stuffed vegetables
Roasting vegetables is nice for this time of year, when vegetables are plentiful and tasty. But I had done that, and wanted something different with vegetables. Then I thought of the cooking course I did years and years ago. It was a Turkish cooking course, held in a makeshift kitchen in one of the local community centres, and our teacher was a Turkish woman in her fourties, who, after only the briefest of introductions, rushed to the stove, unpacked her shopping bags and started to cook immediately and wordlessly. You had to stalk her, so to speak, look over her shoulder at the stove to see what she was doing, and scribble down notes on a home-brought notepad. And you had to ask her questions, too, about what was happening in the kitchen, because all she was doing there, it seemed, was cook, quickly and with great skill and flair without really saying what was going on. Unfortunately there were only like 8 lessons and there was never a follow-up; but it left me with a notepad of notes, the first impression of a large cuisine with unknown flavours and combinations, and the memory of her lovely cooking. So, I took out my notes of her class and made these stuffed vegetables. In a bowl, mix 1 cup of washed raw rice with about 400 grams of minced meat. Add one small shredded onion and half a red pepper, in very small dice. Add half a tin of tomatoes in their juice; cut up the tomatoes. Add two tablespoons of butter to the mixture and mix everything with your hands. For seasoning, add chopped up dill, mint and parsley; add pepper and salt. For a vegetarian version, add chopped pine nuts and raisins instead of meat. Actually, this filling is for stuffed vine leaves as well; but this time I stuffed it into vegetables. Take 4 smallish light green peppers (Turkish style); one long eggplant, cut in two, and 2-4 zucchini, the small light green type preferred. Use a apple corer (if you have one) to scoop out the flesh of the zucchini from the stem side. It takes some fidgeting, but it works. Scoop out some flesh of the eggplant, so you create a bedding for the filling. Take off the tops of the peppers and clean from the inside. Then, stuff your mixture into the peppers, eggplant halves and zucchini. Don't overstuff because the rice will expand when cooking. Put in a large pan with some olive oil and fry gently a little bit, then add the rest of your tomato mixture, some extra butter, the juice of one lemon and salt and pepper to taste. I added two vine leaves on top of the eggplant for recreational reasons. And because I figured it would look good on the picture! Cover the pan and simmer gently for about 40 minutes until rice is cooked, but make sure there is enough liquid in the pan; check regularly. Eat this with a good bread and perhaps as a side dish some fried sausages. And some cacik (tsaziki): thick yoghurt with chopped cucumber, dill, mint and garlic.
