Pilaki (Turkish stew)

You know that you eat, sleep and dream food when you are constantly referring to and comparing real life events to MasterChef. And this time, I was faced with the Turkish mystery box challenge, featuring black-eyed peas and sivri peppers. Sometimes you pick a recipe and sometimes a recipe picks you!

It all started when I saw this enormous bunch of long, pointy, green peppers at the supermarket. They looked so good and were so inexpensive that I just grabbed them before taking a really good look at what they were. Well, actually, that’s not entirely true. I was recently discussing with a friend how, here in Sweden, many fruits and vegetables often have very vague names. That is, the supermarket simply labels them “tomatoes” and that’s it! Or maybe they’ll make a bit of an effort and call something “baking potatoes” or “risotto rice”, letting you know how it’s meant to be cooked or what kind of dish it’s meant for.

So the sign next to these peppers simply read “spetspaprika” which literally means pointy peppers. That’s great. I can see they are pointy, but thanks for trying. On the bag itself it  simply said “sivri”, and when upon closer inspection I could see that the country of origin was Turkey. OK, so I have some pointy green peppers from Turkey – in a bag, so I can’t really smell them or take a discreet nibble or anything. Still, I wanted ’em, so I bought ’em. I continued perusing the fresh produce department, and bought some “hard potatoes”, “onions in a bunch” and “vine tomatoes”.

Later at home, when I was trying to decide what to make, and had settled on some kind of vegetable stew, I saw that I had a large jar of black-eyed peas and thought that would make the perfect protein for my dish. So I had some potatoes, carrots, onions, beans and oh yeah, those crazy peppers. I went to my trusty computer, Googled green sivri pepper and learned that they are a Turkish heirloom variety that is hundreds of years old. “Now we’re getting somewhere,” I thought, “I’m going to get a really good description of what these are.”

I read on and learned that they have a slight sweetness and can range from mild to a very hot cayenne heat. Hang on a minute “from mild to very hot”? Hmm, so there are different varieties? I Googled on, and read this: The hotness of each pepper is inconsistent, ranging from mild to burning hot. That’s when I realized that there are secret forces at work that simply do NOT want us to know what kind of vegetable we are buying or how hot a given variety of pepper is. Many of the sivri images online were of red peppers, so I guessed that mine were younger, and milder in general. I carefully took a bite of one and then another, and sure enough, one was sweet while the next definitely had some zip to it!

I capitulated. I chopped and diced, sautéed and simmered, and in the end, my mystery box challenge turned out to be a very tasty pilaki or Turkish-style stew, with lots of flavor and pleasant, mostly mild heat that varied from bite to bite. I didn’t even know that’s what I was making – it was like the recipe had chosen itself. But hey, sometime you just have to go with the flow!