Discovering the Language of Photography – the Gernsheim Collection

Photography is another one of my big passions, aside from cooking. Last Friday a friend of mine and I went to the Harry Ransom Center at UT to see the Gernsheim collection on Early Photography. It was amazing – from the first photograph ever taken, through early attempts on developing various techniques and manuscripts from the lives of the first photographers.
Some of the images were amazing, like this gelatin silver glass by Paul Augustus Martin – Big Ben in London. (Sorry, could not find the image online, and my picture of it is pretty bad)

Here is the video summary from the exhibit – Discovering the Language of Photography

Mango Bread!

Wow, I just found my long lost ‘blog’ with only one post 🙂
Now I can retry being consistent and post here from time to time! Here is one of my favorite recipes of all times, as a welcome back post – Mango Bread! Sadly I don’t remember where I found it first, otherwise I’d give credit.

Use a cake pan or bread pan, the muffin one won’t work, since the dough is pretty gooey and the muffins won’t rise.

Mango 'End of Summer' bread

2 cups flour
1.5 cups raw brown sugar
1 tsp cinnamon
2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 cup mango nectar or juice – also try with apricot or peach nectar, results are always good
1/2 cup vegetable oil (or milled flax if you want to cut some of the fat. I don’t.)
3 eggs
1 tsp vanilla extract
2 fresh mangoes, diced (about 2 cups worth, or 3 cups if you want it really mango-y)

Mix the ingredients in this order, grease your pan and bake for 25-30 minutes at 350F or until a knife/toothpick comes off clean in the center of the bread.

Turkey Burgers with Feta

I am not a big burger fan, or turkey for that matter. However, I would eat almost anything with feta 🙂

I was searching for different, low-carb, recipes for burgers and the one with turkey and feta seemed promising. Usually I don’t follow recipes, I create my own as I go, but I wasn’t sure if I can use the US technique for burgers – ground meat and spices, or the Bulgarian one – with egg, soaked bread and onion. Decided to go with the Bulgarian one, after checking a few recipes that included egg to hold the meat together.

So, here are the ingredients:

1 lb ground turkey

1 cup crumbled feta (I prefer Bulgarian, the French and Greek are too dry and ripen) – sheep or cow’s milk, doesn’t matter

1 cup chopped parsley

salt, pepper to taste

1 cup chopped green onions

2 eggs

optional – bread crumbs, I don’t usually use them, but it will add substance

My cheese was fatty enough, but if yours isn’t, add a few spoons of olive oil.

Mix all ingredients and shape the burgers – make them more like balls, rather than flat, so the cheese stays inside, since it will melt as you grill them. Let the burgers stay in the fridge for an hour or so, for all flavors to soak in and then grill for about 10-15 mins on high heat. Great side could be roasted potatoes, tabuleh or green salad.

First Post …

Programmer by day, avid cook by night, I think I will mostly use this blog to keep track of the recipes I come up with during my kitchen explorations.