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Ah, the humble carrot. Is there anything this wonder vegetable can't do? I might be giving carrots too much credit here, but it's hard not to with a dish like SWEET CARROT & GARLIC LABNEH. Finely cut carrots and garlic, sauteed in very nice olive oil until soft, then folded into very thick yogurt called labneh (and I make my own labneh, thank you very much.) The result is savory while retaining the carrot's natural sweetness, rich thanks to that homemade labneh, and wonderful when spread onto thin pieces of flatbread, which I'll also be including. This is an unexpected, but quite easy to like, way to start the meal this week.

I hemmed and hawed about which main dish to make this week. There are too many to choose from, each one better than the last. Then it hit me, I should bring back a classic, home cooking style dish that I haven't prepared in forever, something that captures the soul of the cuisine and also feels a touch special. That dish is TURKISH STUFFED EGGPLANT, and it's pretty much how it sounds, with the magic being in the details as always. This dish is often done with ground meat, but I think we can improve on that by making a proper, flavorful braised preparation beforehand and shredding that up. So I'll start by braising beef with lots of different spices until it's nice and tender, then I'll shred that and add in a bit of the cooking liquid so that it's the proper level of saucy. Whew, step one down. Next, I'll split eggplants in half, roast those with some olive oil and seasonings until they are soft and delicious, and now we have a tasty platform for our tasty braised beef. Then, for my final trick, I'll stuff the eggplants with this wonderful braised beef, top that with some nicely caramelized onions and toasted almonds, add a touch of lemon, and pop those into a pan for you to heat in your oven. This is the sort of dish that takes all day (or MORE than a day) when you're making it at home, but you get all the greatness and none of the kitchen hassle. Plus it's really tasty.

If you know me, you know how I feel about the word "salad". I use it all the time of course, but it bothers me that this word can also mean those wimpy, forgettable side dish things at a big catered dinner. CHOPPED TOMATO & WALNUT GAVURDAGI SALAD is a salad worthy of the name, and is far from wimpy but still serves as our light and refreshing item when looking at the menu as a whole. This will make a fantastic accompaniment to the main dish, and here's how it works: fine-chopped tomatoes and cucumber, some toasted walnuts, and a savory red pepper vinaigrette along with pomegranate molasses and a bunch of mixed herbs. This dish is a standard to serve with things like shawarma and kebab, but the subtle improvements I've made will take this straight out of "side dish" territory and firmly into "memorable" territory.

I'd get in trouble with the food police if I didn't serve a rice dish with a menu like this, but plain old rice just won't do. BROWN BUTTER RICE PILAF WITH ORZO, however, will do quite nicely. This is sort of an "upgraded standard" type of dish... rice pilaf is a super traditional thing to serve with almost any meal, and it's usually toasted pasta (orzo in our case) with a decent amount of butter and fluffy long grain rice. By making a few details nicer and adding a few things, we can make this a dish worthy of being written on a menu. Toasted orzo and rice of course, but then we'll use brown butter for its nutty goodness, make the pilaf itself with a homemade stock, and finish things off with some fresh dill, very nice paprika, and chickpeas for a little texture contrast. I won't pretend that I'm reinventing rice over here, but this is GOOD rice.

Confession time: I like good baklava, but I do not like having to make it. Baklava is the type of dish that's great when you have an army of grandmas to knock out the tedious preparation, but I'm short on my grandma army recruitment numbers. Is there a way we can have a "baklava" dessert, still keep things interesting, but make it in a way that doesn't require military intervention? There is, and I'm calling it "BAKLAVA" BREAD PUDDING. This is the soul of baklava merged into the body of great bread pudding, and the outcome feels modern and classic at the same time. I'll start with my standard sweet custard of course, bread, a big handful of ground pistachios, and a smidge of clove and orange blossom water. Then we bake that up to a nice tender golden brown, and serve it with some warm honey syrup to complete the picture. I won't say that this is BETTER than baklava, but it shares enough with the actual dessert while being something new and different. And who doesn't like bread pudding?