turkey | beach house kitchen

Lazy Lahmacun – Vegan Turkish Flatbread Wrap

We absolutely love Turkey and it’s diverse, veggie-friendly food. We have so many happy and tasty memories about our trip there a couple of years ago. We will be sharing more Turkish dishes soon as they are firmly on the menu at home and at work; Pide, Imam Bayildi, Shakshouka, Corba, outstanding salads, wicked coffee…….the highly delicious list goes on and on. If you are vegan/veggie/ or just love amazing food, Turkey is calling to you!

Three of my favourite things are travelling, eating and history (the order changes daily). Turkish is a feast on all these fronts. We did not eat Lahmacun in Turkey, it was always non-veg friendly, but I vowed to experiment with it when I returned home.

On a walk – Sunset in Cappadocia, Turkey

Travelling inspires so many of the dishes I cook, influencing recipes, my constantly evolving style of cooking and the way I prepare food. I love wandering the world, soaking up all the flavours and techniques and then giving them a blast next time I’m in the BHK (or just any random kitchen for that matter). It is what inspires and challenges me to be a better cook and take on different influences.

We travelled around the south of Turkey in a clapped out car, mainly camping, taking in some of the outstanding ancient sites and spending as much time bobbing around in the azure Med as possible.

We then spent a couple of weeks working on an organic farm where we cooked with the local veggies, normally without electricity, power or water. It was a great challenge! At the end of meal times, we went across and fed the scraps to the giant resident wild boar.

Jane in Cappadocia

We bought produce from the local market in Burdur (Central Turkey, proper middle of nowhere. Beautiful people and landscape). The farm made its own rosewater, ran by a vet, enviromentalist and animal lover, they even cared for rare eagles, wild boar and wolves (yes, grey wolves! Normally injured by hunters).

We especially loved the weekly trip to the markets and have never seen such a fine display of olives. Many stalls were like works of art, colourful patchwork quilts of olive perfection. Have you tried a pink olive?! One of our most random memories of Turkey was hitching a rid in a ramshackled sewerage wagon. We were stuck in the middle of the mountains and it was a lifesaver. Very fragrant.

Outside the Blue Mosque – Istanbul, Turkey

The markets of Turkey were always overflowing with beautiful produce. When we travel we generally prepare many of our meals, saves money and ensures we’re keeping this gloriously vegan and tasty. Everything seems to grow well in Turkey and Turkish people have a real passion for produce, they absolutely love their veggies, especially local favourites like aubergines and pomegranates. Here’s what The Guardian wrote about Istanbul’s markets, I always feel very at home in a food market, you generally see people enthused and passionate about food, it’s a revealing window into local culture. I also find many of the very freshest and most authentic restaurants and food vendors around markets. They’re the real deal, where the locals flock for delicacies.

We camped on a beach down south, on the Med coast, under an olive tree and did lots of this……somewhere near Antalya, Turkey

Lahmacun is normally made with minced beef and is served all over Turkey but we’ve packed loads of plant-based gorgeous-ness into our version and the flavour is epic. This is another recipe plucked from our recent cookbook ‘Peace & Parsnips’. You can eat it like a pizza or wrap it around some salad leaves, pickles, onions etc….either way, you’re in for a totally Turkish treat. I use shop bought ‘lazy’ flatbreads here, it would be awesome on your favourite home made flatbread of course. In Turkey, they may even be made in a blistering wood fired oven.

One of our favourite 'Lokantasi's' In Istanbul. Cheap and filling with loads of veggie options.

Turkey really captured our hearts, from the vast expanses of emptiness in the heart of Turkey, the mountains of the East and of course, the glittering Mediterranean coastline. It is a truly fascinating place expressed perfectly by the diverse and rich cuisine.

Afiyet olsun! (Enjoy!)

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Lazy Lahmacun – Vegan Turkish Flatbread Wrap

The Bits – Makes 4

1 large aubergine
1 red pepper
3 tablespoons olive oil
1 small onion
5 cloves of garlic, peeled and crushed
150g mushrooms, sliced
1 teaspoon ground coriander
a large pinch of ground cinnamon
½ teaspoon ground cumin
¹⁄³ teaspoon chilli powder
½ teaspoon sea salt
½ teaspoon black pepper
1 teaspoon dried basil
2 tomatoes, grated
½ a handful of fresh flat-leaf parsley, chopped
4 wholewheat flatbreads
juice of ½ a lemon For the topping
1 x lemon tofu feta (optional)
5 tablespoons cashews, roughly chopped

Do It

Preheat the oven to 200°C/gas mark 6

Pierce the aubergine many times with a fork, then put it on a baking tray with the red pepper and rub them both with olive oil. Bake in the oven – check the pepper after 15 minutes, then turn them both over with a spatula and bake for 15 minutes more. Take out the pepper and leave the aubergine in for another 10 minutes. They should both be soft and well coloured. Deseed the pepper, trim the aubergine, and roughly chop them both.

While that is going on, on a medium-high heat, warm 1 tablespoon of oil in a frying pan. Add the onions and fry for 6–8 minutes, then add the garlic, mushrooms, spices, salt and pepper, and continue cooking for 3–4 minutes. Add a splash more oil if needed. Now add the red pepper and aubergine, with the basil and tomatoes, and warm through on a low simmer for 6–7 minutes more. Stir in the parsley, cover and keep warm.

Your oven should still be rocking. Bring it back to 200°C/gas mark 6, lay out your flatbreads on baking trays and brush them with olive oil (especially the edges). Spread the vegetable mixture thinly over the bread – 4 tablespoons per lachmacun is normally cool. Top with cashews and tofu feta (if you’re using it) and pop into the oven for 12–15 minutes.

Serve

Drizzled with a little more olive oil and even a little squeeze of lemon juice. Depending on the size of the flatbread, this dish makes a great little or big plate and can be cut into wedges to be served as an appetizer or rolled around some salad. Raw cashew hummus (see page 160) is a perfect accompaniment.

Turkey really took our breath away

Foodie Fact

Aubergine (or eggplant, brinjal….) is a nightshade, along with tomatoes, potatoes and peppers. It has not always been appreciated as a delicious vegetable, for centuries in Europe it was a purely ornamental plant and was even said to cause insanity and leprosy if eaten! Aubergine is a good source of fibre and minerals, the skin is high in anti-oxidants and it is low in calories.

Brazil Nut and Banana Breakfast Cookies - Fresh from the oven

Brazil Nut and Banana Breakfast Cookies – Up close and personal

Warm, healthy cookies for breakfast. Yes, please!!!!!! A fine start to any day and even the sleepiest of heads can cope with the simplicity of getting these together. This is a nourishing and energy giving breakfast on the run and one of these cookies contains much more nutrition than your average bowl of cereal.

A strange post to be winging it across from the Turkish Med, but the weather in the port town of Antalya is dreadful. Jane and I are tucked up in bed with cups of well stewed Turkish tea. We were here two weeks ago and the sun was blazing, it now resembles a supermarket car park in Leicester town centre in a November hail storm (with the occasional roman aqueduct thrown in). Amazing the difference some pants weather can make.

THE BEACH HOUSE ON TOUR

A quick update as to our wandering ways. We’re in Turkey, as mentioned and have been whizzing around in a hire car for two weeks, covering thousands of kilometres in this fascinating and rich land. Firstly, Turkey is a country with many layers of incredible history and culture, stunning and varied landscapes, but the real star (as ever we find) is the people. The folk we have met have been absolutely brilliant, wonderfully hospitable, kind and funny. Jane and I have felt very at home ever since, on the first night, a genial waiter Abdullah, offered us his house to stay in for as long as we like. We declined his more than generous offer, so he halved our bill and sent us on our merry way. This has become quite normal, every day we are confronted with bare faced kindness and highly welcoming behaviour.

The view from our hotel in Antalya on the first day, now it looks considerably greyer with occasional lightning forks crackling over the mountains.

We’ve been so active in the last 14 days its quite hard to recap that’s been done. Having taken in most of the Turquoise coast, with its stunning ancient Greek and Roman Ruins and beautiful beaches, we headed up to Pammukale, which is a massive calcite wave with hot thermal springs (and an almost token vast ancient Greek settlement on top). We then whisked our little Fiat up through the Alpine clad mountains, inland and across a vast Anatolian steppe to Konya (the resting place of the poet Rumi and the home of the whirling dervishes) and then spent a few days exploring and hiking in the ridiculously unique and surreal rock features of the Cappdocian valleys. We stayed in a luxury cave, carved out of compressed volcanic dust. The beauty of having a car is being able to stop alot along the way and get lost. Getting lost I find is the best way to get to know a country properly. The out of the way places are always more fun than the tourist ‘hives’.

Now we’re back on the coast, having traced the silk road for a while and hung out in caravaserai’s. We’re readying ourselves for a weeks volunteering and cooking on an organic farm and animal sanctuary (meaning sitting down for a day). Phew! In a nut shell, its been intensely brilliant. It feels like we’ve been away for years. Pictures will hopefully follow when a better internet connection arises.

THE TRIALS AND TRAVAILS OF VEGAN TRAVELER

Being a vegan foodie traveler outside select parts of LA is never going to easy, but many Turkish staples are easily veganised and we haven’t struggle for sparkling sustenance thus far. Saksuka, corba (soup, lentil normally), bean stews, gorgeous pides (Turkish pizza), village rice dishes, shepherd salads, smoked aubergine and pepper salads, many clay pot roasted veggie variations (in wood fired ovens), and lashings of white bread ( no whole grains on the horizon) have kept us ticking over quite nicely. All washed down with plenty of tiny glasses of Turkish Whiskey (well stewed tea normally grown around the Black Sea).

We do have a very unique diet in the Beach House Kitchen and we always feel the pinch the first few weeks of a travel. Gone are the 6 vegetable morning juices and rampantly organic raw salads and layered tofu bakes. Having said that, back here in the big city Antalya (population 11 million) we have just enjoyed a slap up mezze-fest in a white table cloth joint. Radical selections of local leaves, beetroot, funky turnip juice, fresh steaming white bread, melt in the mouth aubergine dishes (known as the ‘sultan’ of vegetables in Turkey and quiet revered), interesting and intense tomato rice (the shape of which I’d never seen before, very squat and dumpy grains). Great stuff and an open fire to boot.

Generally travelling as a vegan means scouting out as many fruit and nuts as you can find. I’m not a huge supplement fan, but do travel with some Spirulina which I picked up in India, see this article I wrote for more info on this wonder green powder. Getting balanced nutrition is a happy quest when on the road. A vegan traveler has to be more patient with food and accept the occasion stray lump of cheese or gristle with grace and impeccable manners. After all, we are ambassadors of something highly positive, why ruin it all with a restaurant rant. It can get a little embarrassing on occasion, especially when in a home. No matter how much you explain yourself, language barriers can become chasms when ordering in a restaurant. It is quite an alien concept in most parts of the world. So far, on this trip, I have been fine and had no encounters with surprise ingredients. There is an element of keeping it simple and realising the the cornucopia of local food is generally out of bounds and you will have to settle with some simple veggies dishes and many baffled and perplexed looks from local waiting staff and restaurant owners. Jane and I also make alot of salads and simple veggie dishes ourselves, we always travel with a good knife and some plates. This keeps costs down a little and means that we can pack loads of gorgeous local veggies into diets with relative ease. Overall, Turkey is a great country for vegan travel and much of the produce is organic and seasonal.

I made these cookies just before we left the Beach House for our travels around Turkey, Spain and India. They were a real hit with our friends over coffee and chats. As usual with our sweet things, they are an attempt at taking a gorgeous cake/ cookie recipe and making it as healthy as we can, without compromising on delicousness.

These baked beauts are packed with nutrition and low GI, all that shebang! They are also super tasty and almost a meal in themselves. After one of these for breakfast, we feel pretty much sated for the morning. We’ve basically put loads of the things that we love in a bowl and baked it, most are ingredients that we believe will do our body the most amount of good first thing in the morn. A novel way of approaching cookie making you may say?! But the cookie taste it there, it just so happens that we snook in a few wonder foods as well. We’ve got oats, flax seeds, bananas, maple syrup, brazil nuts, cinnamon……it’s like a health food shop condensed down into small disc of crispy happiness! All these things are going to make your body smile and sing.

Gluten free folk may like to try buckwheat flour or your favourite gluten free flour mix instead of the wholewheat flour, we haven’t tried it, but are sure it will lead to magic results. Gluten free oats are also readily available. You can also just use oats, but the cookies won’t quite have the density and firm texture that these will.

Fresh out of the the oven. Would you call this a cookie or a biscuit?

SO WHEN IS A BISCUIT A BISCUIT, AND A COOKIE A COOKIE?

I think this is a matter of cultural surroundings and varying criteria. Personally, a cookie is moist and chewy and a biscuit is crunchy and crumbly. Cookies are normally fatter and biscuits are thinner. Cookies are not traditional in the UK, so any new and magical ingredients normally take things in a cookie direction. What do you think? I know in the States biscuits are served with savoury dishes, they seem to be more like a semi-scone, but generally quite heavy. I know one thing, there is no way anybody would refer to these whoopers as a biscuit, maybe a ‘slab’ would be better way of describing them, or a ‘chunk’.

Use any variety of nuts and seeds here, whatever’s handy (although poppy seeds are probably best used only if you love ‘em dearly).

Once baked and cooled fully, these cookies will keep for a few days in a tight fitting container or biscuit tin and don’t just eat them for breakfast, eat them all day if you like!

Gluten-free flour mix and oats will be great in this recipe too.

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Breakfast Cookies with Banana & Brazil Nuts

The Bits – 6-8 big cookies

200g Scottish oats (50g more reserved)

30g wholewheat flour

2 bananas (mashed with your hands or a fork)

3 tbs sunflower seeds

1 ½ tbs flax seeds

1 handful brazil nuts (roughly chopped)

200ml sunflower oil/ light olive oil

3 tbs maple syrup/ brown rice syrup/

1 teas bicarb of soda

1 ½ teas ground cinnamon

1 teas almond extract

In the mix

Do It

Preheat an fan oven to 180oC.

Mix together all the bits in a large bowl until a smooth dough is formed, then add the rest of the oats and stir in. This will give the cookies a little bite and texture.

For soft cookies bake for 10 minutes, for slightly crisper cookies, turn the tray and bake for a further 2-3 minutes.

Breakfast is served!

Serve

Using a flat spatula, place on a wire rack and leave for 15 minutes to cool. Best served with a nice big cuppa tea.

Foodie Fact

Many people believe bananas to be high GI (Glycemic Index) foods, meaning they release their carbohydrates straight into your blood stream and leave you with a ‘sugar spike’ that can lead to blood sugar level mayhem and long term ailments.

Bananas are actually low GI and are our friends, meaning they help against diabetes and keep our heart healthy. The greener your banana, the less sugar present. Plantains have the lowest sugar levels.