Mothers Day 2013 Part 1

Our family has come to a mutual understanding that for major holidays and events (e.g. Christmas, birthdays, Mother's Day, Father's Day, etc.), physical presents are unnecessary...an added bonus, if you will, given by those that are feeling particularly generous. We all agree that the best gift is a delicious meal and some quality time with the family. Whether we have a home-cooked meal or eat out is dependent on the circumstance; sometimes, we do both. Thus was the case for Mother's Day 2013, which we started celebrating on Saturday night. I've been pretty worn out and haven't really cooked recently, and so my gift to my mom (in addition to QT with me) was a meal at Wild Fig, a Mediterranean restaurant that has delicious flatbread, among other things.

We started out with a platter of spreads, which is why I picked this restaurant in the first place-my sister had ordered the tarama spread a few weeks ago and I had been craving it for days.

White bean salad, tarama spread (roe), babaganoush (eggplant) and hummus

Second course-some pide (still have no idea how to pronounce this!). See an explanation of pide below, as extracted from wikipedia:

In Turkey, local pita is called pide which also refers to another pizza-like food made of pide dough topped with different ingredients. Regional variations in the shape, baking technique, and topped materials create distinctive styles for each region. Such pides may include pastırma, sucuk, chicken, chopped or ground beef, kavurma (meat, generally mutton or beef, fried with suet and salt and kept for later use), cheese, potatoes, mushrooms and many other ingredients.

Pide 

Next up, some Iskender kebabs; kebabs are just a must when at a Mediterranean restaurant, in my opinion. This was absolutely delicious. There was some tzatziki sauce, lamb and beef gyro, topped on diced flatbread, with some tomato garlic sauce. Served with rice!

Iskender kebab

A simple salad with calamari. Who doesn't love calamari?

Calamari salad