Forget hamburgers, hotdogs and potato salad. The picnic I went to last weekend had dreamy food from farflung places--Turkey, Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, Yemen, Israel, and I took a Jewish honey cake.
The group that put this together included three cookbook authors, a Turkish cooking teacher, an internationally-focused blogger and women expert in the cuisines of their homelands in the Middle East.
You don't find such food in restaurants, so fresh and prepared with such care and pride. Look at this beautiful boreg, filled with feta cheese.
Yellow Yemenite rice brightened the table and was full of good things--eggplant, sweet red pepper, onion, parsley, chick peas and edamame.
Succulent rice-stuffed grape leaves disappeared quickly.
This is spinach borek, a Turkish pastry from Azerbaijan.
Smoked eggplant from Azerbaijan was heavenly, a rich blend of grilled eggplant, yogurt, olive oil and garlic, drizzled with more olive oil and sprinkled with dried mint and paprika.
This dish intrigued me because I thought it was made with short-grained pasta. The pasta turned out to be exceptionally long-grained aahu barah basmati rice. Mixed in were cubes of lamb and a sweetened mixture of fried carrot strands, raisins, slivered almonds and pistachios.
Called qabeli, or kabuli, pulao, this is the national dish of Afghanistan, mandatory for special occasions. Several of us whipped out notebooks and wrote down the recipe, because we'd never tasted anything like it.
Turkish cacik--yogurt with garlic, dill, mint and cucumber--went with everything and was good just to eat by itself, like a salad.
There was also a Mediterranean salad, basically an Israeli salad with jicama and walnuts added.
This Turkish bread, made with poppyseed paste, is called hashhasli corek.
And here is buttery rich baklava, made with a technique that eliminates the hassle of buttering filo sheets one by one.
Beautiful, light apple sharlotka is a Russian cake from Azerbaijan.
Here is my honey cake, jammed into a box. It was much better than this presentation. Two people have asked for the recipe, which came from Faye Levy's book, "1,000 Jewish Recipes."
The picnic took place at El Dorado Park in Long Beach. The weather was cool and breezy following days of rain. We warmed up with Turkish tea served in Turkish glasses and mugs. The water had been heated on a small portable stove.
Following that came coffee in dainty cups, the way it would be served in Turkey.
If this had been a food festival, we would have been sorry when it was over. But we are cooking friends, in touch regularly, and we're planning to do it again.
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