The famous potatoes Turkish salad
We didn't have enough time to prepare a dish for dinner this evening. We were so hungry that we needed something quick, but of course it wouldn't be a kind of prepackaged food. Do you have any guess what we do whenever we feel too tired to cook something suitable for "dinner" concept? In Turkish culture, a perfect dinner should include a kind of soup as a starter and as a main dish meat or chicken or vegetable stew should be on dinner table accompanied by a kind of salad or yogurt. No need to mention desserts for a wonderful ending. However, we don't always have time for all these courses as we are working. Fortunately, our culture has a great solution for people in need of quick dishes. That is; Breakfast at Dinner Time!
The meaning of "breakfast" is broad in Turkish language. It doesn't mean only the meal eaten in the morning. If you have tea, cheese, olives, sliced tomatoes, peppers and cucumbers on your table, it is called breakfast no matter when you eat them. These are the indispensable foods of breakfast. And of course it's up to you to enrich your breakfast with some pastries or different versions of egg or other food "inventions". The most common food of this untimely breakfast is potato salad. So this evening, we decided to have a breakfast style dinner and as a preparation, we just boiled potatoes and eggs, which means we didn't spend so much time on it. I should add that Turkish people apply this type of breakfast whenever they don't have enough time or ingredients for a demanding dish.
Ingredients
- 4 middle-sized potatoes
- Half bunch of parsley
- 2 scallions
- 1 onion
- 1 green pepper
- 2 tsp sumac
- 2 tsp red pepper flakes
- 1 tsp salt
- 2 tbsp olive oil
- 2 eggs, hard-boiled
- 1 tsp dry thyme
Boil the potatoes until soft. Meanwhile, you can prepare other ingredients.
Dice the onion into a bowl, cover it with sumac and crumble them together so that sumac and onion combine well.
Chop scallions, pepper, and parsley and add them in the bowl.
When potatoes cook, take them from the heat and wait them in cold water to peel them easily. When they are cold enough, peel and cut them in big cubes and toss them in the bowl. Add red pepper flakes and salt and combine them. Take the salad on a plate.
Slice the hard-boiled eggs and put them near the salad. Drizzle olive oil on the salad and egg slices. Sprinkle some pepper flakes and dry thyme on eggs. And your potato salad is ready to be the main character of your breakfast.
Note: Some people prefer slicing eggs into the salad and mixing them altogether, but I love to see egg slices separately, that's why I put them near the salad.
Side/accompanying dishes form such a rich category within Turkish cuisine that they could be addressed as a subject in themselves. The salads, pickles, meze (appetizers), cacik, and some greens do not only add variety to the main dishes, but are also complimentary to them. For example the vegetables, spices and greens eaten along with oily meat dishes serve to lighten the meal.Some of these dishes even appear as main dishes. But it must be noted that when these foods do not accompany another dish, they are always eaten with bread; in other words, they are the katik, the food to compliment bread. Onions, salt and bread, piyaz (bean salad) and bread; tomatoes, cucumbers, onion and bread, etc. Although such consumption is still common, with the spread of local cuisines these accompanying foods are more and more used only to accompany a dish. In this way they have become a broad palette of flavors.
Although the various meze, salads and pickles occur in neighboring cuisines, their flavors in Turkish cuisine are different from the rest. For example there is a large variety of regional styles of pickles. Originally simply a method of preserving vegetables, the making of pickles later developed further to become a favorite side dish with extreme variety. Just as every region has its own ingredients, there are also different pickling methods from region to region, which is further reason for these local flavors. The same is true of salads. In addition to a large number of salads, there are many which are indispensable to local Turkish food traditions. Some of these include ezme (a sort of "Turkish salsa" from the southeast), purslane salad, bostana, etc. Below are some of the most notable of Turkish salads, pickles and special side dishes, and short recipes.