Turkish bean salad

The Boy has decided that he wants to cook more meals entirely on his own, which I'm very happy about.

He recently got this cookbook from one of his online author friends called "A Gluten Free Taste of Turkey" by Sibel Hodge on his Kindle and has been excited to try some of the recipes. It's a beautifully written and edited book with lovely pictures for each of the recipes. There's also a great review on the book here.

So far The Boy is doing pretty well. He's managing to cook most of the things he's decided to cook on his own without consulting me too much. I'm enjoying the time off. :-)

The Boy loves beans so when he came across the recipe for a bean salad he bookmarked it to try. This one in English is simply known as "Bean Salad" though in Turkish it is known as "Baharatli Kuru Fasulye" which I also assume translates to "Bean Salad". :-)

Here's the RECIPE for the bean salad:

Ingredients:

• 1 can of white beans (haricot / butter beans / cannellini)
• 1 red onion - diced
• 1/4 teaspoon chili flakes
• 1 green chili - diced and fried
• 1 small red pepper (capsicum) - diced and friend
• 1/2 to 1 teaspoon cumin
• 1 teaspoon tomato puree
• Salt to taste
• 2 teaspoons lemon juice
• 2 cloves garlic - crushed and chopped
• 1 tablespoon olive oil for frying
• Chopped coriander (for garnish)

Instructions:

• Drain can of beans, then rinse and place in a bowl.
• Fry onion, chili, garlic and pepper in olive oil until soft and add to beans.
• Add the rest of the ingredients into the bowl with the beans as well.
• Mix all the ingredients together, garnish with chopped coriander and serve.

This recipe serves 4 people as a starter or two people as a main for dinner, though a bit on the light side.

I don't think The Boy did much different to this recipe aside from the lemon juice. He used the juice of half a lemon, which is more than 2 teaspoons worth of lemon juice, but that's okay cos we like our lemon juice. :-)

Oh, I just checked ... instead of a whole red onion, he only used half a red onion because it seemed like a lot of onion, and he used 2 green chilis instead of one because we like our chili.

There was a lot of slicing and dicing with this recipe, all into small pieces and I'm glad that it was The Boy doing it rather than me. Can't say that I'm a fan of the fine dicing work.

This recipe was delicious and certainly quite different from what we normally eat. The Boy loves beans, so this worked out well for him. It was zingy and tasty. I think next time though, we might have something else to accompany the dish since just this dish alone was not quite enough just for dinner. I think this makes a much better side dish than a main dish.

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Caramel iced coffee slushee ... in the Thermomix

Today is another horribly hot day - over 38 degrees C and for those who go in Farenheit, it's 100+ degrees, which is just way too much heat. I walked outside to film a video today and it felt like I was being slapped in the face with a radiator. We've had the AC going since about 10am.

The Boy decided that since it's so hot and nice cold drink treat would be fantastic and he picked out an ice coffee recipe from "A Gluten Free Taste of Turkey" by Sibel Hodge and I looked up a recipe in the Thermomix Everyday Cookbook and combined the two, with a dash of something extra for ourselves.

This is the RECIPE we came up with:

Ingredients:

• 2 cups of non fat soy milk
• 4 shots of espresso coffee with 4 Equal or sweeteners of some sort
• 4 tablespoons of low fat vanilla ice cream
• 300g ice cubes
•   2tablespoons caramel sauce

Instructions:

• Put everything into the Thermomix bowl and blend on speed 10 for about 20 seconds.
• Check to see that all the ice has been blended smoothly. If not, blend again for another 10 seconds on speed 10 until the mixture is smooth. (The texture should be like an ice slushee).
• Pour into a glass and serve with a straw.

This makes 2 tall glasses of ice coffee slushees.

We didn't have much caramel sauce left, so only ended up using about 1 tablespoon of it, but 2 tablespoons would have brought out a bit more of the caramel flavor.

This was perfect for a hot summer day. Cold, slightly sweet and just the right thing. Also, since we used non fat milk, low fat ice cream, sweetener, it was a pretty low cal drink too, so it can be enjoyed without counting calories. :-)

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Pasta food math ... just for fun

I'm starting off by saying that this post is complete whimsy.

Where I work, we don't have a kitchen, nor do we have a microwave or any way to prepare meals, so I pretty much need to buy my lunch unless I bring in something that does not require heating and doesn't go soggy like sandwiches made in the morning and eaten 4 or 5 hours later often do. I can, I suppose, bring in something cold and stick it in the fridge for a cold lunch, but that doesn't really appeal to me.

A few days ago, I was in the mood for some pasta and went over to the food court and sussed out the pasta offerings. They had a tortellini with creamy sauce, bacon, cheese and mushroom that looked pretty good so I went with that.

They had advertised a regular size and a large size. When I saw the regular size and how much food that was, I thought a small option would have been better because I didn't want to throw food away and waste it. That was a mistake as I saw the difference between the amount of food and cost of food between the regular and the small size.

I went back to the office and posted this on facebook.

To which my chef friend responded and provided his wisdom on the cost of pasta and how much better it is to cook your own and not eat it out. It just isn't worth it.

After that, my brilliant Boy chimed in and said there was a mathematical reasoning to the equation for calculating the cost of food and hence what they sell it at. This led to a lengthy discussion (and mathematical equations!) for the math behind pasta served at food courts.

I don't understand the half of it, but my more brilliant and mathematically minded friends all chimed in and had their 2 cents which resulted in the labour cost of food being approximately $111 an hour.

The moral of this story is - obviously, I'm in the wrong line of work and need to become a pasta cooker for a food court stall ... except that it's pure mathematics (according to one friend) and has no real world application, so the $111 per hour doesn't make sense which of course, dashed my hopes of a high paying, fun job, doing something that I quite enjoy, which is cooking.

Anyway, here's the rest of the conversation and the silly. :-)

Truly, the long and the short of it goes back to what Jay was saying, which is - pasta is cheap to cook. It's not worth paying the mark ups, so cook it at home to eat. If you fancy eating out, go for seafood or a nice juicy wagyu steak!

ps. I, of course, for the sake of this blog, had to go back and get some pasta just so I could include a photo of the pasta in question for this blog. :-) I don't I'll be having it again. It doesn't taste so good the second time round.

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