Wednesday, February 24, 2010

I Don't Think She Eats Here

Not with those abs.

While at last week's conference, I ate at a nearby Middle-Eastern restaurant. Twice. The second time I tried their $10 meze lunch buffet and I spent an hour and a half slowly making my way around the table. I'm still swooning.

There was a dish called esmezi that was a sort of Turkish salsa and man it was good over tabbouleh. I think it had chopped tomatoes, vinegar (?) and hot peppers in it but I can't find anything similar online and the Cornfedton Public Library, amazingly, has no Turkish cookbooks. Are there any Turkish ladies out there who care to part with the recipe?

4 comments:

Karen C said...

I'm not Turkish, but I'm married to a half-Syrian.

Unfortunately, that's all he knows about his birth parents... no recipes came pinned to the receiving blankets. However, Wichita is blessed with an abundance of Mediterranean immigrants, mostly Lebanese, and thus an abundance of Mediterranean restaurants.

Whiiiiich has mostly taught me that there's no standard transliteration for menu items. You can buy humus, hummus, homos, hummous, houmus, AND hoummus within a three-mile radius of my house, for instance. So when you're Googling, try any phonetic variations you can think of. In this case, "ezmesi" is more common, or just "ezme" (Google helpfully looks for both when you say "ezmesi.")

You're probably looking for acili domates ezme. I don't have a recipe, though... the only specifically-Turkish place around here closed up awhile back, which is a shame. They made the best baba ganoush|ganush|gannoush in town.

Packrat said...

I'll email my daughter and ask her to ask around.

Anyway, it sounds delicious.

Hope the conference was worth the time and effort. :)

Suna said...

Maybe this lady can help?

http://www.turkishcookbook.com/

Shay said...

Karen, thanks! Googling for acili domates ezme got me a recipe that looks close to what my tastebuds remember.