Two months have passed since Cynthia nominated Farida from Farida’s Azerbaijani Cookbook as my next participant in this Edible Lives series of conversations with food bloggers. The delay is all my fault – I went off to France and got carried away with being in holiday mode, and then my emails ended up in Farida’s spam and delayed our conversation further until they could be found again. Thank you for bearing with me throughout this time, Farida!
All images courtesy of Farida
Before I met Farida, I knew little (aka nothing) about the food and culture of Azerbaijan. Through her blog and our conversation together, I have discovered not only a wide array of temptingly delicious recipes but also an affectionate portrait of Farida’s homeland. As Farida writes, it is traditional for the doors of people in Azerbaijan to be always open to guests. I’m honoured to have been invited to take my own place at Farida’s table in her journey to recapture and present the familar flavours and tastes of her childhood memories.
Here, then, is the story of Farida’s Azerbaijani Cookbook …
How did you get the idea of starting a food blog?
I got the idea to start a food blog a little after I took on writing an Azerbaijani cookbook. One day, I happened to listen to a radio program that talked about blogs and this was actually the first time I’d ever heard the term. I did a search on the Internet and was quite impressed by the number of food blogs out there and became immediately fascinated with the whole idea of sharing the recipes and stories online. A good friend of mine encouraged me to start a blog too and I didn’t wait any longer. My blog is primarily focusing on Azerbaijani cuisine, but I also post other recipes I love which are not particularly Azerbaijani.
Were there any food blogs in particular that inspired you at the start?
I can’t say that one or two blogs inspired me in particular, because there are lots of nice ones out there and a little bit from all of them somewhat inspired me to start my own blog. I especially loved the ones with ethnic foods from around the world. I find that one can learn so much about a culture by learning new recipes and by reading the stories behind them.
Yes, Cynthia commented on how she learns something new each time she reads your blog, yet at the same time she notices similarities between your culture and hers through the food you describe. Have you found that writing for your blog has helped you in the process of working on your cookbook in any way?
Writing on my blog absolutely helped me on working on my cookbook, and in more than one way. Since my cookbook is going to be a mix of food and culture, I wanted to know what aspects of the culture people would be more interested in knowing, what exactly draws their attention about Azerbaijani food, what it is that that they would like to learn more about and I found that comments I have been receiving on my blog are really helpful in this respect.
Stuffed Grape Leaves
Through my blog, I have also met wonderful people who have volunteered to test the recipes that are going to be in my cookbook. And what is most important is that receiving feedback on my posts from all over the world really motivates me to go that extra mile and work harder on my cookbook.
You say on your blog that you only cooked occasionally when you were living in Azerbaijan. How did you go about compiling your recipes and putting together all of the background information that brings your posts to life so vividly after your move to California?
Yes, it is true that I didn’t cook much back in Azerbaijan. My cooking was limited to salads, appetizers and some cakes and sweet pastries that my family made quite often, especially for special occasions, like birthdays or holidays. But I was familiar with food. I saw food being cooked on a daily basis. I was familiar with ingredients and which ingredients were used in what dish, but I never put it into practice.
This is to say that I grew up in a culture where food is a very important part. Azerbaijanis do not eat out much except for special occasions, when extended families get together to celebrate an occasion. There is somebody in every family who cooks every single day. It is usually a mother or a grandmother. Since receiving a higher education is very important in Azerbaijan, parents would rather see their children reading a book and going to libraries than spending their time in the kitchen cooking for the family, or better yet, inventing new dishes. Such was my case too.
Carrot Salad
I would like to mention that I’ve always had a passion for recipes and I’ve been collecting them since I was about 11-12. Sounds contradictory, right? I know, but this is true. I kept collecting and being fascinated by all the ingredients and methods of cooking described in recipes, but I rarely used them. All until I came to the US in 2002. Away from Azerbaijan and my family, I missed homemade food and had no other choice than to begin cooking myself. Later came the idea for a cookbook, then for a food blog. Most background information on recipes I provide on my blog is coming from my everyday exposure to those foods back in Azerbaijan. Today I cook Azerbaijan and Turkish food on a daily basis, and I love to experiment with other international foods as time permits.
What do your family and friends back in Azerbaijan think of your food blog and does it help you to keep in touch at all?
My family was a little surprised when I told them I would write a cookbook and start a blog, but they were very happy and supportive of the idea and believed in me from day one. My friends support my initiative too.
Shekerbura - Making a Novruz Dessert Step by Step
I receive emails from friends or relatives who have tried some of the recipes from my blog and it is especially encouraging to hear that my recipes actually work. So, in a sense, my blog does help me stay connected with people I love but who are far away from me. More than anything, my blog helps me stay connected with my roots and with the culture I grew up on.
As well as staying connected to Azerbaijan through the recipes you post on your blog, you also say that you like to experiment with other international foods and to write about these too. What are your favourite sources of recipes for these other foods?
I love to learn about cultures though their foods. In the past, I used to experiment with them more often but now that I am concentrating on my cookbook, I have less time to do so. My favorite sources for the recipes are ethnic cookbooks and blogs. I am an avid reader of quite a few blogs on ethnic cuisines, and here are some of my favorites: Marija’s Palachinka on Serbian cuisine, Peter’s Kalofogas on Greek cuisine, Sunita’s Sunita’s World, Cynthia’s Tastes Like Home on Caribbean cuisine, Zerrin’s Give Recipe and Banu’s Almost Turkish Recipes, both on Turkish cuisine.
Another favorite blog of mine is Elise’s Simply Recipes. Elise is one of the bloggers who warmly welcomed me to the blogging world where I had just stepped back then. Her blog is a fantastic source for great recipes.
In terms of your own culture, what have you discovered that people like and want to learn about Azerbaijani food?
I think people who visit my blog, particularly non-Azerbaijanis, like to read stories behind traditional recipes. This is where they can learn about a particular tradition, or a ceremony, or just how and when a certain dish is eaten. Anything that would help them catch a glimpse of culture along with the recipe sounds interesting to readers.
Ceremonial Rice Pilaff
How close are you to completing your book?
My goal is to have it published by the end of this year, or early next year, at the latest. I am almost done with the recipe writing part of it and what is left is mostly the cultural, historical information that will appear at the beginning of the book as well as throughout it.
What’s your own favourite recipe on your blog, and what’s your most popular post?
My favorite recipe on my blog is for stuffed grape leaves and this is only because it happens to be my favorite dish.
The most popular post must be that that on zebra cake.
Zebra Cake
Although it is not a traditional Azerbaijani cake (most cakes are a European import to Azerbaijan but Azerbaijanis have wholeheartedly accepted them into their cuisine) it is definitely not a stranger in the country. I have received numerous comments on that particular post and continue to receive emails from people who have tried the cake. This is a great honor and I am very flattered that my zebra cake is being made in different parts of the world.
And finally, who do you nominate to be the next person I invite to talk to me about their food blog, and why?
I would like to nominate Marija from Palachinka to be your next interviewee. Marija and I met (virtually) when I had just started my blog and have become good friends ever since. Her blog has taught me a lot about Serbian food. Marija is an amazing photographer and food stylist. Her blog is truly inspirational.
As is your own, Farida 
. Thank you ever so much for talking to me. I’m looking forward to being able to buy your book and reading more of your fascinating stories behind the food of Azerbaijan.
At the end of her birthday party last year, M announced that she would be having a unicorn party for her next birthday. I didn’t realise that she was absolutely serious about this. I thought, “It’s a whole year away – she’s bound to change her mind.” But no, for a whole year M has stuck to her original intention and has been counting down the days until her unicorn party.
You could argue that I’ve had a whole year to prepare, so why the sudden rush to get everything ready last week? Well, M may have had a solidly clear idea of the grand theme for her party, but she left the finer details entirely up to me. Not wanting to disappoint, I threw myself into turning our house into an enchanted forest in the hope that any passing unicorns might be tempted to pop in on the big day. We made glittery trees and rainbow streamers while M’s big sister created a welcoming poster for the front door.
Last year, M set her heart on a cake she saw in a book by Debbie Brown (here’s a warning to parents – only ever let your children see pictures of cakes that you’re happy to make yourself). Four being so much more grownupperer than three, M has now thankfully entered the chocolate frosting and smarties stage. I’m not so very far removed from the icing sugar cloud of despair that I miss those fondant modelling sessions yet … I’m quite happy to be doing chocolate and smarties.
I couldn’t resist giving the birthday girl a little surprise, though. From the outside, M’s cake looked perfectly normal (in a homemade sort of way) – a magical plastic unicorn standing amid swirls of white chocolate buttercream and scattered smarties. M’s seven little party guests looked on dutifully as M blew out her candles and I took a knife to cut into the cake.
Hesitating before plunging in to make the first slice, I asked them all, “Do you know what happens when a unicorn stands on top of a birthday cake?”
“No,” they whispered with wide eyes.
“He makes a rainbow,” I told them, cutting into the cake.
“Wow!”
The next day, M sidled up to me and asked, “Mummy, how did the unicorn do that to my cake?”
Well, if there’s by any chance anyone left in the blogosphere who hasn’t come across a rainbow cake before now, I’ll explain my own take on the concept … just in case a unicorn happens to pass by and stand on another little girl’s birthday cake 
.
I’m not sure who had the original idea – there’s a box-mix version doing the rounds that appears to have started with this thread in the dubiously-named ‘Something Awful’ forums. Rejecting the layered box-mix and diet soda variety however, I based my own rainbow cake recipe on Farida’s beautiful Zebra Cake (stay tuned for more from Farida in an upcoming post).
I followed Farida’s instructions to make a yellow cake batter (whichever basic cake recipe you choose, it’s important that it’s one in which the batter doesn’t mix about too much during baking or you’ll end up with a muddy brown cake instead of a rainbow). Then, instead of dividing it into two parts and colouring one part with cocoa as Farida did, I divided the mixture between seven bowls (roughly 4 tablespoons of batter in each) and used my fondant paste dyes to colour each portion a different colour of the rainbow.
I then poured each rainbow batter in turn (starting with red) into the centre of my prepared cake pan. As Farida says, don’t wait for each colour to spread out before starting with the next – just pour the batter into the centre of the pan, then pour the next colour right on top and then the colour after that without waiting for each to spread fully. The weight of each batter pushes the previous colour out further and, as long as you keep a steady hand with the pouring, they all sort themselves out.
And it’s as simple as that.
I found out in the school playground this morning that one of the guests has kept her special piece of rainbow cake carefully wrapped up since the party so that she can show it to everyone who visits.
I remember the very first time I ever tasted elderflower cordial. It was an extremely hot summer and I had traveled the great distance between the North and the South of England (which is a far greater divide psychologically than physically, as anyone from ‘Up North’ will confirm) to be with my boyfriend during the holidays. As the sun beat down on the yellowing grass, we sipped cool, refreshing drinks of elderflower cordial and loitered with our fellow bellringers in the shady ringing chambers of old church towers.
The taste of elderflower cordial today transports me straight back to that time. Only now, the boyfriend is my husband and we have three young children who are already in love with the smell and taste of elderflowers.
Although elderflowers grow abundantly in the hedgerows of Devon, this is the first year that we have collected the flowers to make our own cordial. It was O’s idea last weekend.
My collection of cookbooks on the kitchen bookshelves yielded two recipes for elderflower cordial. The first was by Sophie Grigson and the second was in The Cook’s Scrapbook (a lovely book with a whole section on foods from the wild). At first sight, Sophie Grigson’s recipe seemed the more appealing as the elderflowers only required steeping overnight, rather than the five days called for in the second recipe. However, Sophie’s recipe also used relatively more sugar, and we wanted to avoid making the cordial too sickly sweet. In the end, we decided to combine the two recipes by using less sugar and straining the mixture after one day (largely through fears that it would become a mildewed pond if left for any longer).
Both recipes included citric acid, something which I do not happen to keep in ready supply. Apparently, this acts as a preservative so that the bottled cordial can be kept for up to a year. It also enhances the charateristic sour zing of the elderflowers.
Although citric acid is found naturally in the juice of the lemons that are also used in the recipes, it is in too small a quantity in lemons to provide a substitute for the amount of citric acid required – it would take about thirteen lemons to produce an equivalent amount of citric acid, something which would also override the essence of elderflower in the cordial.
Unfortunately, the larger chain pharmacy stores in the UK no longer stock citric acid because it can be used to make heroin more soluble. However, it is also used in wine-making so can be found in small quantities in home brewing shops. We tracked down a supply locally at Quay Side Easy Brew on the Historic Quay in Exeter.
If you haven’t yet made elderflower cordial, I can reassure you that it is simply the easiest thing to do. The most important part is to make sure that the flowers you gather are fresh and white and not creamy or brown, which means that you have to get the timing right – generally, the flowers will be at their best for only two weeks in the early summer of each year. Apparently, it’s also best not to pick blossoms from beside a road … a piece of advice that we didn’t follow to the letter, although the narrow Devon lanes we get around here could hardly be classified as major motorways .
Elderflower Cordial
2 kg / 4 lb 6 oz caster sugar
1700 ml / 3 pints boiling water
90 g / 3 oz citric acid
30 large elderflower heads, flowers snipped from stems
3 lemons, sliced
Put the sugar into a large bowl and add the boiling water. Stir until all of the sugar has dissolved, then add the citric acid, elderflowers and lemons (we were concerned about the many bugs that seemed to be living in the flowers, so we put the pot on the oven top and boiled everything up for a minute or so … I haven’t seen anywhere that recommends you do this, but it certainly didn’t impair the flavour of our finished cordial at all).
Cover the bowl and leave to stand at room temperature for 24 hours.
Scald a sieve, jug and muslin cloth with boiling water, then strain the cordial through the muslin (double-thickness) into the jug.
Clean and scald 3 or 4 bottles (we used wine bottles with screw caps). Pour the strained cordial into the bottles. Cork or cap the bottles, then store in the fridge.
To drink, dilute one part cordial with two or three parts water (still or sparkling), tonic, soda or gin.
I really wasn’t sure what to call this. To my mind, the base is more of a chocolate truffle or mousse than a brownie, but Matt Tebbutt calls it a brownie, so who am I to object? It is his recipe, after all.
Let me back-track slightly. The idea for this ‘puddle cake’ started to grow when I came across both Matt’s recipe for Espresso and Walnut Brownies and Emily’s recipe for Chocolate-Peanut Butter Marble Cake on the same day last week (I actually found Matt’s brownie recipe whilst browsing cookbooks in the supermarket – it’s in his book, Cooks Country, and is very slightly different from the version I found online). The brownies were introduced as ‘one of the most popular puds on the menu at the restaurant’, whilst in Emily’s recipe I discovered what she describes as ‘the most delicious chocolate frosting in in the world’.
Knowing that we were soon to be visited by chocolate-pudding-loving friends from Bournemouth, I was keen to take advantage of their tastebuds by trying out my germinating idea on them …
To put it simply, I was wondering, “Why not bake these brownies in a springform pan and fill the part where it dipped in the middle with Emily’s frosting?” Okay, it’s hardly the thought of a genius, but this idea of mine just wouldn’t go away. As the weekend approached, I even began to dream of chocolate puddles and molten brownies.
I very nearly missed my opportunity. Even on the Monday morning when O had taken the children out of the house to give me a chance to get things ready, I still wasn’t sure that I would really go ahead and make the cake. This was partly because I was supposed to be making gingersnaps to go with the lemon-meringue ice-cream and poached rhubarb we were having for dessert in the evening, but also because I knew my savoury-toothed husband would be less than pleased to return to the copious amounts of washing-up I knew this cake would generate!
Needless to say, the chocolate brownie puddle cake found a way of coming into existence once the gingersnaps were safely cooling. I don’t think there were even too many dirty pots left by the time O returned, but that may be my guilty conscience putting a glossy spin on the proceedings.
I was pleased that it did grind me down into subservience, though. As I wrote at the beginning of this post, it wasn’t really a brownie as such. But it was certainly chocolate heaven.
Chocolate Brownie Puddle Cake (adapted from a recipe by Matt Tebbett and filled with Emily’s most delicious chocolate frosting)
For the base:
300 g (10 1/2 oz) plain chocolate
150 g (5 1/4 oz) unsalted butter
150 g (5 1/4 oz) light brown muscovado sugar)
4 medium eggs
2 oz raisins soaked in hot coffee
150 g (5 1/4 oz) mascarpone cheese
Pre-heat the oven to 150 degrees C. Grease and baseline a 9″ round springform cake pan.
Melt the chocolate in a double boiler or microwave (I used to do it the first way, but it takes far less time in a microwave – you just need to be careful to stir it frequently and to take it out before all the chocolate has melted completely so the last lumps can melt in the residual heat).
Blend the butter and sugar in a food processor until they are fluffy and pale.
Add the eggs one at a time, whizzing to incorporate.
Drain the raisins and whizz them into the mixture.
Add the mascarpone cheese and whizz to combine.
Pour in the melted chocolate and give the whole thing a final quick whizz to fold everything together.
Scrape into the prepared cake pan and bake in the centre of the oven for 45 to 50 minutes. The centre will be dipped and look gooey, but will feel surprisingly firm and springy when you press it gently.
Leave to cool in the pan on a wire rack (don’t be tempted to speed up the cooling by putting it in the fridge – the texture will change from meltingly smooth to densely fudgy).
To assemble:
When the base has cooled to room temperature, remove the sides of the pan and fill the centre of the cake with a half-quantity of Emily’s most delicious chocolate frosting (or make the full amount of frosting and save the leftovers for something else). Decorate with grated chocolate.
Any leftovers can be kept in the fridge for a couple of days, although the texture will be different (and very delicious too, but in a fudgier way).
We journeyed tirelessly and brought the Queen of Cakes to our chateau in the heart of the Normandy countryside.
As evening drew close, we told stories of Parisian adventures while the little prince and princesses drifted sleepily into dreams of dashing duels and swirling sword dances on the steps of mediaeval castles.
A bracing breeze blew across the now-deserted beaches of Operation Overlord in the morning …
… and my elder princess tugged urgently on Rose’s sleeve to show her the marker she had found among the dunes.
We warmed our chilled toes and icy fingers back at the chateau by feasting on tender slices of magret of duck in an orange marmalade sauce. Throwing caution to the wind, the sauce-maker deftly pilfered Rose’s perfectly-fried pieces of garlic and was only spared an untimely death by the perfection of his sweet, griddled courgettes.
Our time together was filled with the yeasty aromas of freshly baked bread …
… the magical knotting of colourfully beaded strings …
… and the joyous convivial sounds of laughter on the terrace.
We visited the local outdoor market and discovered gastronomic riches among the brightly jewelled stalls.
After covertly sharing a crêpe swathed in deep, dark salted caramel …
… we approached the fish stall with anticipatory thoughts of the evening meal ahead.
“How should we cook a turbot?” we asked, looking with anxiety at its large, irregularly-shaped flat body.
“Dans une turbotière,” came the reply. Ah, how silly – of course, a pan shaped like a turbot would indeed be the simplest way of cooking such a fish.
We did not possess a pan shaped like a turbot.
“How else can we cook a turbot?” we asked.
“In white wine on a bed of onions and tomatoes, covered with foil and baked in the oven for thirty minutes at two hundred degrees centigrade,” came the reply. Our helpful fishmonger then offered to cut the fish into pieces so that such unfortunately turbotière-challenged people as ourselves could still enjoy the delicacies of its firm white flesh.
“A whole bottle of wine?” I asked Rose, watching helplessly.
“A whole bottle of wine,” she mercilessly replied.
Whilst too many cooks may sometimes spoil the broth …
… on this occasion a smooth, velvety sauce appeared wondrously from the strained and reduced juices of the baked fish and its voluptuous bed. With the addition of a large spoonful of thick, soft Normandy crème fraiche and some small pieces of butter, even those who normally disliked fish were nearly (but not quite wholly) converted.
The shadows lengthened, darkness fell and the moon rose over the chateau.
We packed our belongings once again and carried our fond memories home with us across the water.
Our time in France may have come to a close, but our adventures together in Devon were about to begin …
