Valentine's Day dinner: Turkish bonanza

For Valentine's Day dinner, we always stay in for a homemade meal by yours truly. In the last few years, I've tended towards ethnic celebrations: French, Greek, Italian. This year Dave requested a Turkish spread. Being adventurous, I was in. By the time I was done reading theWikipedia entry for Turkish food, I was extremely enthusiastic. I chose to make a spread of the following dishes:

• Spiced pita bread (bought)
• Red lentil soup
• Bulgur pilaf
• Manti with yogurt and paprika
• Baklava

The only thing I didn't make was the pita bread, but otherwise I got authentic ingredients and made everything else in my kitchen.

Here's the plate:

At the top is the spiced pilaf, which we bought at the Sahar Meat Market, a Turkish grocery store on the north side. In the lower right is the manti, which is a meat-filled dough pocket very similar to tortellini, which I served over Greek-style yogurt and sprinkled with paprika. I had to get the manti at the Turkish grocery also. In the lower right is the bulgur pilaf. Bulgur is a delicious whole grain that I cooked and mixed with chick peas, Kalamata olives, peppers, mushrooms, pine nuts, and Feta cheese.

The last main dish was a red lentil soup, "mercimek," which was easily the simplest soup ever concocted by man. I started boiling some water, then threw in diced carrots, diced onion, lentils, paprika, and some tomato sauce. So easy!

I liked dipping the spiced pita in the soup, although everything tasted good with the pita. We need to go back to that grocery store.

The last main thing I got from the Turkish grocery store was some phyllo dough - for baklava! This is the classic dish of buttery layers of paper-thin dough and a chopped walnut mixture. After you bake it, you douse it in a honey-sugar mixture. And it looks like this:

Ahh! So good! When I was done, the whole spread looked like this.

It was an awesome dinner, and everything was pretty easy and cooked up fast, except for the baklava, which was a bitch to make. Every two layers had to be spread with melted butter, and phyllo dough loves to rip. But look at all those layers of flaky goodness:

Another Valentine's Day come and gone, and now we have tons of delicious food in the fridge. From this dinner and yesterday's dinner with friends, I have oatmeal butterscotch bars, baklava, leftovers from the bulgur pilaf and manti, Swedish meatballs, and potato pancakes. Looks like lunch is on me this week...