It's no secret chefs don't get much time off--certainly not on holidays. And Valentine's Day is a biggie. Folks make reservations well in advance and snatch up flowers and confections to bring home to their loved ones. After chatting with some of my favorite local chefs, it became clear that Valentine's Day really is just another day and there are many occasions to sit down, toast one another, and prepare a special meal. I asked three simple questions to get to the heart of what a romantic day looks like in their world. Here's what I discovered.

Douglas Monsalud: Kitchenette SF
So Valentine’s Day. Or let’s just say, on a typical romantically-minded evening, tell us about what you and your partner like to cook/eat together at home?
We LOVE to make food that takes a while to cook so that we can hang out, talk while we cook, and drink good wine ; ) With that in mind, we have cooked everything from bouillabaisse to pozole, porchetta to pot roast. You know...simple, rustic, one-pot meals that are comfortable and really make you feel like you are home.

Favorite dessert?
Wow, favorite dessert is a tough one. I like desserts that are lighter and fruity...like the goats milk yoghurt panna cotta with blood orange compote that we've served at Heart Wine Bar. Similarly, I have always loved creme brulee and a nice, flaky crostata with a scoop of ice cream always gets my attention.

If you weren’t eating at home, where are a few of your favorite romantic spots in the Bay Area and why?
Aziza and Gitane ooze romance. They have great food and the atmosphere is at once exotic and warm. Also, I always think getting a dozen oysters from the Marshall Store up on Tomales Bay with a bottle of something bubbly and eating them on a bench overlooking the water is as sexy as it gets.

William Werner: Tell Tale Preserve Co.
So Valentine’s Day. Or let’s just say, on a typical romantically-minded evening, tell us about what you and your partner like to cook/eat together at home?
We don't get to spend a lot of time together as of late-- so usually a romantic dinner would consist of something simple, to spend more time together than in the kitchen, more than likely, champagne, oysters with lemon, market greens, a risotto of mushrooms and nettles, and of course chocolate (Valrhona feves straight from the bag).

Favorite dessert?
Of the moment: kishu mandarins.

If you weren’t eating at home, where are a few of your favorite romantic spots in the Bay Area and why?
Coi, for getting dressed and a luxurious, intimate evening of thoughtful food. Burgers and beer in the back corner booth at Bar Tartine for dressing down and hanging out.

Richie Nakano: Hapa Ramen
So Valentine’s Day. Or let’s just say, on a typical romantically-minded evening, tell us about what you and your partner like to cook/eat together at home?
When we're eating at home we keep it pretty simple: farro with roasted chicken, or an easy pasta. We also get treats from Fatted Calf: charcuterie, cheese, olives. We have a 9 month old son, so there's not a lot of quiet romantic evenings these days, but we do like to unwind with a bottle of kruner or falanghina.

Favorite dessert?
Anything from Humphrey Slocombe, or we'll get something from Tell Tale Preserve Co. and save it for that evening. That stuff is sinful.

If you weren’t eating at home, where are a few of your favorite romantic spots in the Bay Area and why?
Aziza always comes to mind, it's such a beautiful setting in there, and the food is really elegant. La Ciccia is really intimate also, but the sexiest place in town is the Flour & Water dough room. If you can snag a seat at a dinner in there...

Yigit Pura: Executive Pastry Chef, Taste Catering; Winner of Bravo's Top Chef Just Desserts
So Valentine’s Day. Maybe, like a lot of folks, you see it as any other day—but let’s just say, on a typical romantically-minded evening, tell us about what you and a date like to cook/eat together?
I think any day is a good day to be romantic. I would cook what I know they love and tickles their soft spot, even if it goes against my grain as a chef. I find just showing you paid attention will always get you brownie points.

Favorite dessert?
As cliché as it sounds, you can’t go wrong with chocolate. And I know there are myths around it but I still love a great chocolate soufflé. Be it a professional or home chef, it still gets people excited. Take it another step forward and make a really lovely salted caramel ice cream, and put a small scoop straight in the middle. The contrast between the hot and cold is always very sexy!

If you weren’t eating at home, where are a few of your favorite romantic spots in the Bay Area and why?
Lately I’m in LOVE with Barbacco. Modern and really beautiful ambiance, great service, and just really tasty bites, and very reasonably priced. Last time I ate there everything was so great, I am already looking forward to the next time.

Jessica Boncutter: Bar Jules
A typical romantically-minded meal?
That would have to be beef fillet roasted medium rare with salt roasted potatoes, baby carrots and horseradish cream.

Favorite Dessert?
Definitely finish it off with a chocolate pot de creme and a little Serge Gainsbourg on the record player!

If you weren’t eating at home, where are a few of your favorite romantic spots in the Bay Area and why?
Romantic places in the San Francisco Bay Area are upstairs at Chez Panisse for lunch or Manka's in Inverness for the night or Tosca for a drink or of course Bar Jules is so romantic. Chez Panisse lunch during the week feels like you are playing hooky from work with a lover. Manka's, well you just have to stay there one night to experience it. Tosca is a classic always feels special no matter who you are with.

We form relationships with cookbooks, even magazines. We read them for enrichment and entertainment, and we also use them for a purpose -- to prepare specific dishes we're compelled to try cooking. When we learn how to cook something, the dish becomes part of our lives, and we carry the memory of making it along with the memory of enjoying it. I associate particular volumes in my collection with distinct periods of my life. When I was fifteen or so, an old, half-shredded copy of Charmaine Solomon's The Complete Asian Cookbook intrigued me with vivid descriptions of unfamiliar cuisines and ingredients. Simultaneously, it vaguely repulsed me with its weirdly unappetizing photographs. A year ago, I constantly flipped through Chez Panisse Vegetables; three years earlier, I pored over the gorgeous Silver Spoon, for the past 50 years, Italy's best-selling cookbook. My cookbooks -- some of them once my mom's, and a few of those perhaps her mother's as well -- are literally marked with the meals they enabled. Splashes of red and brown fleck a Marcella Hazan recipe for tomato sauce with mushrooms. The entire taco section of Mexican Kitchen looks like a grisly watercolor. They have been touched by hands and worn. Corners have been folded over; pen scribbles show that proportions have, for better or for worse, been adjusted. Someone I know writes the date next to a recipe when she's cooking from it, so she can look back at the book years later and see when she's cooked what. I usually try to sort that out by just dating the smudges. It's a field begging for an expert.

Current wisdom, however, holds that cookbooks are becoming obsolete. While food blogs and recipe-rich websites like Epicurious have been around, relatively speaking, for ages, most web-savvy cooks -- skittish about the potential havoc erupting pots and mishandled cutlery are capable of causing -- balk at positioning their precious laptops too close to a rowdy kitchen fray. Enter the iPad. I should say from the outset that I will never get one. They look ridiculous, too large and unwieldy to be truly convenient, and too small for comfortable typing. I am biased against it, but I cannot help but believe a significant portion of my skepticism concerning the iPad stems from having absorbed and rejected most vehemently widespread allegations that it's destined to revolutionize the universe of cookbooks.

Articles and blog posts salivating over the possibilities the iPad poses are hard to miss. Summarizing more than a few of those I've read would take a while. In late April, Gizmodo editor Wilson Rothman ably broke down the app onslaught in a New York Times Diner's Journal column, highlighting the best of what newly-minted iPad owners can expect from the warm plastic tablets: apps like Epicurious and BigOven brimming with grocery list-making functions and interactive aids paving the way for digital app-ified versions of seminal cookbooks.

While at least one person has proven enthusiastic enough to install an iPad in his kitchen cabinet, app-mania drives me a little nuts -- and not just because I can't afford to spend half a grand on a gadget. I can't deny that it must be nice to cook with such a wealth of information at one's greasy fingertips, but there's something so temporary and soul-less about technology's ability to put reams of information into a very small space. I can draw an obvious parallel to collecting vinyl. I own an iPod shuffle I bought for $50 three years ago, but I still purchase vinyl records, and won't stop -- even though digital music is, at this point, practically free. As a matter of fact, I don't feel like I actually own an album unless I have it on vinyl. It's not simply a proprietary longing; without the actual record, music feels ephemeral to me, as if it might suddenly blow away. The comparison doesn't entirely hold up though: Vinyl records actually sound better than mp3s of the same songs, whereas a recipe's usefulness doesn't depend on its packaging, particularly when an iPad can call up ingredient profiles, recipes, and instructional videos with a few brisk clicks. The truth is usefulness doesn't really encompass the point of a cookbook. Like album art, a cookbook can be stylish, beautiful, and evocative -- something people want to display, cherish and share. Any publishers of cookbooks banking on digital downloads down the road shouldn't forget this.

If their cookbook lending library is any indication, the owners of the newish Local Mission Eatery, on 24th St. near Folsom, probably feel the same way. For an annual fee of $35, members can borrow a book a week, providing they follow a highly generous set of rules. With titles like Ferran Adria's A Day at El Bulli, Grant Achatz's Alinea, and a multitude of Craig Claiborne volumes, possibilities run the gamut from fanciful and fantastic to immensely practical. Importantly though, the library applies a dose of community consciousness to the cookbook form, emphasizing that the sharing of a valued text among members of a community makes for shared experiences too. It localizes and articulates a larger phenomenon. When you borrow a cookbook and cook a recipe, you're immediately tied to everyone else who cooks that recipe. Yes, there are apps for that too -- features that illuminate what people in close geographic proximity are cooking -- but those are poor substitutes for dripping sauce on the same page.

Two years ago, my girlfriend and I combined our cookbook collections and stacks of food magazines along with our books and records. Since leaving home, I've bought cookbooks of my own to supplement those pinched from the old homestead. Lately, I've bought some with my girlfriend too. In time, the collection will swell further, and the rows of books will require more shelves. Big, heavy cookbooks take up a lot of space. They don't blink, come to life, or talk to you. They're just cardboard and paper -- fusions of inanimate ingredients that readily fall apart and rot. Still, I imagine they'll still last longer than an iPad's hard-drive -- in every sense.

On Sunday, May 16th, Meals on Wheels of San Francisco will be throwing its 23rd Annual Star Chefs and Vintners Gala at Fort Mason's Festival Pavilion. The gala is a benefit for San Francisco's homebound seniors, and is the organization's largest fundraiser of the year.

Nancy Oakes of Boulevard will be returning for her 7th year as Gala Chef Chair -- it will be her 22nd year participating in the benefit. She will be leading an illustrious line-up of more than 70 of the Bay Area's finest chefs. Who says too many cooks in the kitchen is a bad thing?

Among the chefs participating in this year's gala are: Mourad Lahlou (Aziza), Jeff Banker/Lori Baker (Baker & Banker), Daniel Patterson (Coi), Douglas Keane/Nick Peyton (Cyrus), Jan Birnbaum (Epic Roasthouse), Thomas McNaughton (Flour + Water), Chris Cosentino (Incanto), Staffan Terje (Perbacco), Laurence Jossel (Nopa / Nopalito), Richard Reddington (REDD), Charles Phan (The Slanted Door), and Mark Sullivan (Spruce).

Talk about a culinary dream team, huh?

With so many all-stars on board, the meal will no doubt be stellar. I asked Oakes what it's like organizing such a massive undertaking with so much talent involved. She responded, "First and foremost, we are so fortunate to be in the Bay Area. So many [of our talented chefs] say yes."

Logistically, the evening will begin with an hors d'oeuvre "grazer" and wine reception, featuring creations from more than 30 chef and wineries. Following will be a three-course, sit-down meal. Oakes explained, the chefs have been grouped together to form 8 groups total. Each group will prepare its own menu for its assigned seating area. "The goal is to let the chefs be who they are," she said. "With each group cooking for about 100 people, it's important that they are able to put something out that they are proud of…and of course, to have fun." Chefs with similar cooking styles will be grouped together, and at least one veteran gala chef will be placed on each team.

Also, with more than 75 of California's leading vintners participating in the gala, there will be plenty of wine to pair with all that fantastic food. And in case you're still feeling thirsty, a special cocktail bar manned by beloved bartenders, Scott Beattie (Hangar One), Jon Gasparini (Rye), Scott Baird & Aaron Smith (15 Romolo) and Daniel Hyatt (The Alembic Bar) will serve up classic spirits and exotic concoctions.

The evening will culminate with a lavish dessert reception, featuring sweet treats from Sara Spearin (Dynamo Donuts), Jake Godby (Humphry Slocombe) and Bill Corbett (Coi & Il Cane Rosso), just to name a few.

Let's not forget about the benefit aspect of this whole shindig. Both a live and silent auction will be held, during which guests will have the opportunity to bid on a number of lavish prizes (food, wine, and luxury-themed). Guests will also have the chance to pledge donations to the "Fund-A-Route" campaign, which goes towards funding an entire meal delivery route for the next year. Last year's gala raised a grand total of $1.1 million.

"Providing nourishing meals and supportive services for San Francisco's seniors is of utmost importance during these trying economic times," said Ashley McCumber, Executive Director of Meals On Wheels of San Francisco. "With the generosity of these world-class chefs and wineries, we are able to provide 440,000 meals to seniors in San Francisco."

Tickets are pricey, but if you have deep pockets or know someone who does, encourage them to wine and dine for a good cause.

Individual tickets are priced at $400, with patron levels ranging from $1,500 to $20,000. To reserve tickets or for more information, call 415-343-1280 or visit www.mowsf.org.

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While the menus have yet to be finalized, I'm betting that we can expect to see lots of local spring bounty. Think asparagus, strawberries, baby carrots, fava beans, fresh, light, vibrant flavors. Here's a sneak peek at a dish Chris Cosentino (Incanto) is preparing:

Fava Bean and Strawberry Salad with Pecorino
Recipe courtesy of Chris Cosentino, Executive Chef of Incanto & Co-founder of Boccalone

Serves: 6

Ingredients:
2 cups shelled fresh fava beans [about 2 pounds of favas in their pods]
2 cups strawberries, trimmed and quartered
1 bunch wild rucola or arugula
Pecorino cheese
Juice of 1 lemon
¼ cup balsamic vinegar
4 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
Kosher or sea salt, to taste
Coarse ground black pepper, to taste

Preparation:
1. Bring a pot of water to boil, season with salt, blanch the shelled favas for about 1 minute then transfer to an ice bath seasoned with one teaspoon of salt so as not to overcook.
2. Remove the skins of the larger favas and discard, the smaller ones don’t need to be removed as they are not tough or bitter. Place the favas in a mixing bowl, then set aside.
3. Add the strawberries to the fava beans. Season with salt and fresh ground black pepper. Add the rucola or arugula.
4. Dress with a splash of lemon juice, balsamic vinegar, and olive oil, toss to incorporate all the ingredients. Put on a platter or on individual plates.
5. Using a vegetable peeler, peel curls of pecorino on top and serve.

In July 2009, Lev Grossman wrote of Bourdain in Time:

"It was invisible then. Now we recognize it right away: this is Anthony Bourdain's world...He changed our whole cultural idea of what a kitchen is. Pre-Bourdain, it was a warm, cozy, maternal place. Now it's a profane, brutal, masculine crucible, where human frailty is rendered away like so much tasty bacon fat."

Of course, Kitchen Confidential didn't tell chefs anything they didn't already know. I also doubt the book would have been such a sensation had it not arrived at a time when cooking and eating were becoming popular fodder for entertainment on the Food Network, and chefs were more and more in the public eye. Today, celebrity chefs are brands -- swollen, polished amplifications of the managerial personalities they cultivated actually manning kitchens. I'm not trying to write a college paper here, but I have noticed (as have many others) that nearly all of the high-profile celebrity chefs are men. While female Food Network hosts -- like Rachael, Giada, and the newly minted Melissa-- focus on saving time, shopping frugally, and feeding families -- clear extensions of the domestic arena -- male celebrity chefs focus on the craft itself, food for its own sake, cooking as an endless array of skills to acquire and adventures on which to embark in the carrying on of tradition and technique. They can approach food from an intellectual perspective. You learn about salumi. You study pizza. You get your education one cream-laden sauce at a time. You come of age in a French kitchen helmed by a venomous, insult-spewing maniac. You soak up abuse like a crostini, work awful hours, and get paid little to no money, but it's what you expect -- because you're an apprentice. You have to be man enough to take it. Some day, you'll be an executive chef yourself, and you'll have your own cadre of serfs to kick around. Until then, you mince onions and practice cursing. While women obviously pass through similar rites of passage in kitchens all over the world, in the realm of food entertainment, they're relegated to clipping coupons, dumbing down complicated dishes to satisfy some producer's market-tested vision of the American housewife, and attracting no shortage of she-can't-really-cook mockery from their male counterparts. Older female celebrity chefs -- like Lidia Bastianich, for example -- are motherly and comforting. They learned to cook from their mothers, and that's what they're sharing with you.

Everything on television is deliberately orchestrated, of course, but many of the common signifiers of male chefness -- the cursing, the drinking, the fighting, the screaming, the preoccupation with large pieces of meat -- whether expressed on camera, in memoirs, or reputation via third-person anecdotes -- endow a traditionally feminine role with coarse, conventionally masculine trappings. Producers want men to feel safe watching their shows. They don't want the women to appear shrill, unattractive, bossy, or otherwise threatening, or for the men in aprons to come off as effete. Over the course of six seasons of Bravo's Top Chef, some of the show's most reviled male contestants have been wheedling, effeminate men. Likewise, when Padma Lakshmi, host of Top Chef, did a tour of Spain for the Food Network way back in early 2000s, she was not tripping around, Bourdain-like, shit-faced on sherry, taking bullfighting lessons, making subtle references to gastrointestinal distress. Instead, cameras zoomed in again and again as she slowly lowered strips of fine jamon into her mouth, oohing and cooing, her face bathed in a soft, warm lamp-lit glow. In one segment, she rode a horse, in another, a donkey. She did go to a bullfight, which the bull managed to win against all odds. Relieved, Lakshmi repaired to a nearby restaurant, where she ate the balls of one of the victorious bull's less fortunate comrades.

Men who have become famous cooking and eating in the public eye go out of their way to project a masculine image, and their carefully constructed personalities stud every crevice of the machismo spectrum. Ginger-coiffed Bobby Flay, proprietor of what Grub Street deems the 13th largest chef empire, is a wise-talking Jersey dude. He's richer than an oil tycoon but he has real friends. How do you know? They come over to his modest-seeming house for sausage party cook-outs. Sometimes, when he's smirking his way through a Throwdown episode, he looks like guys I've seen at bars late at night, red-faced, a little sweaty, leering at ladies between shots of Patron. 8th on Grub Street's list, Mario Batali, corpulent, jolly, and orange-clogged, is renowned for Falstaffian excesses. With his Tourettic interjecting of idiotic catch phrases, Emeril Lagasse, locked with Jean-Georges Vongerichten and Nobu Matsuhisa for #5 through #7, strikes me as a man who always speaks louder than he has to. With his Stray Cats-meets-Swingers-in-the-back-of-a-Sunglass Hut shtick, Guy Fieri apparently wowed audience members at this year's Great American Food and Music Festival in Mountain View with what Bay Area Bites contributor Stephanie Im called a "highly entertaining blowout performance complete with loud rock n'roll, gratuitous hot chicks on stage, big machinery, power tools, and pyrotechnics." The owner of 27 restaurants around the world, Gordon Ramsey has bounced over some financial ruts lately, but Grub Street still has him in the #1 slot. His shows are crude spectacles of theater Artaud, would find unwatchable. Ramsey berates chefs, spits food on the floor, and picks fights. Off-screen, he's compulsively disrespectful, particularly towards women. Bourdain? Well, he doesn't actually cook much anymore, but he drinks a lot on No Reservations and makes a point of eating anything put in front of him, regardless of how strange or off-putting it may be. When he's not going shooting with Ted Nugent, he's a culturally sensitive daredevil -- an Evel Knievel of antacid-defying degustation. I can eat this gigantic sandwich, these bulbous eyeballs, and this disgusting warthog anus, he seems to say -- could you? When he and Eric Ripert venture back into the Les Halles kitchen to char beef and sauce sole for Season Four's "Into the Fire" episode, they're in the war zone, brothers sloshing through the trenches, dunking freedom fries in spitting oil and hustling out steak au poivre as the foes -- the diners -- descend in overwhelming numbers. Interestingly, Jamie Oliver, who on several occasions has been the target of Bourdain's bullying, was the subject of a 2003 academic article published in the International Journal of Cultural Studies: "Oliver's Twist: Leisure, Labor, and Domestic Masculinity in The Naked Chef". The writer, Joanne Hollows of Nottingham Trent University in England, frames Oliver as a construction of the masculine domestic cook. According to Hollows, in his professional capacity, Oliver avoids associating cooking with labor; instead, it's a fun, leisurely, and "recognizably manly" activity.

You'll never see a man on a cooking show gasping and groaning over the way something tastes -- over-sensualizing their pleasure from food. "Oh that's serious," Bourdain will say, wiping some beastly innards off his face, taking a swig of Heineken. Emeril and Fieri will bark as if they're at a ball game. Batali will explain why something is good, rather than simply express how happy he is to eat it. Some kinds of cooking -- grilling, artisanal curing, brawny offal-centric preparations -- tend to have hyper-masculine devotees. Molecular gastronomy -- food science, art, and fantasy in a delicious jumble -- is safe too -- because it's so dramatically removed from the drudgery of home-cooking. Every now and then, you see a gentle man cooking on television, and the effect is jarring. In March, celebrated Manresa chef David Kinch schooled Bobby Flay on Iron Chef. Even though his restaurant is a destination, the soft-spoken and terroir-enthused Kinch will never have product tie-ins -- commercial mayonnaise, kitchen gear, spice rubs, etc -- on Flay's level -- even in the unlikely event he wanted to in the first place. He'd rather build "tide-pools" of fresh shellfish and sea beans languishing in dashi-laced green tomato broth and go surfing in his spare time. One of my favorite cooking shows was Charlie Trotter's original Kitchen Sessions on PBS in the late 1990s. Amid a loose jazz soundtrack, Trotter very softly presented his thesis: cooking is a cycle of improvisations where time-tested techniques meet endlessly changing circumstances and opportunities for adjustment. The food was high-concept, challenging but within reach. As a host, he was a soothing presence -- murmuring vaguely poetic asides, often looking away from the camera, frequently indulging in tangential digressions appropriate to his show's statement of purpose. Trotter has been very successful, but his show, at least in that incarnation, didn't last more than a year or two. Ironically, Trotter actually made a cameo in the 1997 movie My Best Friend's Wedding, in which he convincingly played the stereotype of a blustery chef, bellowing at an assistant: "I will kill your whole family if you don't get this right!" It's a better joke now, twelve years later.

Sunset magazine has long been the go-to source for "how to live in the West" especially when it comes to travel, gardening, home improvement and of course, food and wine. Since the centennial of the magazine in 1998, Sunset has been hosting an annual open house called the Sunset Celebration Weekend. The weekend takes place in June, and there is a schedule of chef demonstrations, garden and outdoor living events and live entertainment. The entrance fee is $15 and that gets you admission to all of the presentations although you'll need to sign up for the wine tasting events separately and they fill up quickly.

Many vendors offer tastes and nibbles, but for a meal, you'll have to pay. I was a bit disappointed that the food available was the typical street fair variety such as corn dogs, gyros and overpriced tostada salads. Not very inspiring! The exhibitors and vendors range from Hawaiian Airlines and speciality nurseries to the ShamWow! and everything in between.

Highlights of the experience include meandering through the gardens, including the team garden for the Our One-Block Diet, a tour of the test kitchen and the outdoor kitchen.

Test kitchen has a long counter where finished dishes are evaluated. Once the editorial and test kitchen team is finished with the dish, a green flag indicates the staff can eat it. A red flag means the dish is not yet finished, and a pirate flag means, the dish did not pass muster, eat at your own risk! In the tote bag you receive at the entrance are some coupons, a schedule and a great booklet with recipes from all the chefs so even if you only come one day, you'll have recipes from the whole weekend.

My favorite presentations were by chefs Burak Epir of the Pilita Mediterranean Turkish Grill in San Carlos and Cindy Pawlcyn of Mustard's Grill. Epir showed off his kebab technique with a huge knife, and shared tips such as using a small sieve to filter stems and seeds from dried herbs. He used my favorite pepper, maras, in his recipe for Kilis kebab which also included lots of fresh parsley, the most commonly used fresh herb in Turkey.

Cindy Pawlcyn emphasized the importance of using the ripest produce, explaining it is better to substitute an ingredient than to use something that is not deliciously ripe. She also showed a technique of smashing hazelnuts with the side of a chef knife rather than chopping them to create a better and more uniform texture. Great tips, no matter what recipe you try.

Kilis kebab
10 tomatoes
2 poblano peppers
1 medium white onion, preferably sweet
1 bunch Italian parsley, chopped
1 Tablespoon salt
1/2 Tablespoon fresh ground pepper
1 Tablespoon Maras red pepper, also called Marash pepper
1/2 medium white onion, grated
2 pounds ground lamb, shoulder cut

On a charcoal grill cook the tomatoes and pepper until well charred, remove the skins and finely dice.

Also finely dice the onion and mix it with the chopped parsley. Add to the charred tomato and peppers and set aside. Cover and keep warm.

Prepare the kebab by adding salt, pepper, Maras red pepper and the grated onions to the ground lamb. Mix well. Make the meatballs and place on a skewer. Grill indirectly over the heat, until nice and juicy. Place the charred tomato and peppers on a plate and set the meat kebabs over it.

Recipe reprinted courtesy of Sunset and chef Burak Epir