For this month’s Cookbook Club, Susanne decided to take us on a journey to Turkey by selecting Turquoise: A Chef’s Travels in Turkey by Greg and Lucy Malouf for our book of the month.  The book itself is absolutely stunning with a blend of food and travel writing and gorgeous photos of Turkey.  If you like having food photos to go with every single dish in the book, you will be a little disappointed.  That didn’t hold back the Amazon.com reviewers, however, who all gave the book five stars.

Enter Parties That Cook headquarters yesterday morning and you’d find an office full of wary Cookbook Club members cautioning each other about how they were not happy with the way their dishes turned out.  A few people ended up remaking their dishes, and several complained about how it was very vague in some respects. Turns out, many of the dishes emerged in much better condition after sitting overnight and most everyone enjoyed the meal. One cautionary note: the book often fails to mention to add salt or pepper to taste, so don’t forget to add these as you cook!

Red Pepper Soup with Bulgur, Chickpeas, Mint and Chile: Crissy started off the meal with this tasty tomato soup reminiscent of a minestrone.  While it started out really brothy and bland, sitting overnight brought the flavors of the soup together and helped a lot with the consistency. Here is an example of the vagueness in this book: the recipe called for one long red pepper and one long red chile.  Crissy went with a bell pepper and Fresno pepper. She also substituted pomegranate molasses for the pekmez (grape molasses) and added a little sugar to offset the added acidity. Recommendations for next time: halve the vegetable stock and add some merguez sausage.

Spiced Pumpkin Köfte with Walnut and Feta Stuffing: This recipe definitely called out for a “do over.” Susanne’s first attempt at this dish came out incredibly runny. Köfte is more familiar in meat form, but this version uses ground butternut pumpkin. You’re supposed to fill balls of pumpkin with the stuffing, but the pumpkin mixture was too runny to be rolled into a ball. Instead, Susanne balled up the feta and rolled it around in the pumpkin just before slipping the concoction into the deep fryer.  The result? Success! These little fritters were crunchy and extremely flavorful with the feta, nuts, bulgur, paprika, cumin and red pepper paste.

Smoky Eggplant Purée : Rosie was concerned about this dish but everyone seemed to like it. The recipe directs you to char the eggplant directly on your stovetop burner, which she found a little difficult to do evenly considering the dark color and large size of the eggplants. The recipe says nothing of puréeing the eggplant, but Rosie found it necessary to do so. A suggestion from Susanne: do this the way you would baba ghanoush and cut the egglplant into slices before charring over the burner. It’s easier to tell when the eggplant is evenly cooked, which makes it easier to turn into a purée. Pictured above.

Whipped Feta Dip: This recipe was the simplist of the bunch with only three ingredients — feta, yogurt and mustard. Of course, Bibby felt it needed a little something so she added salt, lemon and garlic.  The flavors intensified overnight but the consistency came out more like a sauce than a dip.  The verdict? While it’s tasty with pita chips, it would be even better over a main course or the rice pilaf.

Green Olive, Walnut, and Pomegranate Salad: This dish by Susanne was also a hit. Everyone loved the crunchiness and freshness of the pomegranate seeds and the salad was a beautiful balance of sweet, salty and chile-hot.

Shrimp Baked with Haloumi in a Clay Pot: Bibby also made this shrimp dish, but was not too happy with it either.  The rest of the cookbook club generally liked this dish but a few comments included “too sweet” and “a bit perfumey” due to the pekmez, coriandar, caraway, saffron and basil. The cooking time on the shrimp seemed to be way off: 3-5 minutes in an oven does not sound like enough time to cook through, so Bibby left it in there for 15 minutes, plus another 10 minutes on broil and it still could have cooked a bit more.

Feta- and Dill-Stuffed Sardines Fried in Chile Flour: There were a few skeptics when Mick signed up for this dish, but it turned out to be one of the hits of the meal! Other than butterflying and deboning the fish, this was a pretty simple dish with just a little flour, salt, two kinds of paprika and olive oil. The feta and dill stuffing was delicious — it made way more than necessary for stuffing the sardines, but was tasty with the extra pita chips we had. Pictured above.

Pistachio Pilaf with Spinach and Herbs: Another common theme throughout this book seemed to be the excess amounts of spinach called for in recipes. This recipe calls for 1.25lbs of spinach but a 10oz. bag proved plenty.  Everyone loved this lovely green pilaf with plenty of greens, nuts and fresh mint, parsley and dill. Beth though it was just okay and did not think it fluffed up well.

Shepherd’s Spinach: Maureen’s dish called for 2.25lbs of spinach so she has a pile of spinach sitting left over on her kitchen counter. She picked up some fresh Bloomsdale spinach at the farmers’ market and while the recipe called for ground lamb, onion, garlic, dried mint, two paprikas, tomato paste and rice, but no salt. Even though she added salt, the dish could have used a bit more, but was nevertheless tasty.

Turkish Coffee Creams: Michelene’s dessert of cardamon and cinnamon scented mocha custard was absolutely delicious but ridiculously creamy. We thought this would be excellent in little espresso cups. Be careful of letting the eggs curdle!

Nightingale Nests: Everyone agreed that Rosie’s nightingale nests were a delight. These are very similar to baklava except that they are shaped in beautiful nest. The secret? Roll the phyllo dough around a chopstick to create a tight log and then scrunch up the log. Remove the chopstick and coil the scrunched up log into a nest. Voilà !

This was definitely a cookbook where everyone felt their dish was a little off, but once we brought everything together, we had a beautifully themed meal that was suprisingly cohesive. Oh the joys of Cookbook Club!