Yaşar Halim

495 Green Lanes, London N4
020 8340 8090

Yaşar Halim is a north London institution - a Turkish Cypriot supermarket, greengrocer's and bakery with a huge range of Turkish, Greek, Cypriot, middle eastern and Iranian produce. It's the highlight of a mile or so of Turkish, Kurdish and Greek restaurants and shops stretching north along Green Lanes from Manor House tube station. It's been featured in articles on 100 Food Shops You Must See Before You Die and nominated for Local Food Hero awards year after year. What better place to start a year of 52 ingredients?

At 4 pm on New Year's Eve it was buzzing. I bought big bundles of fresh flat-leaved parsley, coriander and dill for 59p each, three pomegranates for a pound, lemons, coarse bulghur (pilavlık bulgur), brined green olives stuffed with almonds, and pomegranate syrup (also known as pomegranate molasses - nar ekşisi in Turkish). I bought the Sera brand, which is Turkish, and compared it to the remains of a bottle of Lebanese Cortas brand. Both were good: the Cortas was a little darker and more acid, the Sera very slightly sweeter and thinner.

I also bought some flaked Turkish chilli, pul biber, labelled misleadingly in English as red pepper flakes, and also sometimes known as Aleppo pepper. It's a delicious dark red chilli, mild enough to scatter over food, with a slightly salty smoky taste. It is often provided in dishes on tables in Kurdish cafes in London, so that you can season your food to taste. It may get an entry of its own at some stage this year.

Finally I went next door to the Yaşar Halim's bakery, and came away with Turkish bread sprinkled with sesame seeds (a bit like a thicker variety of barbari nan), mysterious cheese buns flavoured with sesame, raisins and thyme, and big square fried pastries filled with custard and sprinkled with icing sugar.

Ingredient 1: Pomegranate (punica granatum)

Pomegranates are going to be the first of the 52 ingredients. They may be the only fruit to have a city named after them (Granada in Spain), and a weapon (grenade).

The main thing you need to know about pomegranates is that it is possible to get the seeds out without ending up covered in gore, with a bowlful of mangled seeds and pith. My thanks to the cookery writer Diana Henry: it was her book Crazy water, pickled lemons which taught me that eating pomegranates didn't have to be a bloodbath.

Cut the pomegranate in half. Hold it over a bowl, cut side down, and whack it hard with a heavy spoon. The seeds will rain into the bowl, unbroken. A bit of the acrid cream-coloured pith will also fall in, but not very much - you can pick it out at the end.

Pomegranate salad

I used the pomegranate seeds and syrup in a tabbouleh-like salad inspired by Diana Henry's recipe for Salad of middle eastern grilled chicken, bulghur wheat and pomegranates from Crazy water, pickled lemons. I soaked the bulghur in stock until it swelled up: it's particularly good if you have real chicken or vegetable stock, but this was Marigold instant. I mixed it with a lot of finely chopped parsley and coriander, a chopped and sauted onion and some sauted garlic, and some walnuts dry-roasted in a frying pan and broken up gently (this seems to work better than chopping them - you get less skin and shrapnel). Then I stirred in most of the pomegranate seeds and left the flavours to merge.

The dressing was a mixture of pomegranate syrup and olive oil, lemon juice and a little honey - it can be quite sour and hot, because the bulk of the bulghur and herbs soaks it up. I finished with a final sprinkle of pomegranate seeds.

This works very well with chicken - Diana Henry suggests marinading the chicken in a mixture of pomegranate syrup, olive oil, runny honey, cumin and garlic. A vegetarian version of the salad with chopped feta is also good. It's a flexible salad - you can make it very light by going heavy on the herbs and not using much bulghur, or make it solid and filling with a lot of bulghur.