Shepherd's salad - Coban Salatasi

If you go to Istanbul expecting kebabs, meatballs and other chunks of protein, you might be pleased to find that there is also a rich tradition of salads, cooked vegetable dishes (especially aubergine) and dolmades, or stuffed vegetables. This simple salad pops up all over the place, and it's a really good accompaniment for meat dishes - the fresh vegetables and tart lemon juice counter the wonderful oily richness of Turkish food like nothing else.

I made this last night, but the photo at the top of the page is of an identical salad I ate in a little restaurant next to the Bosphorus - unfortunately, I still don't have my camera so couldn't photograph last night's version. Mine turned out pretty much exactly like the restaurant one, though: this is a very quick, very easy dish with half an hour's thumb-twiddling in the middle.

To serve four, you'll need:

4 medium tomatoes, very ripe
1 very mild onion
1 cucumber
1 large handful flat leaf parsley
1 mild green chilli
6 tablespoons olive oil
Juice of half a lemon (and more to taste)
Salt

Slice the onion very finely and chop the parsley roughly. Put them together in a bowl and squeeze over the juice of half a lemon and two tablespoons of olive oil. Set aside for thirty minutes before you put the rest of the dish together.

When the thirty minutes is up, dice the tomatoes and peel and dice the cucumber - the pieces of tomato and cucumber should be small and even. Slice the chilli into thin rings. Mix the chilli, tomatoes and cucumber together in your serving dish and dress with the remaining olive oil and a squeeze of lemon juice. Place the onion slices and parsley on top of the dish and pour over any oily juices from the bowl. Bring the salad to the table with the onion on top, then allow the diners to mix it up themselves.

Ezme - Turkish crushed tomato and chilli salad

It's been an exciting few days. Some readers will be aware that I have a horrible allergic reaction to lobsters (face swells, airways close, scalp comes out in lumps, I get injected with adrenaline and then sleep for two days). Unfortunately, at a Chinese meal on Sunday where the rest of the family was munching their way through a couple of lobsters while I stuck to crab, I must have accidentally ingested some, because the evening saw my eyelids slowly but surely swelling up to resemble one of those bobbly goldfish. The rest of my face soon followed, and I've been lying under a duvet, groaning, ever since.

Then, as soon as I felt well enough to tackle a post here, I realised that I've left my camera at a party the day before the lobster incident. Fortunately the party was at my parents' house, where we were celebrating my lovely Dad's 60th. The camera is safe and sound, but it is about 60 miles away, full of photos, and this does mean that two of the Turkish posts I was planning on making will have to wait until I have it back. Similarly, today's post has no accompanying photographs - please imagine a cheering, dark red paste.

Ezme is served as a starter alongside other salady nibbles to be eaten with bread in Turkey. It's extremely spicy, and also serves as a deliciously fresh cold sauce to go with grilled meats. If you're in Cambridge, check out the Turkish delicatessen on Mill Road for the hot paprika paste you'll need. (Tips from readers about where other Turkish delis can be located would be very welcome - please leave a comment.)

To serve six, you'll need:

½ lb fresh, ripe tomatoes
1 pointy green pepper (the pale sort which is good barbecued)
½ a cucumber
2 spring onions
1 small handful mint leaves
1 tablespoon hot Turkish paprika paste
1 tablespoon olive oil
2 tablespoons sherry vinegar
Salt, pepper, paprika to taste

Peel the tomatoes and the cucumber, and remove the stalk, interior ribs and seeds of the pepper. Chop the tomatoes, cucumber, pepper and spring onions as finely as you can without reducing them to a pulp (careful pulsing in the food processor will also do the job). Stir in all the other ingredients, tasting for seasoning. Serve at room temperature.

Imam Bayaldi

I'm writing about Imam Bayaldi, a favourite middle-eastern aubergine dish (it means 'the imam fainted'), specifically in order that my friend Martin, who has a vegetarian to entertain, has something new to cook. Sorry Martin - I've been meaning to get round to this for ages. I guess I just like meat.

It's odd how many dishes from places all over the world have names like this, where religious men are felled by dinner. There's Buddha Jumps over the Wall soup (a Chinese soup so good, apparently, that even the Buddha was driven to interrupt his meditation with worldly gymnastics - I wouldn't know, because it's so expensive I can't bring myself to order it). There's Strozzapreti, an Italian pasta which translates as 'strangled priests', apparently because they are so good a venal priest choked himself to death when gorging on them. The imam in the case of Imam Bayaldi has, at least, only been driven to unconsciousness rather than unseemly jumping or choking, so I suppose he wins.

There's a lot of olive oil in this recipe. Aubergines are notorious for soaking oil and flavourings up; it's what makes them so delicious. If you're feeling bad about your waistline, go for a jog tomorrow. Life's too short to avoid aubergines.

To make two stuffed aubergines you'll need:

2 aubergines
1 red onion, chopped
6 cloves garlic, crushed
1 celery heart, chopped finely (make sure you get the yellow/green leaves here)
2 medium tomatoes, chopped
1 green pepper, chopped
3 bay leaves
1 small handful fresh oregano
1 small handful fresh mint
1 shall handful fresh parsley (plus extra to garnish)
250ml chicken stock (substitute vegetable stock if serving to vegetarians)
Olive oil
Salt and pepper

Begin by slicing the aubergines in half lengthways and use a knife to carefully hollow them out, making them into boat shapes. Chop the flesh you've removed into 1cm squares, and put it in a large covered bowl. Use a serrated knife (like a tomato, the aubergine has a tough skin and soft flesh, so it's easier to cut with a serrated knife) to remove long strips of skin from the outside of the boats (see picture). This will help the aubergines' flesh take on flavour evenly from the stock and olive oil. Try as hard as you can to avoid puncturing all the way through to the inside of the hollowed out shells, but don't worry; it's not the end of the world if you do.

Chop the onion, celery, tomatoes and the green pepper into pieces about the same size as the aubergine pieces you chopped earlier. Mix these with the aubergine flesh, the garlic and the herbs (apart from the bay leaves), a few twists of the pepper grinder and a teaspoon of salt. If you can find some flat-leaved parsley (which does have a subtly different flavour), use that - you can see from the pictures that all I had in the garden was curly-leaved parsley. Add three tablespoons of olive oil to the bowl and mix well.

Place the aubergine shells in a baking tin with reasonably high sides. Fill the aubergines with the mixture in the bowl, and tuck the bay leaves between them. Drizzle with some extra oil so the edges of the aubergines are well-lubricated, then pour the chicken stock into the bottom of the dish so it laps around the sides of the aubergines. Pour another five tablespoons of olive oil into the dish with the chicken stock.

Bake the aubergines, covered with some aluminium foil, for 45 minutes at 180°C (350°F), until they are soft. Remove from the dish and discard any remaining stock and oil in the pan. Serve immediately - the couscous from yesterday's post is a fantastic accompaniment (and, like this dish, can be made vegetarian by swapping the chicken stock for some vegetable stock). You can avoid aubergines which (as in the photograph at the top of the page) look like a chia pet by the simple expedient of not garnishing them with way too much curly parsley. I blame the very large glass of retsina I was drinking at the time.