Turkey - Retro Food For Modern Times

For my modern take on Turkish food, there was only one choice. It was always going to be shawarma. And my first thought was that I could give some props to my girl Sabrina Ghayour. I own all of her cookbooks and Persiana remains one of my favourite books to cook from. Sabrina’s recipe for ultimate chicken shawarma comes from her book Feasts and it is totally delicious!!!!

But, as I was cooking the shawarma, I reallised I had another connection (that does not involve late night stops at the Hollywood Palace) and that connection is my new favourite podcast, or actually set of pods. I ‘m sure I have spoken about my love of the true crime pod before and some time ago I started listening to Small Town Murder. I virtually inhaled every episode so I was able to catch up on the back catalogue of then 80 something episodes pretty quickly. I’m listening to Episode 114 as I write.

But what do you do when you run out of pod and don’t want to wait a whole week to hear more from the funniest guys in podcasting? Well, in my case, despite barely knowing one sport from another, you start listening to their other pod Crime In Sports. And let me tell you, you don’t have to know anything about sport to enjoy it.

Both of these pods are amazing, the hosts, James Pietrogiallo and Jimmie Whisman are hilarious!!! And the stories!!!! Who knew????

For a good start to the level of crazy Crime in Sports reaches, why not give Episode 58 a try?

#058 – If He Could Kill The World… – The Terribleness Of Viacheslav Datsik

This tale contains neo-Nazi’s, naked snow wrestling, armed robbery, unrestrained testicle pummelling, bare handed escapes from Russian mental asylums and the self-nicknamed Red Tarzan. Believe me, amongst all the, what James and Jimmie would call nudnickery, there is not much time for too much sport.

Another favourite of mine comes from my own country…

#058 – Such is Annihilation – The Chaoticness of Ben Cousins

Aka…you hid your meth where?

What has all this to do with Shawarma you ask? Well, there are some recurring characters in Crime in Sports, a few special guests that pop in for a fleeting moment in each episode and one of those is the Shawarma man. Spawned in Episode 32, (Dave Meggatt), the Shawarma man invariably refuses to serve some hapless and very confused sporting criminal some lovely lamb shawarma. I wonder what he would think about Sabrina’s chicken version!

Just quickly back to Sabrina, her shawarma contains normal pickles. I made some pickled turnips for mine. Normally when you see these they are a gorgeous hot pink. This normally comes from beet juice. I think beets are the food of the devil so I added some radishes to my turnips which turned my pickles a much paler but still rather pretty pink.

That’s me done!

Read and cook Sabrina, listen to Small Town Murder and Crime in Sports and tell me what you think!

Also, please let me know your favourite cookbooks and I’m always up for a good pod recommendation.

For now?

Sign says closed!

So as luck would have it, the week I wanted to write about the Turkish meal of Shish kebabs, there has been a diplomatic incident between Australia and Turkey. But this blog is not afraid to tackle contentious issues. Actually, no, scratch that, this blog doesn’t want to have anything to do with this debacle. To be frank, both sides of this spat are terrifying and we here at RFFMT are ~~cowards~~ peace lovers who just want to eat some meat on a stick.

Or, to be etymologically exact roasted meat (kebap) on a sword (sis).

Or to be even more precise, delicious roasted meat on a sword.

The recipe for these Shish Kebabs came to you direct from 1972 via Good Housekeeping’s World Cookery. As usual, the introduction to each chapter comes with a gorgeous drawing of representing the food of the region: