Celeriac with olive oil and orange juice

One of my favourite winter vegetables is the good old celeriac. It is one of those love or hate vegetables for most kids in Turkey as the sharp taste and smell of the celeriac can be quite unappetizing for some. But not for this one.

In cold winter nights, my mother used to make etli kereviz, a celeriac, potato and meat stew cooked in a simple broth. She would then get a scoopful of the broth and mix it with lemon juice and one egg and stir it into the broth just before serving to give it that cloudy look and the creamy taste.

Zeytinyagli kereviz, a cold served dish made by cooking cubed pieces of celeriac, potatoes and carrots in olive oil and lemon juice with sauteed onions was also a regular in our house.

Borek with mince meat filling

Borek is the common name for all baked or fried pastries, made from a thin flaky dough called yufka (filo) and filled with various ingredients. The sky is the limit when it comes to fillings but most common ones are feta, spinach, zucchini, potatoes, green lentils, leeks and mince meat.

Turks, love their borek and have created many different ways of making it. For example, we fill sheets of yufka with cheese and parsley, roll them into little cigars and fry them in oil to make sigara boregi, we poach them in boiling water before layering to make su boregi, we fold them into an envelope and bake them over sac (a large concave piece of sheet metal) to make gozleme, we stuff and roll them into individual spirals to make gul boregi or into one big continuous long spiral to make kol boregi.  

Poached Quince Dessert

The days are getting shorter, weather is turning cold and gloomy. Winter is just around the corner. I have to admit there is not much to look forward to about the Sydney winter other than the end of it, unlike the winters of my childhood in Istanbul.

First would come the packing of summer clothes and unpacking of winter ones; the joy of seeing the warm and cosy jumpers that I forgot I owned, the thick coats and scarves we wrapped ourselves in and the long leather boots that kept our feet warm.

Then, little stalls of chestnut sellers would start to appear around each corner. You would buy a small pack and hold it between both hands to warm your cold fingers while you are chewing on the delightfully sweet roasted chestnuts. The packet sizes would get bigger as the prices got cheaper by mid-winter.

Pogaca - Turkish Cheese Puffs

After my post on the tea parties of my childhood, I started craving for one badly. So finally I gave up fighting my desires, summoned my Turkish girlfriends, asked one of them to bring her tea pot and threw myself a tea party.

I was determined to do it as traditional as possible so even though there was no kisir on the menu, we had simit, spinach borek, pogaca, bunt cake and pots of freshly brewed black tea. And we talked, gossiped and laughed about every subject that is important, from husbands to nail polish colours.

I confess, due to time constrains I had to take some shortcuts and made my pogaca with ready rolled shortcrust pastry instead of making the dough from scratch. The outcome tasted good and we all enjoyed the fake version but knowing the taste of the original neither my girlfriends nor I were fooled.

So the next weekend, I was in the kitchen again mixing butter and flour together and working a dough from scratch to make the real deal.