Etsis Turlu - Rich Summer Vegetable Stew

I've been cooking quite a lot of Middle Eastern recipes recently.  It started with the  Iranian Pearl Barley Soup known as Ash-e Jo or Ash-e-Jow  early this year when we had freakish snow and with the unusual hot weather continuing, now I have Etsis Turlu.   

According to the cookbook author this Etsis Turlu comes from Turkey.

With the rain over the weekend, it was the perfect excuse to make a stew more suited for autumnal days and colder evenings, but i have lots of summer vegetables including courgettes, marrows and green beans coming from the garden that I wanted  to make the most of it, even if it is the height of summer.

This stew will last us good three days of the working week and we intend to eat it with couscous, bulgar wheat, rice or crusty bread.  

I am sharing this  Etsis Turlu Stew with Souper Sundays hosted by Kahakai Kitchen. 

Medley of Courgettes - Zucchini

The rain poured from the skies non stop over the weekend and many of us were thankful for it.  

I am harvesting courgettes aka zucchini.  I so prefer calling them Zucchini, but i live in the UK, so it has to be courgettes.  Above we have Tondo de Piacenza.

I scooped the seeds from the middle and stuffed it with some meatfree soy mince.  See the meat free filling recipe here.

Some marrows aka Summer Squash in other parts of the world and courgettes: gold rush and a stripey variety, whose name I have forgotten.  I have made another Marrow Curry, but this time with the addition of chickpeas. It will be our dinner for three days of the working week.

As for the courgettes, they have been used mostly for lunch.  I haven't taken many photographs of my courgette dishes this year, as they have featured on my blog before such as courgette pasty, courgette cake, courgettes flapjack and pasta salad.

The climbing beans are dwindling.  In fact these are the last.  I may have mentioned in a previous blog post that some of my bean canes have been infested with black fly, its been particularly bad this year. So I will be pulling out the bean frames - wigwams next weekend, clear the ground and sow some fenugreek or salad leaves - I can't quite decide which of the two, unless readers have any other suggestions.  It just feels such a waste not to make the most of the space whilst the weather is still relatively kind. 

Well the purple and green beans may all be gone, but...

Ta'dah!  We have cherry tomatoes coming from the greenhouse, these are the first of many we hope....

I was also tempted by these vegetables from the greengrocers at the indoor market when I was in Cardiff last week.  I made a Middle Eastern dish called Etsis Turlu with these aubergines and two tone pepper. Come back tomorrow if you want to see the final dish which also includes some of my homegrown marrow. 

If not, please do come back next week when I will show off some more of my homegrown tomatoes instead - there will be lots of them.  I  am sharing this post with  Harvest Monday which is hosted by the lovely Dave over Our Happy Acres.  

Jurassic Kingdom Comes to Cardiff Bute Park

Last weekend, we went into the city of Cardiff for a bit of shopping, but as usual we were there early and many of the shops were not open, so we decided to have a mooch about in Bute Park - dubbed as the green heart of the city.  

Well what an interesting sight we stumbled upon.

We learned very quickly that Jurassic Kingdom had taken over Cardiff Park  as one of its five stops in the UK.

Jurassic Kingdom is an outdoor educational touring  experience for people of all ages to explore green spaces and encounter more than 30 life size epic animatronic dinosaurs from a 85 foot long Diplodocus, to Triceratops and Tyrannosaurus Rex in the most unexpected of green spaces.

It was pretty cool, in fact very cool to see the workers putting them together like a  jigsaw.  We were also very lucky to be able to get up quite close and personal and touch some of them.  

Here are some photographs we took.  If you find youself in Cardiff between Saturday August 11th to Monday 27 August 2018 - you note these awesome dinosaurs are now behind barricades, understandably why - you don't want them to escape and cause havoc in Cardiff Bute Park.