Shepherd’s salad – Coban Salatasi

Turkish saladIf 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.

Panzanella

PanzanellaSummer finally happened in Cambridge this weekend. It seems to have finished today, but I’m glad we made the most of it with a picnic on Sunday. I made a Spanish omelette and this easy and delicious tomato, cucumber and bread salad. Panzanella is a Tuscan salad which works really well as part of a summer lunch, and offers you a great way to use up extra bread you’ve got lying around – it’s traditionally made with stale bread, but any dry, open-textured bread like ciabatta will work very well here. Some recipes include tuna, onions, anchovies and other strong flavours, but when your tomatoes are good, this simpler preparation makes the most of them.

This is absolutely the best time of year for tomato recipes, and the English tomatoes you’ll find in the supermarket at the moment are at their sweetest and ripest. (My own are a bit of a disaster this year; it’s not been hot enough for them to ripen, so I’ve three vines of gorgeous big tomatoes in various exciting shades of vivid green.) This salad makes the most of them by macerating them overnight with salt, lots of olive oil and garlic, herbs and a glug of really, really good vinegar. The juice from the tomatoes leeches out and combines with the other ingredients, penetrating the crisp flesh of the cucumber, and pieces of bread are added just before serving to soak up the rest of the flavourful juices.

To serve six as part of a picnic, you’ll need:

10 large fresh plum tomatoes
½ large cucumber
100g small, mild olives (again, I heartily recommend Waitrose’s Spanish Couchillo olives)
100g Sunblush tomatoes and their oil (or 100g of your own home-made slow-roasted tomatoes)
1 tablespoon chopped oregano
1 tablespoon chopped basil
1 tablespoon chopped parsley
2 cloves of garlic, chopped finely
Zest of ½ a lemon
5 tablespoons olive oil
2 tablespoons good balsamic vinegar
1 large pinch salt
1 pinch sugar
8 turns of the peppermill
½ a ciabatta, torn into pieces

Chop the tomatoes and cucumber roughly into 1cm cubes, and place in a large bowl. (If you’re going to be eating this at a picnic use a Tupperware box so you can transport it easily.) Stir in all the rest of the ingredients except the bread, and taste for seasoning – add some juice from the lemon if you want the salad to be more tart. Put in the fridge and leave, covered, overnight until you are ready to eat. The flavours will meld (there is something magical about what happens when you use this combination of herbs with raw tomatoes) and soften overnight.

Immediately before serving, tear the ciabatta into small pieces and stir it into the salad. This is great with a chilled glass of Prosecco and lots of sunshine.

Parmesan, tomato and onion bread

Parmesan, tomato and onion breadWhen I was a little girl, there was a bakery in our town which made a cheese and onion bread. It was never quite right – the cheese was too mild, there wasn’t enough onion, and it needed very salty butter. All the same, I used to really look forward to eating it, preferably sliced with plenty of cheese and tomatoes layered on top, then baked in the Aga by my Dad.

This week, I decided to try to make my own cheesy, oniony bread, this time with my Dad’s tomatoes baked into it. I used lots of parmesan, a nice big onion and some flavourful sun-dried tomatoes (along with a little of their oil). The results were great – no extra cheese, tomatoes or toasting required. To make one loaf, you’ll need:

210 ml tepid water
1 level teaspoon caster sugar
1 packet easy-blend yeast
350g strong white flour
1 teaspoon fine salt
100g finely grated parmesan
1 ½ teaspoons dried oregano
1 minced clove garlic
1 large onion, sliced finely
5 sun-dried tomatoes in oil, chopped small
1 ½ tablespoons of the tomato oil
½ tablespoon fleur de sel or other coarse salt to sprinkle
Extra parmesan to sprinkle

Mix all the ingredients (except the tepid water and the salt and parmesan to sprinkle on at the end) in a large, warm bowl. Pour in the tepid water and mix well with a wooden spoon until the dough comes together. Transfer to a floured board and knead hard for ten minutes, until the dough is stretchy, glossy and no longer sticky. The onion pieces will snap as you knead, but don’t worry about them.

Bread doughWhen the dough is kneaded, put it back in the bowl and cover with some oiled cling film. Leave in a warm (not hot) place for about 40 minutes, until it has doubled in size. (The dough will take a couple of hours to rise at room temperature if you don’t have a warm place to keep it.)

Take the dough from the bowl and knock it back down to its original size, kneading again for five minutes. If you want a traditional loaf shape, put it in a loaf tin. I decided to make a low, flattish bread in order to make the most of the lovely crust with its sweet caramelised onions poking through, so I shaped the dough on a non-stick baking sheet.

Sprinkle the bread with the salt and extra cheese, and leave to rise again, covered, for 40 minutes in a warm place. Meanwhile, heat the oven to 230° C (450° F).

When the dough has risen, place a large baking tray full of water at the bottom of the oven, and the tray with the bread on a rack in the middle of the oven. Bake the loaf for between 30 and 40 minutes. It will be ready when it sounds hollow when you tap the bottom. Serve with plenty of butter.

Chicken parmigiana

This is, for me, one of the very nicest things you can do with a chicken breast. The chicken is beaten flat with a heavy rolling pin, coated in crumbs and parmesan cheese, and sautéed gently in butter and olive oil until golden and crisp. It’s served on a bed of rich tomato sauce. I love this dish served with some buttered white rice – you can also serve it with pasta.

Parmigiana simply means ‘cooked with parmesan cheese’. If, like me, you find yourself cooking with a lot of parmesan, you should consider investing in a Microplane grater. I love these things (mine was a wedding present and gets used several times a week) – they grate your parmesan very finely, and with no risk to your knuckles. The fine grade is absolutely perfect for parmesan, and it’s also great for reducing garlic to a pulp, for zesting fruit and for grating nutmeg.

To serve four greedy people you’ll need:

Sauce
1.5 kg fresh ripe tomatoes
3 large onions
4 cloves of garlic
1 handful fresh basil
1 handful fresh oregano
1 mild red chilli
1 ½ tablespoons balsamic vinegar
2 teaspoons sugar
1 large knob butter, plus extra to taste
1 tablespoon olive oil
Salt and pepper

Chicken
4 large chicken breasts
4 oz fresh breadcrumbs (about a cup for Americans)
4 oz freshly grated parmesan cheese (ditto)
½ teaspoon paprika
1 teaspoon freshly ground pepper
½ teaspoon salt
1 egg, beaten
1 large knob butter
1 tablespoon olive oil

Begin by peeling and seeding the tomatoes. (This is very easy – use a knife to make a little cross in the skin at the bottom of the tomato, then pour over boiling water and leave for ten seconds. Fish the tomato out with a slotted spoon. You’ll find the skin will come away easily. Slice open to remove the seeds.) Chop the tomato flesh and set aside in a bowl.

Dice the onions and chop the garlic finely, and fry in a large knob of butter until translucent and fragrant. Add the tomatoes and finely chopped chilli to the saucepan and stir to combine everything. Bring to a very low simmer, and reduce (this will take more than an hour) to half its original volume or a little less. Bring the vinegar and sugar to the boil in a small pan and stir it into the sauce. Add the oregano and season with salt and pepper. Taste to check whether you need more salt or sugar. Add another knob of butter for a more mellow flavour if you like. Set the finished sauce aside.

Place the chicken between two sheets of cling film and beat it with the end of a rolling pin to flatten it out. Mix the paprika, salt, pepper, cheese and breadcrumbs well in a shallow dish. Dip the flattened chicken breast into the beaten egg, then dip the eggy chicken into the dish of cheesy crumbs until it is well coated. Set the sauce to reheat.

Heat the oil and butter in a non-stick frying pan until it sizzles, and drop in the breaded chicken pieces. Saute on each side for about 5 minutes, until golden and crisp. Spoon some of the sauce into the middle of a ring of rice on each plate and place a chicken breast on top of it. Dress with a bit of basil, if you’re feeling artistic. Serve immediately with a green salad dressed sharply.

Parmigiana di Melanzane

This is probably Dr Weasel’s favourite supper dish. Parmigiana di melanzane is a layered, baked dish of aubergines (eggplants for all the Americans out there), rich tomato sauce, parmesan and mozzarella. It’s a wonderfully savoury meal to brighten up an autumn evening.

This tomato sauce, simmered for ages until thick and unctuous, is unbelievably good – it’s also very simple, containing very few ingredients. It freezes well, so if you can face seeding and peeling even more tomatoes, make some extra and save it for the sort of snowy day when you need to eat something red. Try it with pasta, or over meatballs.

To serve four with some left over for lunch you’ll need:

2kg ripe tomatoes
4 medium aubergines
3 large onions
4 cloves of garlic
1 handful fresh basil
1 handful fresh oregano
1 mild red chilli
1 ½ tablespoons balsamic vinegar
2 teaspoons sugar
1 large knob butter, plus extra to taste
250 g mozzarella
Salt and pepper
Grated parmesan
Olive oil to fry

Begin by peeling and seeding the tomatoes. (Cut a shallow cross at the bottom of the tomatoes and pour over boiling water. Fish the tomatoes straight out of the water, which will have loosened their skin, and peel it off. Cut open and discard the seeds.) Cut into small dice.

Dice the onions and chop the garlic finely, and fry in a large knob of butter until translucent and fragrant. Add the tomatoes and finely chopped chilli to the saucepan and stir to combine everything. Bring to a very low simmer, and reduce (this will take more than an hour) to half its original volume or a little less. Bring the vinegar and sugar to the boil in a small pan and stir it into the sauce. Add the oregano and season with salt and pepper. Taste to check whether you need more salt or sugar. Add another knob of butter for a more mellow flavour if you like. Set the finished sauce aside.

While the sauce is reducing, prepare the aubergine. Slice it into rounds about 1 cm thick (salt to remove the juices if you like; with modern aubergines the bitter juices have been bred out, and you’ll probably find you don’t need to salt at all) and fry each round in very hot olive oil (the aubergine slices are like little sponges, so you’ll need plenty), until brown on each side. Drain on kitchen paper and season with salt and pepper.

Set out a layer of aubergine slices in the bottom of a baking dish. Place some basil leaves on top. Pour over a layer of sauce, layer over some mozzarella, then more aubergine, more basil, more sauce and so on. When you’ve used everything up, sprinkle over the parmesan and bake for 45 minutes at 180° C, until brown on top. Scatter over some fresh basil.

Serve with crusty bread to mop up the rich juices.

Slow-roasted tomatoes

The recent glut of tomato recipes (the result of a glut of tomatoes) should end with this one, I hope; semi-preserving tomatoes by roasting all the moisture out of them and marinading in olive oil produces something so good that I think I’ll be roasting all my future tomatoes too this year. It’s a good method for dealing with large number of tomatoes, because when cooked in this way they reduce in volume so dramatically. The few pounds of raw tomatoes I cooked here resulted in about a jam-jar full of finished tomatoes.

Imagine how a tomato might taste if it was twenty feet tall and made of sunlight shining through a piece of red stained glass. Slow-roasting will transform your garden tomatoes into Platonic tomatoes of perfection, more tomato-ish than the juiciest tomato salad. The long, long cooking shrinks the tomatoes, concentrating their flavour – your whole house will smell of sunshine. Start this recipe in the morning; you need to keep the tomatoes in the oven for about seven hours. There’s very little actual work involved, though; once your tomatoes are cooking, you can forget about them for the day.

My tomatoes were the cherry-sized Tumbler. If you have a larger variety, you will need to cook them for longer. You’re aiming for a texture which is not quite dry, but not juicy. Test your tomatoes every half hour or so after seven hours to check for texture. (Try not to eat them all while you test. It’s quite a challenge.)

For one tray of tomatoes you’ll need:

Tomatoes, halved, to cover baking tray (about 2lb of cherry-sized tomatoes)
2 pinches caster sugar
1 level tablespoon dried oregano
2 large pinches salt
A generous amount of pepper
Olive oil to drizzle

Arrange the tomatoes in a single layer, cut sides up, on a baking tray. Sprinkle over all the dry ingredients evenly, and drizzle olive oil over the cut surfaces. Make sure you use plenty of freshly ground black pepper, which will help the tomatoes’ flavour sing.

Place in a low oven (100° C – you are aiming to dry rather than cook) for seven hours until the tomatoes are no longer juicy. Pack them with their oil into a jar, top up with some more olive oil and seal. Add half a clove of grated garlic to the jar if you want even more flavour to your tomatoes. The tomatoes will keep in the fridge for up to a week, but since you are unlikely to be able to open the fridge without being tempted to eat a spoonful in that time, they probably won’t be around for long enough for you to find out.

Puff-pastry tomato tart

Alert readers will have gathered that I am currently drowning in tomatoes, and that yesterday’s promised recipe for the other half of a packet of puff pastry was bound to include them. You’re right – today it’s tomato tart. If, as a friend I was talking to tonight does, you have a vegetarian to entertain, you’ll find this little tart really pretty, delicious and very quick and easy to prepare.

I found this goat’s cheese (Picolive) something of a blessing; my original plan had been to stir a teaspoon of tapenade into the cheese, but this came with olive paste already sandwiched in the cheese. I bought two; it’s a very nice little cheese, and I’d like some for lunch on some crusty bread.

To serve one (again, multiply the amounts to serve more people, or serve alongside yesterday’s Pissaladiere), you’ll need:

½ sheet of puff pastry from the supermarket refrigerator cabinet
1 crottin of goat’s cheese
1 teaspoon tapenade
2 cloves garlic
10 small tomatoes (or to cover)
2 sprigs rosemary
Olive oil
Salt and pepper to taste

Score a centimetre from each edge of the pastry rectangle to form a crusty border which will puff up when you cook it. Use a fork to prick holes in the inner rectangle so it doesn’t rise.

Mix the tapenade and two grated cloves of garlic with the goat’s cheese, and spread it on the inner rectangle of pastry. Slice the tomatoes and arrange them in overlapping layers on top of the cheese. Top with the rosemary, season and bake at 200° C for 20-25 minutes, until brown and puffy. The tomatoes will be sweet and juicy, the cheese toothsome and the pastry crisp. It’s almost enough to make you swear off meat.

Smoky tomato salsa

Another recipe for a tomato glut. Foolishly, I planted out five Tumbler tomato plants earlier in the year, a little worried that five would be insufficient for the family’s tomato needs. It appears, however, that Tumbler is a prolific plant – kilos and kilos of tomatoes are coming ripe all at once.

The sweet and flavourful little tomatoes are excellent in this cooked salsa, a version of a salsa served at the Border Grill in Las Vegas and Santa Monica. The Border Grill (and its sister restaurant, Ciudad, also in LA) is owned and run by Mary-Sue Milliken and Susan Feniger, who have a TV show in America called Too Hot Tamales. I’ve never seen it, but whenever we’re in Vegas or LA, Dr Weasel and I make a point of stuffing ourselves silly at one of their restaurants, where the Mexican food is about as good as it gets.

The Border Grill serves three salsas with chips before the meal – something like this one, a zingy green tomatillo salsa (anybody know where I can get young tomatillo plants in the UK next year?) and a raw pico de gallo. It’s hard not to say ‘Yes please!’ to the nice server when he offers to get you more salsa and another bowl of chips. Don’t. You won’t have any room left for the rest of the meal.

This salsa keeps for five days in the fridge, so if you have a lot of tomatoes make plenty. Don’t worry about the large amount of garlic; cooking it like this makes it very mellow and removes any harshness. You’ll find yourself eating this salsa on baked potatoes, with tortilla chips, with crudites…I defy you to make it last five days. You’ll need:

2 lb raw tomatoes, freshly picked if possible
1 large onion, sliced roughly
1 bulb of garlic, peeled
3 tablespoons chipotles in adobo (you can buy these chillis in Sainsbury’s in the UK – use less for a less fierce salsa)
1 small handful fresh oregano (or a teaspoon dried)
1 teaspoon sugar
Salt and pepper
Water

If your tomatoes, like mine, are cherry-sized, you don’t need to chop them. If you have large ones, quarter them and remove the pithy cores.

Place all the ingredients in a saucepan and cover with water. Bring slowly to a simmer with the lid off, and simmer gently for 20 minutes. Set aside to cool. Add the oregano and blitz in a food processor or liquidiser, taste for seasoning and add more salt if necessary.

Roast garlic and fresh tomato sauce for pasta

A quick and dirty recipe for gardeners with a glut of garlic and tomatoes. This pasta sauce makes the most of each ingredient – the garlic is roast for a sweet, fragrant mellow taste, and the tomatoes, fresh and juicy out of the garden. I am having unbelievable success this year with Tumbler tomatoes, which do very well in a pot.

If you’re cooking this for guests, you may want to seed and peel the tomatoes, but we enjoy the tomatoes in this just chopped into chunks. I used angel hair pasta – use whatever’s in your cupboard.

To serve two, you’ll need:

1 bulb garlic
1 large knob butter
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 small handful thyme
1 small handful oregano
1 large handful basil
1 lb tomatoes, chopped roughly
Salt and pepper

Roast the garlic whole with the thyme and oregano tucked around it, the butter and olive oil smeared and drizzled over it, for 40 minutes at 180° C. When the garlic comes out of the oven, set it aside to cool a little while you put the pasta on to cook and cut the tomatoes into large dice.

Squeeze the soft cloves of garlic out of their hard skins into a serving bowl. If your garlic is very fresh, you can leave the skins in to nibble on too. Mine was straight out of the ground, so the skins went into the bowl. Tear the basil roughly and put it in the bowl along with the herbs, butter and oil from the garlic dish and the tomatoes. Season with salt and pepper, and put the steaming hot pasta on top of everything. Mix gently and serve immediately.