Istanbul, Constantinople, Istanbul....

I am really all about theme nights... cooking a few dishes from the same country of origin, pretending that you are in some exotic locale. Plus, it's a way of getting a few recipes down at once, which is something I am in need of doing! Tonight - it's Turkey night!! No, not Thanksgiving... Turkey, the country -- lamb, tzatsiki (cacik), and salad!

72. Grilled Lamb Chops - *Grills*
73. Tzatsiki of Sorts - *Junk Food*
74. Turkish Salad - *Larder Salads*

When I went in search of minced lamb the other day and was completely unsuccessful, I did manage to pick up some lamb chops -- or at least I think they are. The package (yes it's from a supermarket, kill me all now!) said Australian Shoulder Lamb Chops. So I either have lamb shoulder or lamb chops - well, it looked grillable so I thought, why not?

Since the lamb chops would take the shortest time to cook and needed to be served warm, I started on the tzatsiki and salad.

Tzatsiki, as Tom points out, comes in many forms in many countries. The yogurt/cucumber/mint dish in Turkey would in fact be called cacik. Tzatsiki is the name for the dish in Greece. Lamb and yogurt always seemed to be a good pair so I didn't mind borrowing this recipe from the Junk Food chapter.

For the tzatsiki, I grated a cucumber that was deseeded.

I removed excess moisture and mixed it with thick yogurt, dried mint, finely chopped garlic and salt. I let it get 'cool as a cucumber' (thanks, Tom!) in the fridge, but before that I snapped a pic!!

Then, a few minutes before dinnertime, I began the salad. It is not a difficult salad, just time-consuming because it takes on qualities from salad niçoise, which must have potatoes and eggs just so. I first did the chopping for the salad - yellow peppers, tomatoes (deseeded), cucumbers (deseeded), and lettuce. I also added the butter beans before I put the entire thing in the fridge.

I boiled some new potatoes for the salad, and once a bit cool, tore them into uneven pieces. After tossing the potato shards in some olive oil, I let them sit to the side until I would start assembling the salad.

The lamb chops were just basically the hot grill/hot oven method used in all of the Grills chapter. I seared some lamb chops on the grill pan, and then seasoned them and put them into the very hot oven for a few minutes to finish them off. Here are the Australian Shoulder Lamb Chops!

While the meat was resting I finished the salad -- boiled a couple of eggs, toasted some almond flakes, and dressed the salad with olive oil, white wine vinegar, chopped dill, salt and pepper. I topped the salad with the almonds and put the quartered eggs to the side as a garnish. They came out a bit too, erm, runny, even though I boiled them for six minutes as stipulated. Oh well, never mind.

Here is the finished salad!

And closeup!

To go along with the Turkish theme, I also baked Nigella's Nigella Bread -- aka, bread with nigella (kalonji) seeds from How to be a Domestic Goddess.

The dinner was delicious! I had one of the chops, and although it was quite boney, the meat part was tender and juicy. It was lovely dipping some meat into the tsatski. The salad was fantastic too - lots of textures and colors, and I loved the unusual additions of almonds and dill!

Sorry I couldn't get a table shot - we have horrible lighting in our apartment and the only place that gets good light for pictures is the coffee table - so what you may see in almost all of my pictures that I don't crop to an inch of the picture's life is my Leksvik coffee table. We don't eat at the coffee table -- well not all of the time.