This has to be the easiest stew recipe I know.  The laziest cook in the world could make this, and produce something as delicious to eat as it is effortless to make.  I swiped it from Susanna Spiliopoulos of Hotel Pelops in Olympia, Greece, when we stayed with her this spring.
 

Susanna has her own (very highly regarded) catering business and kindly shared some of her numerous culinary tips with us during our two day cooking spree in her squeaky clean professional kitchen.  For Susanna, good cooking is all about good oil, by which she of course means good Greek extra virgin olive oil, which in her case is pressed from her family’s very own olive grove up the road.

We found ıspanaklı ve peynirli börek to be as common in Turkey as spanakotyropita is in Greece, and made a point of sampling as many as humanly possible, purely in the name of research of course.  They are essentially the same dish - a savoury pie made of multiple layers of ultra-thin pastry with a spinach and cheese filling.  Sometimes it’s just spinach, or just cheese, but I like it with both. 

They come in various shapes and sizes, depending on which country, region, town, village, bakery or home you’re in, and with different fillings.  The form here is nice and simple and works with the packets of filo dough we can find in shops in the UK.  I have made the filling purposefully generous in quantity and moist in consistency as I don’t like my börek dry.  The recipe is loosely based on two very different versions I had the opportunity to make with chefs in Turkey and Greece - Engin Akin in Istanbul and Dimitris Mantsios in Naoussa.

Erhan Şeker is a talented Turkish chef who makes great use of wild greens and herbs.  He cooks all sorts of weird and wonderful leaves, shoots and tendrils, most of which I wouldn’t know how to find back at home in the UK.  But one thing we can definitely find at home is stinging nettles.  In many areas they’re abundant.  And of course they’re free, and very good for you.  

This dish, called ‘çırpma’ in Turkish (meaning ‘mixed’, as I guess you could mix up all sorts of greens in here if you wanted, wild or otherwise), was expertly made for us in Erhan’s kitchen by his assistant Nesrin, using Erhan’s homemade goat ricotta. It’s the kind of comfort food that feels like it should be bad for you it’s so satisfying, but is actually incredibly good for you.  Wild greens are more nutritious than cultivated ones as they’re higher in antioxidants and other goodies that the plants must have plenty of in order to defend themselves from pests.

As you will see, the ingredient quantities in the recipe need some refining, so let me know how it goes if you make it.

I named these Turkish syrup-drenched cakelets ‘hedgehogs’ due to their spiky appearance and potential appeal to kids.  Making them is great fun, involving an unusual use for a colander (a ‘kalbur’ in Turkish).  I helped make them in Erhan Şeker’s restaurant kitchen, under the watchful eye of his assistant Nesrin.  Impossible to find in restaurants, kalbura bastı are commonly made in Turkish homes.  So for a true taste of Turkish home-baking, get out your colander...

The ingredient quantities in this recipe probably need some refining, so please let me know how it goes if you make it.

While staying with Erhan Şeker on Turkey’s Aegean coast, we watched in awe as he whipped up dish after dish in front of us in no time at all.  Erhan likes to use plenty of herbs (his aim is to grow all 250 herbs in his ‘Herbs and Spices of the World’ book, and he’s making good progress), and he likes his food to be simple, fast and fresh.  He also loves inventing new dishes and trying them out on passing culinary anthropologists.  

To demonstrate these principles he went out and picked a bunch of fresh oregano, sliced up a couple of small courgettes and had this delicious salad on our plates in what seemed like seconds.  Cooking from scratch does not need to be labour intensive.  I think it would also work well with other herbs, such as basil, parsley or dill.  To keep the flavours simple, I’d just use one herb though, two at the most.

We ate maybe a hundred gözleme each in Turkey.  It is a kind of flatbread (yufka), folded up around a filling such as cheese, potato or spinach, and cooked on a metal dome (saç) over a fire until the outside is browned and crispy and the inside is soft and hot.  They are absolutely delicious and make the perfect breakfast or lunch hot snack. 


In Cappadocia I spent one hilarious day making them with three expert women in the village of Göreme.  Gülcan, Hamide and Hatice showed me how to make the fillings, knead and roll the dough, fold it up in a parcel around the filling and then cook it over the tandır fire.  Here is the recipe and several short video clips.  Warning: some clips contain explicit language (in Turkish).

This session around the traditional tandır oven is now sadly a rare occurrence in Cappadocia, where it was once a very socially significant event for the women of the cave houses, and it was probably Hatice's last.  You can read the full story here.