You saw the beatiful flowers of the eggplants growing in our backyard in my previous post and sure enough there was a recipe to follow them. But lazy me, kept putting off writing this very easy recipe. I want to blame it on the heat wave that is baking the Northern California valley now. Truth: I am lazy, admitted.

Many spellings are acceptable in English for kebabs, kababs, kabobs and ?

Just because we spell them as “kebap” in Turkish, I chose the closest spelling in English: kebab. Before you ask me, yes, we do use the Latin alphabet in Turkish, with a few extra letters. Another piece of info: the word shish (şiş in Turkish) means skewer. Hence the name of this kebab.
I hope you are not mistakenly thinking that Turkish or Middle Eastern food is all about kebabs. Having said that, this is one of many kebab varieties prepared in Turkey. The main kebab mix changes from one person to another. For the parts of the country where they can get quality meat (talking real quality here) they only mix in salt and pepper to the ground beef. I have tried the same here, but the result was nowhere close to what I am used to. So, it was time to add in some more spices, to produce this recipe. Tried it more then once now and convinced that it is spicy and good. Reduce the blackpepper amount if you do not like very spicy food.

I strongly suggest using metal skewers for this type of food, as the metal heats up, it also cooks the meat/vegetable touching it.

• 500gr (1.1 lbs) ground beef, medium fat
• 1 tsp salt
• 1 Tbs ground black pepper (reduce if you do not like spicy)
• 1 tsp pepper paste (can be found in local Turkish, Middle Eastern stores, or online)
• 1/2 onion (when chopped in small pieces, about 1/2 cups)
• about a quarter bunch of fresh parsley (when chopped, about 1/2 cups)
• 3 - 4 long japanese eggplants, cut in 1/2 inch width

1. Chop the onion and the parsley fine, mix in all the ingredients. The more you knead the mix, the better it is. Take about a walnut size piece, make a ball around the skewer. Place a piece of eggplant. Alternate.
2. While preparing the other skewers, make sure to rest the ones that has meat & eggplants on a tray/baking dish so that the meatballs do not touch — this will help retain their shape. Similarly, try to cook them without having the meat and the eggplant touching the grill
3. As the skewers are cooked, you can put them in a big enough pot/baking dish with its lid on to help them get softer as the other skewers are still on the fire, cooking.

Afiyet olsun!

These are flowers of a vegetable that comes in many different shapes, sizes and colors. Having said that there are no 30 varieties that I know of; maybe 5 is well known?

I was impressed by the look of the darker one, shown above, when I first saw it. Growing in our backyard now. Can you recognize what they are?