Cook through your books – April

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Wow – it’s been a while! Not that we have not been cooking and eating here at Coeur de Sel but I do admit that I have not been to keen on trying new things. New projects, the garden and quite a lot of travelling, not to mention the job, have taken their toll, which means quiet times on this blog.
But my camera is filled with pictures of the last 3 month so lets start catching up with April’s cooking session with the girls.
Never really pleased with the name, I tried to come up with a more adequate name. I think I found one.

We had lot’s of plans for that evening but then everybody was way too busy with life to dive into the bookshelf until the night before. So once again it was a late night group chat with way too many pictures from recipes going from one to the other.

Turkish would have been on the program, but we realised that we all don’t really have a Turkish cook book.
That night I rediscovered the Casa Moro cookbook, it has been sitting on the bookshelf untouched for a long time!

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So the next day this was on the menu:

– Gözleme flatbread filled with spinach stuffing from Casa Moro cookbook n°2
– Basmati rice with chick peas, currants and herbs from Ottolenghi’s & Tamimi’s Jerusalem
– Fried okra with tomatoe, garlic and preserved lemon also from Ottolenghi’s & Tamimi’s Jerusalem
– Orange almond cake from ” The Cookbook” by Ottolenghi

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For me the discovery of the night was the Gözleme Anatolian flatbread.
Back in Istanbul we were queuing for the blue Mosque but when we were only three people away from entering they closed the door for prayer …. We went to the nearest restaurant to drink some tea and eat a little something before starting queuing all over again.
In the restaurants center were three woman kneeling on the floor, one was, very thinly,  rolling out little balls of dough, the second one would then bake the bread on a metal dome over a fire and the third was stuffing the bread with a variety of things – spinach, potato , cheese … the whole process was beautiful to wach, the bread even better to taste.

On the  way to our garden here, there is a wild playground with a fire place and sometimes in summer there’s a group of Turkish women making Gözleme. I’m determined to try making Gözleme in our garden and over the fire too!

They are delicious, easy to make & I think brilliant to go with many menus. The recipe will follow.

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Conclusion: I still don’t like okra much –  I need my desserts “jucier”  but the orange cake is nice for an afternoon tea – Gözleme will be on the menu more often – and the Moro cookbooks are back in business.