Because I lack creativity

I love making pancakes. My mom made them for almost every Sunday breakfast when I was in Istanbul. When I went to NY, there were pancakes everywhere, of course, but I still used my own recipe when I wanted to cook a home-made brunch on the weekends. It’s not all different from the basic pancake recipes you find online, but still I think it tastes different :)

The photos below are from a Christmas brunch we did with friends back in NY —as you can see, the menu was a mix of Turkish and American :) You can also see the perfectly round pancakes I made ;)

Here’s the recipe:

In a large bowl, you mix up the following:

2 tablespoons sunflower oil

1 egg

1 cup milk

In a smaller bowl, you mix up the following dry ingredients:

1 cup flour

1 tablespoon sugar

1/4 teaspoon salt

2 teaspoons baking powder

Then, slowly add the milk-egg-oil mixture into the dry ingredients and stir. The result is better if you wait for about 15 minutes before you start making the pancakes. Heat a lightly oiled griddle (over high heat), scoop the batter onto the griddle and let them brown on each side —you know that it’s time to flip the other side of the pancake when there are lots of small bubbles formed on the batter. You can make the pancakes as big or small as you like, so the amount you scoop each time is up to you. Just make sure the griddle is really hot during this process, since the first ones always come out pretty bad if you don’t. Before serving, you can put some butter on the pancakes while they’re still hot, and they’ll be even more delicious!

I recently got this recipe from my aunt. Originally it has plum sauce in it as well, which makes it even more delicious. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find plum sauce anywhere yet, so I had to try the recipe without it —it was still very tasty. This is my new favorite salmon recipe now, after Giada’s salmon with citrus salsa verde. 

Here’s how to do it:

For 1 piece of salmon:

2 teaspoons pesto sauce

2 teaspoons soy sauce

1 tablespoon toasted, thinly sliced almonds

Black pepper, to taste

These are definitely not exact measurements and you can easily increase or decrease them according to your own taste. 

You first spread the pesto sauce on the salmon, and then the soy sauce. Lastly, sprinkle the almonds on top. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper and place the salmon on the sheet. I cooked mine in the oven at about 180°C (~360°F) for 20 minutes. (You can add some salt to taste —the soy sauce was salty enough for me, so that’s why I didn’t add any extra)

Bon appétit!

P.S. Normally you spread a little bit of plum sauce on the salmon first, before pesto and soy sauces. Everything else is the same. I’l try that as soon as I can find the sauce :)

I always postponed making macarons, since I thought it was an extremely hard recipe to follow and thus just buying one would save me a lot of time. To tell you the truth, I didn’t even want to do these, but I couldn’t resist when my mom insisted. However, the result was beyond my expectations! The crunchiness of the shell’s outside together with the soft texture of the inside created a little heaven in my mouth. An important player of this heaven was the filling —The Wonderful Biscoff Spread. I usually tend to eat this spread with a spoon like I do Nutella and it worked perfectly with the cocoa shells.

I used a Turkish recipe for this, but here’s an English version with the same measurements for the shell —you just need to leave out the carrot, and add 2 teaspoons of cocoa powder instead. You can basically use anything for the filling, but I suggest you give the Biscoff spread a try immediately!

I love Samphire, which is quite surprising because I don’t eat that many green vegetables and this seems like a rather random plant to like. It is best served in the coastal line of Turkey, and I had a chance to try the dish in Bozcaada. My mom recently discovered that the salad goes great with roasted pine nuts so we had to try it immediately. These are the photos from yesterday.

You can find the recipe here, as well as some information about the plant itself. Couple of differences to note: We also added pine nuts at the end —it made everything even more delicious and we left samphire in the boiling water for 10-15 minutes rather than a few. The single most important tip is that you shouldn’t add any salt to the water since the plant itself is quite salty enough!

Enjoy!

Nothing better than a glass of lemonade for the hot summer! This is a very easy recipe (it doesn’t even include boiling!) that my mom always uses. You can find it here.