Ashure: Turkish Bakery Wheel of Fortune

One of my favorite dishes at Passover is charoset, which is made incredibly simply, using only apples, walnuts, wine, and sugar.  It tastes like someone deconstructed the world's most perfect granola bar, then turned back time so all the ingredients just fell from the tree (or were squeezed from the cane, or fermented from the grapes, depending on the ingredient in question).

Thanks, Cooking With My Kid - that's much prettier than mine!

I can't really discern whether it's my favorite because it's delicious (which it is) or because it's the only Passover-related thing that my kitchen-challenged self can reliably prepare for a tableful of generally discerning Jewish people (which it also is - I mean, for example, have you seen how you make gefilte fish?!).

Conversely, one of my least favorite things to eat is oatmeal.  This makes pretty much no sense, because I enjoy Cream of Wheat, Asian porridges (Chinese zhou, Vietnamese cháo; even that Japanese grated yam dish that has the consistency of snot...it's called tororo, I believe) yogurt with granola, and other oatmeal-like things.  There's just something about oatmeal, its watery slight sweetness, that tastes and feels like someone left Cheerios and skim milk out on the porch in the sun.

So when I peeled the lid off a mystery dessert I got at a Turkish bakery that looked like an exact cross between charoset and oatmeal, I honestly had no idea what would happen with the communication between my tastebuds and my brain.

I ate it on my windowsill to give it more of an 'I'm picnicking in the forest' feel.

It was called ashure, and was more oatmeal-like than charoset-like - but really it departed quickly from both.

I can see how it might be better with fresh peaches rather than canned, because every time I got a surprising crunch and burst of juice from a pomegranate seed, I got a little electric shiver of delight.  The chickpeas lent an almost Asian-dessert-like quality (with its always confounding emphasis on sweet legumes) and the cinnamon sauce all runny in the middle brought to mind a warm, gooey cinnamon roll.

Not bad for something I chose by pointing at random into a display case!