While considering salads, I had two things in mind: to have something fresh and refreshing, and have some acidity instead of any other kind of oil--including olive oil which we use literally all the time. I prepared two salad dishes while Melih was beating the wheat-meat mixture of keşkek hard with his strong muscles (I just wanna make sure that he's gonna do the same thing the other times we cook keşkek:) ).
The first salad I prepared was very similar to the Turkish çoban salatası (shepherd’s salad) which is made of onions, tomatoes, cucumber and peppers. Each ingredient is chopped finely and mixed with lemon, olive oil and some salt. In my version of çoban salatası, I decided not to put any onions this time, since I did not want to mix the smell and the taste of the broth with the onion's. It was totally my individual decision, but I think it worked well. Also, this time we had cherry tomatoes at home.
I used them instead of the regular tomatoes by chopping into two. Cucumber was the freshest ingredient just picked up from our little backyard garden. As for the peppers, we prefer a nearby organic farm called Pontius Farm. There, you actually can pickup several types of peppers--hot, mild, bell, jalapeno--when they are not grown too big. Even in the once in a week farmers' market here, not to mention the big grocery stores, the peppers are always too big. I prefer them in finger-length for the salads. So, I chopped the delicious, finger-length Pontius Farm peppers (about 4 mild 1 hot) into our çoban salata. I finally added some chopped parsley on the top. Although we usually add lots of olive oil to the salads--basically we pour olive oil to the salads--this time we only put some lemon and a little bit salt. So the fresh and acidic çoban salatası was ready to eat. For some reason, I avoided the strong taste of onion in the salad, but I actually preferred arugula. Maybe it is because onion does not have the freshness that arugula has. I washed the arugula--also from our precious backyard garden; I chopped it finely; put it into the plate and added some crumbled feta cheese on the top. It was Melih's idea to add a little bit plum vinegar to the arugula-feta plate. The plum vinegar provided a perfect acidity and extra freshness. Again for this one, I did not put any olive oil. Since it was an instantaneous idea, I have no idea if our arugula salad has a name. Though, it was the most refreshing dish on our table.
As for the sweets, after eating everything we cooked, I had this "inclination," this "tendency" for something sweet, but I was not at all in the mood to go with fatty and very sugary deserts. Dates were the perfect matches for this sort of craving for sweets. They are not too sweet, not fatty, very light and extremely delicious. They are maybe the most refreshing sweet that one can eat since a date is a fruit. Also, they contain lots of fiber, so are very good for digestion. Due to the fact that we are currently in Ramadan--the holy month for Muslims--we have lots of dates in our Middle Eastern grocery store in Champaign. (Dates are particularly consumed in this month during fasting) Dates are not too sweet for me, but I still wanted to lighten their taste after the tirit and keşkek dinner. One thing that I always do is to eat dates with some walnuts inside--imagine the energy I get. This time, after putting a piece of walnut inside my date (by the way, walnuts are from my grandmothers' gardens;)), I also added a little bit of the cream from the Brown Cow brand yogurt. Note that I would never put the so-called creams sold in the markets on the top of my dates. Well, since I never buy, I do not really know if there is a really good and once which is content- and taste-wise similar to the kind of cream I like. In general, I find the usual cream very oily, meaninglessly light in texture and tasteless. A little piece of cream from the top of my yogurt is a perfect choice. Eventually, this date-walnut-cream combination was an amazing, such an awesome taste. Both walnut and the cream made the sweetness of date lighter in different ways. It was just a perfect match. I think I ate like 9 of them at once.. After that huge dinner.. Imagine.. I think my strong stomach also had some important role here ;)
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