Bulgur, a staple ingredient of Turkish kitchen.  Some recipes define it wrongly as “cracked wheat.” Well, it is cracked, it is also wheat but it is not just cracked wheat ;)  It is boiled as well as cracked.  You can find bulgur in different sizes. Prefer the coarse bulgur for the pilafs.
Last year I have decided to grow kale in our winter garden, and the only kale seeds I found locally were Russian/Siberian Kale.  Reading about it, it should have similar taste to the ordinary kale, but has different shape of leaves. Making this dish was an obvious choice to make use of the fresh leaves I have gathered from our garden.  Eating with homemade yogurt, it was one of the simplest, yet full of flavor meal I have made recently.

• 1 cup coarse bulgur
• 2 cups water (prefer chicken, beef or vegetable broth)
• 400 gr (about 1lb) kale - when trimmed, the green leaves were about 250gr (about 1/2lb) or less (could be used more)
• 1 big size onion
• 2 tablespoons olive oil
• 1 teaspoon pepper or tomato paste
• salt to taste

Cut the onion in small pieces.  Wash and cut the stems of the kale, cut the green leaves for an inch thickness.

Heat the water or broth, when it is about to boil, heat the olive oil in a medium size pan, add pepper/tomato paste and onion pieces, cook for a short while. Add the bulgur and kale, mix, add water/broth + salt, mix well.  Cover, heat in medium heat until water is thoroughly absorbed.

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!