LAURA: Let’s talk Turkey. You know a country that shares its name with a delicious game bird is going to deliver on the yum tip. Speaking of delivering, SeamlessWeb hooked us up with a meal that was brought straight to our doorstep from Deniz Restaurant in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. They serve some of our favorite food: the kind that caters to lazy asses.

ADAM: We started with a dish of rolled phyllo dough stuffed with spinach and feta cheese. It’s called Sigara Boregi, aka “cigar” Boregi—so named for the way the dish gives you lung cancer. Or possibly just for the way it looks like a cigar. Stuffed pastries are an ancient and popular part of Turkish cuisine. Our Sigara Boregi were a little light on the stuffing and heavy on the pastry, but it’s hard to complain too loudly about any problem that centers around having too much fried dough.

LAURA: We ate more stuffed dough in the form of manti, or steamed Turkish dumplings. Ours were filled with lamb and onions and swam in a sea of garlic yogurt, which I thought was a bit too heavy on the oil and Adam thought was a bit too heavy on the meh. But they can’t be that bad since they’ve been around since the 13th century. When migrating Turks crossed Asia on horseback, they carried frozen or dried manti with them and boiled them over a campfire. Much like today, when a delivery man on a bicycle carried them across Flatbush Avenue.

ADAM: Next up was an Adana Kebab, a long sheath of minced lamb meat, tail fat and red bell peppers, which, when cooked up, looks disturbingly turd-like. Thankfully, it tastes significantly better than a turd. (Although in fairness, I’ve never actually tasted a turd, so I could possibly be underestimating it.) Anyway, to create the kebab, the minced meat is molded around a large metal skewer and then cooked over hot coals. This harkens back to the way kebabs were reputedly invented—Persian soldiers would used their swords to grill meat over open fires. To serve an Adana Kebab, the molded meat is slid off the skewer like a used condom. Scrumptious.

LAURA: The kebabs came with pide, a flat bread that was as big as a frisbee and unfortunately, just as difficult to bite into. Turks are pretty gung-ho about their bread. Back when the country was part of the Ottoman Empire, bakers believed that Adam (first guy on Earth, not the guy writing this) learned how to make bread from the Archangel Gabriel after he was booted from the Garden of Eden. What a silver lining! At any rate, Turks take such pride in their baking that the region Anatolia is known as the “Breadbasket of the World,” edging out Ukraine’s paltry “Breadbasket of Europe” nickname. Poor Ukraine. Now all it has going for it is meat jell-o.

ADAM: For dessert, we tore into some Kunefe, a pastry made of super-fine threads of dough and a cheesy-middle. The bready threads are made by drizzling a super-thin stream of batter onto a turning hotplate, then gathering the strands together so they resemble a pancake of shredded wheat. It all had a lightly sweet, honey-tinged taste that was surprisingly satisfying. It was only after the meal that we realized we should have taken the food into our living room, where we could have eaten Ottoman on our Ottoman. What fools! But it was a great meal anyway. Thanks for the free grub SeamlessWeb!

Eats Deets
Deniz Restaurant
662 Fulton Street (Fort Greene, Brooklyn)
718-852-6503

ADAM: The World Cup has put South Africa in the spotlight for everyone who cares about soccer. And Americans too! So in preparation for Sunday’s championship game, we went to Fort Greene, Brooklyn, and gorged at Madiba, New York’s most festive purveyor of South African cuisine. (We learned about Madiba at a soccer event hosted by the South African wine, Nederburg. Thanks, Nederburg!) As luck would have it, we got to Madiba right after last week’s Ghana-Uruguay game, so the place was overflowing with African soccer fans, who were still partying even though they lost. That means we got to hear annoying horn noises in person!

LAURA: We kicked off our meal with Bunny Chow, which, like monkey gland sauce and Sugar Babies, sadly does not contain the mammal after which its named. “Curry in a Bread Bowl” would have been a more apropos moniker, since that’s what it is: a scooped-out loaf filled to the brim with curried stew. It’s a popular street food in South Africa and originated in the 1940s, when apartheid laws kept black people from eating in restaurants. To keep business from tanking, Indian restaurant owners, or banias, slung their curries into hunks of bread (instead of bowls) and sold the dish out their windows, creating a very early version of take-out food with edible doggie bags.
 
ADAM: And that’s how Bunny Chow proved racism creates great things! What a history lesson. Next we gulped down a rich oxtail potjiekos, aka stew, sucking the soft beef off the tail bones. Potjiekos (pronouced poi-kei-kos) literally translates into “pot food” and is the name for any stew cooked in a—yup—potjie. The potjies are three-legged cast iron kettles that range in size from Adorable (fits in your palm) to Holy Crap (gives you a hernia). They were originally used by wagon-train-traveling Afrikaans settlers, who never bothered to clean out the pots. Instead they’d leave in all leftover stew, then simply toss in more ingredients before every meal to replenish what had been eaten the night before. We sincerely hope that’s not how potjiekos is made at Madiba.

LAURA: A braai (pronounced bry ) is a South African barbecue with customs similar to what we see here in the States. (Families do it on weekends and holidays; men helm the grill, women make the sides; Father’s Day cards make cliched jokes about it.) For our braai experience, we tried boerewors (above), a beef sausage with Dutch heritage that’s formed into a glorious spiral and tossed on the braai until the casing crisps up. It was served with a mild cornmeal porridge called pap (think grits, but thicker), which is the go-to side for all meats (“vleis”) ‘round these parts.
 
ADAM: How much do South Africans love their pap and vleis? Well, a local radio station recently created a song parody called “Pap En Vleis.” It was set to the tune of Lady Gaga’s “Poker Face.” Obviously. Check out an delightfully weird, choreographed, costumed performance below. We’re fairly certain this is what they do for half-time entertainment at every World Cup game. South Africa is awesome!
 

Eats Deets
Madiba Restaurant
195 Dekalb Avenue (Fort Greene, Brooklyn)
(718) 855-9190

Postcard from South Africa

To get our World Cupped, we hit up Brooklyn’s outpost of South Africa, the restaurant Madiba. While there, owner Mark Henegan showed us a potjie (above), the three-legged cast iron pot traditionally used to cook stew. Then he filled us in on the most awesomely alarming South African item on the menu: Monkey Gland Sauce.

“We tell people that we rip out a monkey’s glands then cook them, but that’s not true,” he explained. “No one’s sure where the name monkey gland sauce came from, but one story is that it originated when a big French chef came to Johannesburg. While he wasn’t paying attention, someone put fruit into his red wine reduction. He sipped it and shouted, “What is this?!? Monkey gland sauce?!?” But then he realized he loved it. So they put monkey gland sauce on the menu that night and it got written up in all the newspapers. That’s how monkey gland sauce became famous—it was the mixture of a well-known chef from France and the local people in the kitchen.”

At Madiba, they serve monkey gland sauce on ribs. Had it been made of real monkeys, we totally would have gunned it. Instead we opted for an even better main course. One made of bunnies! (Kinda.) Full post on the South African foods we actually ate coming later this week…

Yours in Mastication,
Laura & Adam