What I Cook When I'm Not at Home

What is the one thing that everybody cooks when they're on vacation at a friend's house or in Airbnb? Eggs, obviously. But breakfast is too easy. What do you make after breakfast? I'll put the short answer up front. Find a recipe for Adana kebab, cook it at home. You will quickly learn how tasty it is and how versatile it can be, especially if you're an American viewer, because our country is woefully behind on kebab culture. What might also become apparent is that it's so easy to make that you can reliably, perfectly make it again and again, even if you're in someone else's kitchen with limited access to ingredients and tools. I say follow someone else's recipe because I don't use nor have a written recipe myself. I play fast and loose with the composition of this dish at the cost of diminished authenticity. Let me show you

what I mean. First, into a food processor goes a small onion, a small handful of parsley, and one big chopped up red bell pepper. I pulverize everything into a chunky, speckled paste, drain out as much liquid as I can, and then return the mix to the processor, this time with a pound of ground beef added, as well as one heaping teaspoon of kosher salt, and about a tablespoon of kebab seasoning. This is my favorite kebab seasoning. This one is available at Costco right now, and you could always just make one from scratch. Give everything a 1-minute long spin one last time. This is a minced meat that is ready to be turned into a delicious meal. It took just six ingredients. That means if I'm at an Airbnb in a foreign state with truly zero groceries, I can grocery shop without racking up a $100 tab. The yield of this meat scales very easily. 1 lb is enough for my child, my wife, and myself, but I could double or triple it to feed a crowd, be I on vacation with friends. And even though I've been lucky enough to encounter a food processor, blender, or even a slap chop in other people's kitchens, you can simply mince everything with a big knife and mix it together with your hands in a bowl. Today, I used 90% lean grass-fed beef because I don't want as much grease as an 80/20 blend, and I do want a little bit of that grass-fed gamey funk. Lamb would be more traditional. You may use either or Impossible Meat or ground chicken if anyone in the house has a dietary restriction. The protein is replaceable as is almost everything else. Replace the small onion with the other half of a big onion that you had in the fridge or with two shallots. Sure, I could pack a dime bag of Urfa Biber in my carry-on, but the whole spice blend can be subbed out for something else that contains cumin and chili and garlic. I've gone to Sprouts and purchased a small amount of pay-by-the-ounce store brand Fiesta blend seasoning for 25 cents in the bulk bin area. The point I'm trying to make is that even though we all know that ground meat is an inexpensive, flexible ingredient, this particular application also makes it intensely flavorful and juicy. The question then becomes how

will you prepare it? When pressed onto skewers, these are ready to be prepared in the typical delectable manner, grilled over an open flame. The beef fat will drip into the fire and vaporize upwards coating the meat in that incomparable grilled meat flavor. That's something that I will do at home, but the last big reason why I opt to cook this when I'm out of town is that the kebab meat is happy to take on many forms. You could broil them to imitate a grill, but I don't want to set off the smoke alarm. Instead, I will opt for long skewerless patties that I can sear in the pan. There's enough fat in the meat to not need supplemental oil, so if I'm staying in a house with no canola in the pantry, it's not a problem. These are fantastic in flatbread as a wrap, but you wouldn't be wrong for noticing it looks like a long hamburger and opting to cook a large patty into a fusion cuisine Adana kebab burger. I'm showing you a nice presentation garnished with sumac onions, but the meat itself really is flavorful enough to stand alone. If minimum effort was your goal, you could always smash it into kibble as if it were taco meat and serve it over rice or as lettuce wraps. To me, the sweet spot between effort and deliciousness is always going to land right on arayes. I've already covered them on the channel before, you just smear the meat in between pita and cook it in a pan or a grill or an oven. This is exactly the same deal, but with Adana kebab filling rather than kofta kebab. I'd like to put aside for a moment the framing of this subject as something to cook while on vacation because if you're picking up what I'm putting down, you see the potential of Adana kebab and you want to taste what it's like for it to operate at full power level with the flavor and the texture and the novelty sliders all slammed to the right. You should follow this recipe Middle Eats put out for Beyti kebab. It's done in this method that's approachable at home, rolled up between layers of store-bought filo dough. You arrange them in a dish cut side up and bake them at 350 for 25 minutes. Take them out, pour a tomato and pepper sauce all over each one, and then bake it for 20 more minutes. I'll link his original post in the description. Video came out in 2024 and I remember that because when I watched it and made it, it was the tastiest thing I ate that year. Incredible flavor combinations in that one. And so yes, even though I

think a bowl of Adana kebab meat is among the most advantageous things to prepare on vacation, it's also one of the tastiest things to prepare any day. I'm not good enough at contemporary video ideation to be the one to do it, but one of these days a zoomer with a broccoli haircut is going to find a way to position this particular ground meat preparation as a mega viral life hack. You remember the parchment paper gyro method, the smash burger taco moment, the current lazy wonton trend? What do these all have in common? They're all taking full advantage of flavorful ground meat's propensity to come together into a meal that's asymmetrically beneficial for the requisite effort. That belabor language is precisely why it can't be me who starts the wave. I just can't simplify. Please go make this food. Look her genuinely.

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