary, and cover with lemon juice. Then chop it into small pieces.

Once the oil is hot enough to make a few water droplets spattered onto it sizzle, add the garlic. After about a minute, add the onion. When the onion has become tender and translucent, add the red snapper. Sprinkle salt and pepper over everything, and let cook a few minutes, stirring frequently.

Pour the white wine onto the snapper, and let it cook until all the wine has evaporated. Once the wine has evaporated, add the tomatoes and the capers and let cook a few more minutes, again stirring quite a bit.

Drain the penne, and quickly throw them onto the mix of snapper, tomatoes, and capers. Turn off the heat, stir everything up, and then chop or tear up the parsley and basil and sprinkle over everything. Give it all a good last stir, and serve piping hot!

Tomato Sauce

I don't think I could ever get tired of eating spaghetti with tomato sauce. Whenever my culinary inventiveness has spent itself and I just want something easy and tasty, I stir up some of this sauce, sauté a few vegetables, throw it onto my spaghetti and voila - dinner!


There are a lot of different variations of this out there - some have you add carrots and celery, others a pinch of sugar, some require that you peel and seed your tomatoes, others that you just peel them, others don't require either of these steps, and so on and so on. My own way of making tomato sauce is pretty simple - just tomatoes, olive oil, onion, and maybe a little salt, but of course if you want to add carrots, celery, or anything else, go right ahead!

Though my ingredient list is pretty sparse, I do like to peel and seed my tomatoes. While this is a bit more time-consuming and messier than just chopping them up and throwing them in the pot, I prefer the smoother, pulpier consistency this gives the sauce. I have also heard that the seeds make the sauce more acidic, although I haven't done any in-depth testing to discover whether this is true or not. One tip I received for making tomato sauces less acidic is to add a pinch of sugar and then a pinch of salt, so if you do decide to leave the seeds in, you could try that and see if it helps.

But anyways, for the sauce...
You will need:
Lots of tomatoes (I use about 5 medium San Marzano tomatoes per serving of pasta)
1 yellow onion
Olive oil
A pinch of salt (and sometimes sugar too), if necessary

After much experimenting with different types of tomatoes, I have come to the conclusion that San Marzano tomatoes are far and away the best tomatoes for all sauce-making endeavors. Oddly, this is exactly what everyone else had already concluded ages ago, but of course I had to do my own tests just to be sure! And yes, San Marzanos (San Marzani?) are the best; they are wonderfully pulpy and easy to deal with and they give the sauce a great flavor.

San Marzano tomatoes

I do realize that they may not be readily available in all places - I couldn't find them in any of my local supermarkets and only one of the three or four tomato vendors at my farmer's market sells them - but please please try to find some if at all possible. If there are absolutely no San Marzano tomatoes within 100 miles of your kitchen, my second-favorite type for sauces is Cuore di Bue (literally Oxheart), but these are also difficult to find in the States. I bought some heirloom tomatoes that resembled Cuore di Bue tomatoes and they worked pretty well, so you could try that, or if you really can't find any of those types, at least use cherry tomatoes. Whatever you do, do not use regular round tomatoes. Good for salads, bad for sauces.

But back to sauce-making:
In a large pot, bring some water to a boil. While you're waiting for the water to come to a boil, chop up an onion and set it aside. When the water starts to boil, throw the tomatoes in, and leave them there for a very short time (30 seconds or so) to make them easy to peel. Slicing a small 'x' into the peel at the bottom end of the tomato before you boil it makes the peel come off even more easily - just be sure not too slice too deeply or you'll also take off some of the pulp!

After 30 seconds, I pour the tomatoes into my colander and run some cold water over them. Although I suppose this method does waste some water and time as I have to refill and reheat my pot for cooking the spaghetti, it's easier than trying to fish out the tomatoes one by one, and I like to use the time when I'm reheating water for pasta to chop up the vegetables that I add to the tomato sauce at the end. If you're less wasteful than I am, or simply in a hurry to eat, you can go with the tomato-fishing method and then use the same water to cook your pasta, assuming you are making pasta.

Once the tomatoes are cool enough to handle, peel and seed them. To seed them, I use what is known in technical terms as the 'skwuntching-out' method: I take a tomato, hold it over the sink, rip it open and skwuntch out all the juice and seeds. I then take whatever pulp there is (minus any bits of core naturally) and set it on one part of my cutting board. Repeat with all tomatoes until you have a lovely pile of pulp and a lovely red mess in your sink. One day I plan to find/invent a recipe that requires only the juice and seeds of the tomato so that I can actually use everything instead of having to waste so much, but I haven't quite gotten around to that yet...

Once the pulp is ready, heat up some olive oil in a small saucepan, and when it is hot, add your chopped-up onion. While the onion is sautéing, chop up the tomato pulp into smaller bits. Once the onion is soft and translucent, add the tomatoes, a bit of salt if you want (and sugar if you're afraid your tomatoes will be too acidic), cover the pot, and turn the heat to low. While your tomato sauce cooks, prepare your spaghetti, or whatever other pasta you want to use*, and then add the finished sauce along with some nice flakes of oregano, or grated parmesan, or both! While I usually sauté some peppers and zucchini and throw them in too, that's completely optional.


*A note about pairing pastas with different sauces/toppings:
I used to go about my life blithely unaware that it mattered at all which pasta went with which sauce. Months of living in Italy taught me just how backwards and wrong of me this was. Of course it matters which pasta goes with which sauce, just like it matters which belt goes with which shoes, and which pastry you eat on which holiday, and many many other things to which we non-Italians are completely ignorant. After poring over a fascinating book on the subject (700 pages all about pasta, how could I resist?) I discovered that, while the specific type of pasta is not too important, there is a very important difference between the more general type of pasta, that is, between long types of pasta (such as spaghetti, capellini, and linguine) and short types (fusilli, penne, farfalle, etc.). Basically, long types tend to absorb a lot of sauce, so they work best with lighter sauces like tomato sauce and no-sauce toppings like vegetables with a bit of olive oil, or clams. Shorter pastas are better for creamier or spicier sauces, hence the omnipresent penne all'arrabbiata and creamy dishes like farfalle con panna e piselli (i.e., peas and cream). Thus, you can happily substitute sedanini for rigatoni and you probably won't run into too many problems, but try it with tagliatelle and you're just asking for trouble.

I think there was also something about shell-pastas, but unfortunately, I don't remember what it said. Ah well, you can experiment and come up with your own pasta-pairing rules and then let me know!