Lemon and Popyseed Muffins

Lemon is my favorite ingredient, and poppy seed is a plant my farmer grandparents have had been growing for years now. In my family traditionally we use the poppy seed for breads and lemon for salad except my mother she prefers lemon by itself like, she can have lemon as if she is having an orange. So those two popular items have been brought together by the Americans (I guess). The other day my friends wanted to get together for brunch and we decided to host it in our house. Since i have been obsessed with muffins these days, i decided to bake muffins with my two favorite ingredients. Then i set down on my beautiful mac and googled for the recipes. Although there is tons of lemon poppy seed recipes at the web it is not easy to find a good one. After some research and clicking on too many websites, i found a good one from your home based mom and i have as usual twisted the recipe a bit.

Muffin Ingredients (makes 8 muffins):

• 1 egg
• 1 cup greek yogurt
• 1/2 cups coconut oil (you can use butter)
• 1/2 cups granulated sugar
• 1/4 cups brown sugar
• 6 lemon zest (Attention please this recipe is extremely lemony if you want it to be less lemon flavored use less lemons)
• 1 and 3/4 cups all purpose flour
• 2 tbsp baking powder
• 3 tbsp poppy seed
• 1/2 tsp salt

Icing:

• 1/2 cups powdered sugar
• 1 tbps and 1/2 tsp lemon juice

Steps:

1. Grate the zest of the 6 lemons
2. Combine the zest with 1/2 cups granulated sugar in a mortar, pestle the lemon and sugar by pressing and turning the stick in a drilling motion . (This will allow the essential oils extracted from the zest and integrate with sugar)
3. Add the brown sugar keep pestling.
4. Add the egg mix until you get a creamy texture. (at this point you can use an electric mixer we used a fork and man power since i had friends who wanted to participate making and baking process:))
5. Melt the coconut butter at the microwave or in a saucepan and let it cool then add it to the mixture slowly with a spoon while mixing.
6. Add the yogurt and keep mixing until you get a homogeneous mixture.
7. In a separate bowl mix the dry ingrediens flour, poppy seed, salt, baking powder.
8. Add the liquid to the dry ingredients mix until the flour disappears. (This part is important you do not want to over mix it you want sort of fully mixture rather then creamy one for muffins.)
9. Paper line of grease the muffin tray and spoon the mixture to the tray.
10. Pre-heat the oven 360F/180C and let the muffins bake for 15-20 mins with the help of toothpick check the muffins.
11. Mix the icing ingredients and pour the icing on top of the muffins.

Enjoy....

Potato Salad with Celery and Fennel

Back in Christmas time me and my lovely fiance, who was in town for 3 weeks only, visited the fish house at Brough Market. He had the famous fish and chips and i had a sea bass with veggies. I had fennel in the veggies and it was assorted with the olive oil. I previously tried using fennel in the salad etc... Although I have been a big fan of distinctive tastes such as rocket, celery, ginger; fennel never really worked out for me. But that fennel at the fish restaurant was absolutely my taste. So last weekend when i went for grocery shopping, I bought some veggies including fennel. And the other day I made an incredible salad and used the boiled fennel. Also I have to tell you i tried the boiled fennel just with extra-virgin olive oil which was absolutely heavenly. I think it goes very well with the fish, you won't be disappointed i promise.

One thing you need to be careful about is not over boil the fennel. You don't want it to loose it's texture, you want it to be a bit crunchy but still boiled.

Salad Ingredients:

• 1 fennel bulb
• 400 grams baby potatoes
• 3 celery leaves
• 2 artichokes (you can take this out if you don't like artichoke)
• 1/3 bunch dill
• 1 red chili
• 2 short spring onions (or chives for taste)

Dressing:

• 2 tbsp extra-virgin olive oil
• 1 lemon juice

Boil 1 liter water with 1 tbsp of salt, slice the fennel and soak them to the boiling water for 3-5 minutes. Drain the fennel with the help of a large spoon set them aside. Using the same boiling water put the baby potatoes with skins on and cleaned artichoke inside the boiling water. Let them boil until tender. Drain and slice the baby potatoes (if they are big) with skin on and dice the artichoke. Chop the celery leaves, and dill roughly.

Squeze the lemon and olive oil in a separate bowl mix them until you obtain a green- yellow looking mixture add sea salt if necessary. Pour the dressing in to the salad and mix it. Then spread finely chopped red chili on top.

A failure: healthy muffins

I think a real blogger should not just post the successful recipes and also the failures so if you ever come across to something similar you should maybe consider improving the dish. I am obsessed with muffins and baking these days. i have tried the raspberry lemon muffin recipe from Cafe Fernando with blueberries couple of times and i loved it but i was striving for a healthy muffin. And there is a daily blog that i check almost everyday called simply breakfast. I decided to try the recipe for healthy breakfast muffins since it had loads of coconut in it. So i was excited to try the recipe and went down to the shop after work and had an accident during shopping with the olive oil ended up ruining my ugg boots :( Now that i think about it, it was a sign for me to not to bake these very healthy muffins. So here is the recipe,

• 1/2 cup coconut oil
• 2/3 cup desiccated coconut
• 1/4 cup ground Almond
• 3 eggs
• 1 banana
• 1 Tbsp greek yogurt
• 1 tsp baking powder
• 10-15 frozen blueberries

Combine everything and put them in muffin tin and pre-heated oven 350F until it is golden.

The original recipe has 2 Tbsp jam in it. It occurred to me that it wouldn't be sweet but honestly i though you would get a good flavor because of the massive amount of coconut. Also one more irritating think about this muffin is the presence of eggs is so dominant. I am not an egg lover so it was pretty hard for me to consume even half of it. When we were discussing with my friend we thought you might be able to get something out of it if you consume it like pancakes with maple syrup. If you like eggs and coconut it might be a good choice for you but not my taste...

Cocunut Tofu Curry

After a long and exhausting day i get to try a coconut recipe.

This recipe is adapted from The Minimalist from Nytimes. http://dinersjournal.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/05/the-minimalist-curried-tofu-with-soy-sauce/
It turned out really good, i twisted the recipe a bit here is my version of it.

• 1 large Spanish onion
• 1 pack of soft organic tofu
• 1 can of coconut milk
• 2 tbsp of soya sauce
• 15-20 pine kernels
• 1/2 tbs cumin
• 1/2 tbs ground sweet red pepper
• a pinch of salt
• 1 tbsp olive oil

I have followed the instructions given in the Mark Bitman's recipe. Diced the onions and fry it until it is soft and brown. Add the cumin and let the cumin toast.add tyhe pine kernels keep stirring and add the coconut milk (The Coconut milk was solidified when i opened it i was surprised cause i have never worked with coconut milk before but it turns out it might happen when it is cold around and considering the Siberian freeze in UK... Anyhow don't panic when your milk is solidified or separated mine turned out fine when it was heated.) The coconut milk has a heavenly smell when it is heated. Then I added the tofu and soy sauce salt and pepper for taste. It is very easy to cook and very tasty as well. Highly recommended:)

Winter Salad

I have started this blog long while ago but haven't posted much. I think the blog will turn out to be a food blog maybe you can also see some posts on science. I am not blogging on my work though since we are suppose to publish, although i would love to blog on the life of a grad student it is not very exciting. I think it has been summarised on one of the episodes in Simpsons by this statement "There is nothing wrong with them, they just made a wrong life choice." Anyhow, so i guess food is an important part of my life and i am very happy to read, write, try, eat, and talk about food. So without any further due here it comes the winter salad recipe;

4 medium sized carrots,
10 grams of root ginger,
3 celery leafs,
1/3 bunch dill,
1 medium sized lemon,
Extra virgin olive oil,
Sea salt,

Peel the skin of the carrots grate the carrots, roughly chop the celeries and dill, in a separate bowl mix the sea salt, lemon, and olive oil do not peel the ginger and grate in to the mixure for dressing. Mix the salad with dressing. Enjoy the salad:)

Heavenly Lemonade

With the hot summer days are coming up I want to give the recipe of a lemonade that i took from the web site of a famous Turkish food blogger "ev cini". I have made this lemonade for my friends for couple of times and they told me they are in love with the drink. It could be useful to have the recipe ready, to impress your friends on a hot hot summer day. So here is the ingredients serves 4-6 people,

4 lemons
4 cups of water
1 cup of sugar
4 small size peach
4 small size green apple
plenty of fresh mint
plenty of ice

Boil the water in a cattle and mix it with sugar then add the zest of 4 lemons, and put 4 branches of mint. Cover the mixture and wait for it to get cooler. You might wanna do this in advance you can do it 3-4 hours before serving it or the day before. Once the mixture cooled down filter the mixture and get rid of the zest and mint. Then squeze the lemons and add the lemon juice into the mixture. You can put it into the fridge and wait for it to cool down a little more oryou can directly use it.

Right before serving, pick clear and tall glass cups. Slice the apple and peaches and put them inside the cups. Add some ice and fresh mint on top. And add the previously prepared liquid. Put a straw in and enjoy...

The picture is taken by esma.

Turkish Ravioli (Manti) with Mushroom Filling

I am not big on blogging world but every once in a while i read through blogs. So far i can state that the women bloggers tend to give recipes on their blogs. To validate my assumption, i wont break the tradition and give a recipe of vegetarian manti. For those who are not familiar with manti it is fresh pasta with ground beef filling. It is a traditional food and you should definitely eat if you are planning to visit Turkey. I don't know if it is purely Turkish or originated from middle east though. But yeah i changed the recipe a little and used a whole wheat flour, and used a vegetarian filling instead of ground beef. That made the manti a little bigger in size than it should be but you can make the filling more smooth with a food processor and come up with smaller sizes. The smaller the size is the better. It kinda shows how professional you are on making manti. And the other difficulty i came across was working with whole wheat flour. I used a regular whole wheat flour and when i mixed it with a liquid it was very sticky. i would recommend the all purpose flour. If you can find, get the ones made for pasta. (And to be honest regular flour tastes better:))

What you need for dough:

1. 1 egg

2. 2 cups of flour (i used whole wheat, you can go for all purpose)

3. Water

Ingredients for filling

1. finely chopped small onion

2. finely chopped portobello mushroom (any mushroom will do the job)

3. 1 green chilli

4. finely chopped parsley

5. grated mozzarella cheese

7. pinch of salt, freshly grounded black pepper, dried rosemary

8. two table spoons of olive oil

Before starting dough making, prepare the filling. You need to cook the onion first with olive oil then add the rest. Be creative with the filling, add the flavours you like. And to add the mozzarella you need to wait until the cooked ingredients cooled down.

So you need to mix the ingredients for the dough until you get something feels like dough. it shouldn't be very sticky. You will be rolling out the dough, so you want it to have a smooth consistency. If the dough looks too big then divide it into pieces and roll out the pieces. Then make square pieces from rolled dough with knife and put the filling inside the squares. Pull the opposite sides of the squares together and stick them to one another (that process takes forever). After you are done you can bake them and cook in a boiling water or without baking freshly cook them in boiling water.

And be creative with the sauce, traditional Turkish sauce for manti is yoghurt mixed with crushed garlic and melted butter with powder red pepper is added on top.

afiyet olsun...

P.S. comment below if you know where manti is originated from.