MILK & PUMPKIN

Romanian lovage sauce recipe

2011-05-11T08:46:00.000-07:00

Polish: lubczyk
Kashubian: lëbiszk
Persian: انجدان رومی
Azerbaijani: dərman levistiki
Icelandic: skessujurt
Bulgarian: Девесил
French: livèche
German: Liebstöckel
Hebrew: לווג'
Finnish: liperi

Spring generously gives us vegetables and herbs. I just bought a bunch of of differrent leaf vegetables and fresh herbs at my local market. Lovage. I just ate it fresh for the first time... Dried lovage is added often to the chicken broth in Poland and is a component of many dried herbs mixes, but there is nothing better than a fresh greeny ingredient in our kitchens. It is easy to cultivate, even in the pot on your balcony. And there is something about love in this herb, I am very sure... in Poland people used to put lovage leaves to the first bath of a baby-born girl, which had to bring her love in the future life... for same reason, girls were putting it into their hair or dress during their wedding. Today we only believe that lovage can increase the libido...
The recipe is inspired by Romanian way of preserving this lovely herb, called pasta de leuștean, which is kept in the fridge and added to the soup whenever you like. But try to eat it like pesto sauce with your favourite pasta!

a bunch of lovage (about 200gr)
olive oil
salt (about a teaspoon)

optionally (to make a pasta sauce):
garlic cloves
maybe a bit of pine nuts / almonds / pistachios
maybe a bit of cheese

Wash lovage and separate leaves from stems. Grind them with olive oil and salt and in this stage you can put the result to the jar and pasteurise it the way you usually do and enjoy the celery-like, aromatic fresh taste of lovage after its season. it is great to add a bit of lovage to the soup, stew or pasta sauce. But I thought, this great and simple puree could be eaten like pesto, just with noodles, so you could add, to your taste, ground pistachios, pine nuts, cheese... My palate was satisfied with lovage, garlic, olive oil and salt, and japanese buckwheat noodles. Yummy :)

Back to blogging!

2011-04-14T04:39:00.001-07:00

Dear Food-Lover-Friends! I haven't been posing for a looooong time, I know... I am sorry for not being able to respond and public all your interesting comments, but I promise to do it and to start posting recipes regularily again! Thank you for being there, see you soon! By the way, spring is coming to Poland, I am impatiently waiting for young fresh nettle leaves! What are you waiting for?

Spring cold soups

2009-04-27T23:21:00.000-07:00

Polish: Chłodnik
Belarusian: Хaлaднiк
Russian: Холодник
Ukrainian: Холодник
Lithuanian: Šaltibarščiai

Chłodnik means cold summer soup. It is eaten not only in Poland but also in other east-European countries. The most popular variant is made with beets and/or young beet leaves, kefir or soured milk and many differrent young fresh raw vegetables and vegetable greens. There are also non-beet variants, sour: with sorrel, tomato, kohlrabi or cucumber, and several fruit ones: especially with currants, strawberries (or wild strawberries), melon or cherry soup. And countless new creative versions. As a child, when my mum was pregnant with my brother, we had to eat meals at a dairy bar and we were eating chłodnik and crepes with curd cheese filling. My homemade chłodnik tastes much better :) The one made with beet leaves is called botwina. If you don't have baby beet fresh leaves, hopefully you could see, to inspire yourself, my attempts of making chłodnik when I was abroad and far away from beet leaves :)

for 3 portions:
2 bunches young beet leaves (each bunch contains 3-4 tiny beets)
2 medium beets
2 bunches radishes
1 bunch chives
1 bunch dill
1/2 lemon
3 cups kefir
1 cup yoghurt
3 eggs

1. Boil eggs for 10 minutes.

2. Cut beet leaves and stalks very finely. Peel tiny beets (those from leaves) and normal beets. Cut those bigger into fourths. Cook them in few (1 cup) water (some people take vegetable broth) until beets are soft. When ready, add freshly squeezed lemon juice.

3. Chop very finely other vegetables: chives, dill and radishes. Pour kefir and yoghurt into the bowl and add chopped vegetables.

4. Using a vegetable grater, grate cooked beets. Add beets, beet leaves and the water in which they were cooked, to the kefir.

5. Season with salt, pepper, lemon juice or apple vinegar and maybe also with garlic. Serve with egg halves (and probably some chopped parsley green)

and here comes another recipe, less popular but also tasty: sorrel chłodnik with whey(chłodnik szczawiowy na serwatce)

250 gr sorrel leaves
3 cups whey (see here how to make whey)
1 cup sour cream
3 tablespoons flour
3 eggs
1 tablespoon butter
dill

1. Bring whey to boil. Whisk cream (of room temperature; not taken directly from the fridge!) with flour until there are no clumps and add to warm whey. Stir and let boil again. Set aside.

2. Chop sorrel finely and stew it with butter and probably very few water for about 10 minutes. Set aside.

3. Add sorrel to cooled whey, salt to taste and sprinkle with dill. Serve with potatoes (serve warm boiled potato chunks on a separate plate or pour cold soup over warm potatoes in a bowl). You can also add boiled egg halves.

Dandelions!

2009-04-25T01:45:00.000-07:00

Polish: mniszek
Slovakian: púpava
Upper Sorbian: mlóč
Czech: pampeliška
Ukrainian: кульбаба
Russian: одуванчик
Croatian: maslačak
Slovenian: regrat
Bulgarian: глухарче

I hope that other food lovers will forgive me that I lied when I said that spring means young beet and radish leaves. I really didn't mean to forget about dandelions, young nettles, violets and woodruff. I just spent a weekend at my grandparents' village and I am so relaxed and happy, with a bag full of ecological fresh dandelion greens. I collected them thinking about Swiss dandelion pie, quiche dent-de-lion. Of course, as a true soups lover, I was experimenting with dandelion soup, too. Pictures below.

pie shell:
200 g flour
1 teaspoon salt
80 g butter (cold!)
50 ml (cold!) water

filling:
50 g dandelion leaves (chopped)
100 g camembert cheese
100 ml 30% cream
200 ml milk
3 eggs
1/2 teaspoon salt
few freshly ground nutmeg

1. Prepare the pie shell by kneading rapidly all the ingredients (they have to be cold, as said above). make a ball and leave in the fridge (min.30 minutes!)

2. Prepare the filling: beat eggs with milk and cream, add finally chopped camembert, salt, nutmeg (pepper, paprika) and chopped dandelion leaves.

3. Cover your pyrex dish or baking tray with few butter, roll thinly the dough and place in the dish, pick several times with a fork and pour egg-dandelion filling. Bake about 30 minutes in 180C oven. I guess that meat-eaters could add some cubes of ham or favourite sausage to the filling. This pie can also be made with fresh spinach or (especially) bear's garlic (ramsons).

A dandelion leaves soup was very easy to make. I was actually looking for some traditional regional dandelion soup recipe, but I didn'y find any, so I used my imagination and chopped some handfuls of dandelion leaves, 3 onions, 6 small potatoes, fried raw vegetables, cooked in homemade vegetable broth and thickned with sour cream mixed with fat countryside milk and 1 tablespoon of flour. It tastes nicely sourish and bitter and a bit like spinach and this is how it looks like:

And, one of the most important things to do in spring is to collect dandelion blooms! don't forget to do it right now to prepare dandelion syrup! (recipe available here)

French radish leaves soup

2009-04-24T10:32:00.000-07:00

Polish: rzodkiewka
Silesian: radiska
Tongan: lētisifoha
Greek: ρεπάνι
Mohawk: yotsihkwatskàra
Ukrainian: редиска
Lithuanian: ridikas
Gujarati: મૂળો
Scots Gaelic: meacan-ruadh
Calabrese: rafanèddru

Soupe de fanes de radis, is a French spring soup, made from radish leaves. I must say that when I wait for spring, I am thinking about: Easter, blooming forsythia, beet leaves (to prepare botwina, cold beet soup) and radish leaves (to prepare radish leaves soup). If you have bio radishes around you, don't hesitate and try this soup, it's worth your effort!

(3 portions)
leaves from 2 radish bunches
2-3 potatoes
2 onions or 1 leek
broth (3 cups)
milk (1 cup) - can be replaced by broth
creme fraiche / grated cheese

1. Chop radish leaves and onions/leek. Fry onions (leeks) in oil until golden, add leaves and slowly simmer few minutes more (let's say, 5 minutes)

2. In a saucepan, boil cubed potatoes in broth. Add simmered vegetables and cook just until potatoes are soft. Puree or press through a sieve (which is not recommended, cause it won't be that easy with radish leaves...), pour into the saucepan again, add milk and seasoning (salt, pepper) and slightly heat again. And that's it! Oh, and you can garnish it with grated cheese or crème fraîche just before serving.

Russian sorrel patties

2009-04-23T16:25:00.000-07:00

Polish: szczaw
Albanian: lëpjetë
Wolof: bisaab
Tatar: quzğalaq
Kazakh: қымыздық
Faroese: hømilia
Breton: triñchin
Furlan: panevin
Manx: shughlaig
French: oseille

I guess it may be difficult to find fresh sorrel leaves in many countries. Here in Poland many people cultivate sorrel in their gardens and you can easily buy it in spring in the markt. I am a huge fan of three most common edible Polygonaceae: buckwheat, rhubarb and sorrel. I lately learned a wonderful Russian recipe for sorrel patties, called Пироги с щавелем. They taste... well sourish, and neither sweet nor salty, it is that kind of meal that you can serve with cream or sprinkled with sugar (analogically: in Poland people eat placki ziemniaczane / latkes / raw potato pancakes sprinkled with sugar; in Ecuador people eat empanadas de viento / patties with cheese and onion filling sprinkled with sugar). So don't be afraid of adding sugar to the sorrel filling. Remember: sorrel mixed with sugar tastes like rhubarb! :)

400 gr curd cheese / twaróg
2,5 cups flour
1/2 teaspoon sodium bicarbonate
1/2 teaspoon salt
6 teaspoons sugar
4 tablespoons sour cream
80 gr butter (melted)
1 egg
fresh sorrel leaves (about 400 gr) + sugar + few oil

1. Cut sorrel finely and place it in a bowl, sprinkle with few oil, cover and heat for 2 minutes in mictowave (sorrel will loose its fresh colour and reduce volume)

2. Press curd cheese through a sieve. Add sifted flour, sodium bicarbonate, salt, sugar, sour cream, melted butter and egg. Mix well.

3. Take a tomato-size ball of the dough, sprinkle with few flour just to be able to roll it. Put about 2 tablespoons of sorrel and 1 teaspoon of sugar on the top of rolled dough, hide the filling by closing the dough and form a croquette. Fry them and serve (possibly with sour cream or few sugar)
ps. they are DELICIOUS!!!!!

Polish Easter

2009-04-17T15:22:00.000-07:00

Polish: Wielkanoc
Kashubian: Jastrë
English: Easter
Albanian: Pashkët
Mokshan: Очижи
Lithuanian: Velykos
Georgian: აღდგომა
Ossetian: Куадзæн
Swabian: Auschdra
Croatian: Uskrs

Easter breakfast is the most important thing about celebrating Easter in Poland. Everyone wakes up very early and participates at Rezurekcja (6 o'clock a.m. Holy Mass); the naive one who plans to be lazy and sleep longer rather won't be able to, cause at this time you will hear everywhere clangor of special instruments, petards, bells and so on. After that, at least in my family, men prepare and decorate breakfast table while women bake white sausage, season żurek and decorate meals. However, almost everything is already done. Pisanki are painted, żur is already sour, babka is waiting to be served... A culinary must are: żurek, sour rye soup (eaten with chunks of white sausage and boiled eggs, often served in cored little breads), baked white sausage, eggs and babka with mazurek, two kinds of cakes, a flat and a tall one. Often people serve pascha, curd cheese dessert, and chałka, hallah bread. There is actually no other meal this day, people just sit together, start eating breakfast, talk, spend lazy time, heat resting żurek and kiełbasa for dinner and leave the table only to cut some more bread or to boil new portion of tea.

see also: pictures of my family's 2008 Easter breakfast dishes

This year my family's Easter menu was:

* żurek - sour rye soup (for more details, visit the previous post). Sometimes can be replaced by horseradish soup, sometimes people cook a fusion of both: a delicious horseradish żur. The main thing is a sour taste!)
* pieczona biała kiełbasa - baked white sausage
* rolada szpinakowa - spinach & smoked salmon & horseradish cheese roll
* chicken-vegetable (pea, bean, corn, radish etc.) salad
* ser jajeczny - egg cheese (eggs cooked with milk until curdles; looks like cheese, tastes like eggs, traditionally eaten with horseradish sauce)
* jajka - hard-boiled eggs (plain or marinated in beetroot juice) with mayonnaise
* homemade bread
* chałka - hallah
* puff pastry poppy seed pigtails
* babka (egg-yeast tall traditional cake, this year with coffee flavour and coffee icing)
* mazurek (the flat cake; this year with Easter rabbit)
* cooked (yes! not baked! just cooked!) cheesecake with poppy seed-coconut roll cake
* pear-jelly-biscuit cake
* homemade butter
* ćwikła (horseradish with beets), horseradish sauce, red and black kaviar
* sos tatarski - tartar sauce (mayonnaise, sour cream, horseradish, chopped pickled sour cucumbers, capers, champignons, hard-boiled eggs, chives, lemon juice)
* slices of fresh vegetables, homemade pickled mushrooms
* homemade (preserved) cherry juice (kompot wisniowy)

bread, tartar sauce, eggs and egg cheese:

beet-dyed-eggs and egg cheese:

mayonnaise eggs, homemade butter, spinach roll:

spinach roll:

chicken-vegetable salad with duck-egg on the top, sauces and kaviar:

mushrooms and garden cress:

chałka:

mazurek:

pear-jelly-biscuit cake:

raspberry pascha:

babka:

cooked cheesecake hidden in poppy seed-coconut roll:

An important ingredient of eastern breakfast is a plate full of differrent sausages, just like these

Traditional Easter decoration are: garden cress and oat grass, box twigs, willow twigs with catkins, daffodils, myrtle, little lambs (symbol of Jesus Christ) and obviously pisanki, which are eggs painted, dyed, scratched, decorated with bulrush pith or painted with melted wax

Polish sausages

2009-04-14T09:54:00.000-07:00

I guess I am a lucky person, because my mother's family comes from the countryside. We go there not as often as we'd like to, but at least twice a year, for Christmas and Easter, and it is when we taste homemade sausages, my grandmother's hen's eggs and fresh milk. Here you can see examples of homemade eastern Polish delicacies, always eaten for Easter, but also for a simple breakfast :)

from the top of the page to the right: słonina (salo), polędwica (tenderloin), pasztetowa (liverwurst), kaszanka (black pudding), boczek (bacon), boczek faszerowany (stuffed bacon)

here: szynka (ham) and kiełbasa (well... even in English people say kielbasa...)

this is how people in eastern Poland (Mazovia-Podlachia) usually eat Polish black pudding (kaszanka), a blood-buckwheat sausage: mashed and fried, with fried onion slices, few chopped parsley, sour cucumber slices and bread (often rye bread)

and here, an obligatory sausage for Easter breakfast: biała kiełbasa (white sausage). At home, for Easter breakfast, we:
a) cook it in a famous Easter sour rye soup called żur or żurek (we serve żurek with thick slices of biała kiełbasa and hard-boiled egg. Żurek can be also served in bread);
b) bake it in the oven with rings of onion (like on the picture below)

Happy Easter!!!!!!!!!!

2009-04-12T05:10:00.001-07:00

HAPPY EASTER!!!!!
SZCZĘLIWYCH SWIĄT WIELKIEJ NOCY I WESOŁEGO ALLELUJA!!!!!

Austrian pumpkin seed cake

2009-04-09T07:24:00.000-07:00

Polish: pestki dyni
Spanish: pepitas (de calabaza)
Catalan: llavors de carbassa
Venetian: megołete
German: Kürbiskerne
Italian: semi di zucca
French: graines de potiron
Hungarian: sütőtök mag
Estonian: kõrvitsaseemned
Lithuanian: moliūgų sėklos

Styria (Steiermark) in s a region of Austria, where pumpkins grow and where people have many creative ideas how to use pumpkin seeds. I guess they must be all very healthy cause pumpkin seeds are helpful in combating many diseases. So Styrians not only cook pumpkin soup but also bake bake pumpkin seed cakes and cookies. Here is a great example: Kürbiskernkuchen, pumpkin seed cake.

100 gr pumpkin seeds
100 gr flour(*)
4 eggs
60 gr icing sugar
40 gr sugar (or vanilla sugar)
1 tablespoon rum
a pinch of cinnamon
1 tablespoon baking powder
100 gr white cuverture (or simply white chocolate)
25 gr coconut fat (copha)
(optionally: 1 tablespoon pumpkin seed oil)

1. Beat yolks with sugar and whites with icing sugar. Grind pumpkin seeds (possibly in coffee grinder)

2. Sieve flour with baking powder, cinnamon and ground seeds. Add rum. Whisk yolks with icing sugar and whites with crystal sugar (vanilla sugar). Add yolks to the flour, stir well (**) and add well beaten egg whites. bake about 30 minutes (or until the surface of the cake becomes golden) in 180C oven.

3. Prepare the icing: melt chocolate with copha (and pumpkin seed oil) in a double boiler. When icing is homogeneous and still warm, while the cake is already cool, you can start covering thr cake with a spatula. Don't be afraid of oil in the icing - it will only give a green colour to the icing.

(*)Many people use other proportions by taking less flour than pumpkin seeds but then, the cake won't grow and can be difficult to cut. But you can experiment and add only 50 or 75 gr flour.

(**) Plus, I have to tell you that the cake, instead of oily seeds, is quite dry. A good idea would be to add 1/2 cup (pumpkin seed) oil, maybe just after adding yolks to the flour, to make it a bit more moist.

Polish whey borscht

2009-04-09T06:42:00.000-07:00

Polish: serwatka
French: petit-lait
Luxembourgish: Wässeg
Lithuanian: išrūgos
Hindi: छाछ
Albanian: hirrë
Xhosa: ingqaka
Spanish: suero
Slovakian: sirotka
Arabic: شرش اللبن

Whey soup, again! This time a very winter-to-spring-turn recipe. In Poland, beetroot is often eaten during the wintertime, while one of the first culinary appearances of spring is rhubarb chard (botwina / boćwina). Chard is often used in cold or warm spring/summer soups, like chłodnik. If you already have chard, you can prepare a great borscht (sour beet soup) with whey. Actually, beet-whey borscht (podhalański barszcz na serwatce) belongs to Polish Tatra cuisine. It is cheap and easy to make. I decided to modify this tasty recipe a bit, so I added chard.

How to make a whey at home? Check here

see also: Polish horseradish-whey soup
see also: Polish millet-whey soup
see also: Moldovan whey soup

(3 portions)
4 medium beets
4 medium potatoes
1/2 cup yoghurt / sour cream
2 cups whey
seasoning: salt, sugar, apple vinegar
(+ 1 bunch rhubarb chard, 1 onion)*

1. Cook beets and potatoes separately. Peel and dice. (chop onion and chard, fry in oil about 5 minutes)*

2. In a saucepan, put diced beets (and chopped fried chard with onion)*. Add 2 cups water and bring to boil. Add whey and season (with salt, sugar, vinegar and probably also garlic) to taste. Turn off the heat, add sour cream (yoghurt) and stir well. Don't bring to boil anymore, just heat if needed.

3. Put some diced potatoes into an eating bowl and add soup. You can also serve potatoes separately, on a small plate.

Belarussian champignon croquettes

2009-04-07T14:37:00.000-07:00

Polish: pieczarki
Greek: ασπρομανίταρο
Hungarian: csiperkegomba
Lithuanian: pievagrybis
Catalan: xampinyó
Bulgarian: печурка
Russian: шампиньон
Croatian: sirnjača
Manx: shalmane

Champignons, just like every mushroom, are not especially rich in vitamins, proteins or minerals, but because of their taste they are often eaten in Poland and eastern Europe. I know Belorussian champignon croquettes from an old cookbook, which my grandmother gave to my mother. in poland people also make differrent champignon croquettes, but i prefer this Belarussian recipe. Грибные котлеты are very delicious!

500 gr champignons
1 onion
1 egg
few scallions
1 tablespoon dill
1 tablespoon parsley
1 clove garlic
a slice of bread
breadcrumbs (about 1/2 cup)

1. Cook champignons until they are soft (10-15 minutes). Coarsely chop onion and slightly fry it. Soak bread in few lukewarm water. Squeeze it.

2. Using meat grinder, grind cooked champignons, squeezed slice of bread, fried onion, dill, parsley, scallions and garlic. Having it together in a bowl, stir in 1 egg and spoon by spoon add breadcrumbs until the point that you'll be able to form and fry croquettes.

3. Form oval croquettes, roll them in breadcrumbs and fry. Serve with salad.

Polish carrot-poppy roll cake

2009-04-05T16:09:00.000-07:00

Polish: marchew
Gujarati: ગાજર
Hindi: गाजर
Marathi: गाजर
Punjabi: ਗਾਜਰ
Sanskrit: गृञ्जनकम्
Tamil: காரட்
Telugu: గాజర గడ్డ
Urdu: گاجر

Carrots, again :) Can there be something more Polish than poppy seed, roll cake and carrots? Well yes, mead, buckwheat, beetroots... and so on... Oh well... Anyway, I guess lots of people consider poppy seed a typical central and eastern European ingredient and they are just right. There are millions of poppy seed recipes (cakes, pies, buns, dumplings and so on). My today's recipe is called marchwiak. Well, marchew means just carrot in Polish. Marchwiak is a roll cake with carrot-poppy filling from Lubelszczyzna, a beautiful region of eastern Poland, with Lublin as its capital city. Marchwiaki were traditionally baked for All Saint's Day. A very similar yeast roll cake, but with other filling (apple-poppy) was baked by my grandmum (she comes from Podlasie, a region next to Lubelszczyzna; to see more pictures of this beautiful region of Poland, visit a stunning blog with awesome pictures from Podlasie. More pictres for example here. Pictures from Lubelszczyzna can be found here)

500 gr flour
50 gr fresh yeast
1/2 cup milk
1/2 cup water
1/2 cup sugar
2 egg yolks
1 egg white
1 egg
a pinch of salt
1/4 cup lard (melted)
3/4 cup grated carrot*
1 handful poppy seeds
(optionally add 1 tablespoon grated orange or lemon zest - it is not included to the traditional recipe, but it will improve the taste deffinitely)
icing: icing sugar + lemon juice
few poppy seeds more to sprinkle

1. Heat the milk (but don't boil it), add yeast, sugar and 1 tablespoon flour. Set in a warm place and let it grow.

2. Sieve flour, add yeast, water, whisked 2 yolks with 1 egg, salt and melted lard (everything in room temperature, as it always should be when baking yeast cakes!) and knead the dough. When everything combines well and you obtained elastic dough, form a ball and let it grow in a bowl. When it doubles its surface, knead again. I did this point in a bread machine (kneading and growing program)

3. Sprinkle your workplace with some flour. Now decide if you want 2 rolls or 1 roll and six lovely buns. In next point I will first continue about how to make roll cake.

4. Roll the dough (actually, roll only a half of your dough; the second half is to make a second roll or sweet breakfast buns - or just reduce the proportions, which I never made, cause I always prepare a roll cake and breakfast buns :P)

5. When your dough is rolled into 0,5 - 1 cm thick, smear it with egg white. I do it always in Christmas poppy seed or nut roll cakes to avoid gaps between dough and filling. Now, sprinkle it with grated carrot and a handful of poppy seed (and optionally lemon or orange zest, which is highly recommended and, if you wish the roll to be sweeter, sprinkle with 1 tablespoon sugar)
* 3/4 cup is to fill 1 roll cake. prepare also another 3/4 cup to fill the second roll if you decide to bake 2 rolls

6. Now slowly fold the dough. Put it gently on a sheet of baking paper. Sprinkle with the resting few poppy seeds. Bake in 180C oven about 30 minutes or until golden brown.

7. Prepare the icing my mixing lemon juice with icing sugar and pour it on already cooled roll cake.

8. About sweet breakfast buns - after kneading-growing process, just form lovely round-shaped buns (I make six) and let them grow for a while. Smear with egg white and sprinkle with poppy seeds and bake until golden brown. I don't have any picture of them, my family was too fast :(

Polish soda breads

2009-04-05T14:24:00.000-07:00

Polish: soda (do pieczenia)
German: Speisesoda
Croatian: soda bikarbona
Spanish: bicarbonato de sodio
Bulgarian: сода за хляб
Ukrainian: Гідрокарбонат натрію
French: bicarbonate alimentaire

Proziaki , sisters of Mediterranean and Middle Eastern pita bread / khubs, are flat soda breads, baked on the top plate of warm stove. Commonly eaten in Polish Carpathians but not only; my mum, who comes from central-eastern Poland, know them from her childhood, but under a simple name placki (pancakes). If you can use a real stove, you are lucky. If not, you can still bake proziaki, just take the thickest frying pan you have and bake them dry, without any oil. I actually regret that I prepared them cause now my mum is molesting me each morning to bake some proziaki for breakfast... We cut them just like bread rolls, smear with butter and eat with bittercress and cucumber

500 gr flour
1 cup sour milk (Polish: zsiadłe mleko; optionally: sour cream or thick yoghurt)
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon sugar
1 teaspoon bread soda (sodium bicarbonate)
(some people experiment by adding 1 egg or few curd fresh cheese)

1. Sieve all loose ingredients into a bowl. Spoon by spoon, add sour milk and kned in your hands. You should obtain thick but elastic dough.

2. Sprinkle your workplace with flour. Roll the dough until 0,5 cm thick and cut into squares with a knife or into circles with a big cookie cutter or glass.

(1st pic: proziaki before and after baking)

Lithuanian apple cookies

2009-04-05T11:17:00.000-07:00

Polish: jabłko
Amharic: ፖም
Hausa: áfùl
Kirundi: ipome
Malagasy: pôma
Sesotho: apole
Shona: ápuro
SiSwati: li-hhábhula
Somali: tufaax
Wolof: pom

Apples are the most common fruits in central and eastern Europe, but I guess quite rare in Africa. For language lovers, apple in Polish and several african languages, and for apple lovers - delicious, soft Lithuanian apple cookies, obuoliniai sausainiai (they taste like soft thick fluffy biscuit omelettes; they'll melt in your mouth!)

(to make about 12 cookies)
125 gr flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 egg
70 gr sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla sugar and/or 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
1 tablespoon sour cream
1/4 cup oil
a pinch of salt
300 gr apples
1 tablespoon lemon juice
icing sugar to sprinkle

1. Peel apples, cut into small cubes and sprinkle with lemon juice

2. Beat egg with sugar, vanilla sugar, cinnamon and salt. Add sour cream and oil and continue beating.

3. Sieve flour with baking soda, add beaten eggs and apple cubes.

4. Cover a baking tray with baking paper. Place tablespoons of the batter on the tray. Bake 15-20 minutes in 180C oven (they should be lovely brownish on the top). Cool down and sprinkle with icing sugar (optionally: mixed with ground cinnamon)

Polish whey-millet soup

2009-04-04T12:13:00.000-07:00

Polish: serwatka
Pashto: چکه
English: whey
vietnamese: nước sữa
German: Molke
Punjabi: ਛਾੰਛ
Suahili: gururu
Icelandic: mysa
Estonian: vadak
Sestwana: mokaro

Polish (and East European) soups with groats (usually barley, but also buckwheat or millet) are called krupnik. This word comes from old-Polish word krupy, which means just groats. Krupnik contains also lots of differrent vegetables and often dried mushrooms. The recipe I am going to show you now has no vegetables besides potatoes, but tastes nicely sour because of whey. This recipe comes from Miechów, a town in southern Poland. Ladies and gentlemen, Polish whey-millet soup, miechowski krupnik na serwatce!

see also: Polish horseradish-whey soup
see also: Moldovan whey soup

5 cups whey
200 gr millet
500 gr potatoes
1 bunch dill
1 teaspoon lemon juice
1/2 cup sour cream
salt, sugar

1. Wash millet in cold water. Plunge into boiling water, after few minutes set on a colander and place under cold running water. Now you can simply cook millet in 2 cups water or broth for 15 minutes (don't overcook, just observe the grains!)

2. Separately, cook unpeeled potatoes.

3. Pour whey into a saucepan, add chopped dill, cooked millet, cooked, peeled and diced potatoes, lemon juice and a pinch of salt and sugar. Bring to boil.

4. Turn off the heat. Pour sour cream to a bowl, add 1 cup of whey soup and stir well. Add it to the pan with the soup and stir. Don't boil anymore.

Waffle cake tutorial + vanilla filling

2009-03-29T11:41:00.000-07:00

Wafer cake (torcik waflowy, sometimes called pishinger) is very popular in Poland, but also in Russia and probably other east-european countries. Simply wafer sheets filled with differrent kind of creams. Thanks to Feedjit I know that many internauts visit my blog in search of filled wafer cake recipe, and I know that some of you make this cake in a wrong way. That is why I decided to give you a kind of tutorial, to explain you step by step how to prepare this delicious, simply no-bake cake.

First of all, you need big wafer sheets (outside Poland, available in Polish or Russian groceries) -> like these or these. There are even heart-shaped waffles :) Don't you believe me? Go and see what a Polish blogger made with her waffles in a free time :)

Secondly, you have to choose the filling. There are plenty of differrent fillings, for example:
- toffee filling (or more extravagant: toffee with cookies)
- fruity filling
- helva filling
- peanut cream filling*
- eggnog cream filling
- honey cream filling
- lekvar-choco filling
- cacao cream filling
- vanilla cream filling
The most popular fillings in Poland are toffee filling (cook a can of condensed milk for 3 hours in a pot with water, open the can, beat the toffee that you just obtained with some soft butter) or powdered milk-based cacao cream. I promise to show you in the future more differrent filling recipes.
*this filling is delicious but you need to double or triple this recipe to be able to fill 1 pack of wafer sheets

Third thing is decoration. You can just leave undecorated filled wafers and cut them into diamonds, or spread with chocolate glaze and sprinkle with chopped nuts (other ideas are more than welcome). Torcik waflowy is often made for Easter and decorated just like mazurek, a famous Polish Easter cake. Just decorate waffle cake like mazurek or cut it into a shape of egg and decorate - like here or here.

Ok. If you already have made your plans, let's start!

1. Prepare enough cream (better more than less). At least 2 cups of cream for 1 pack of waffles.

2. Smear cream on waffles, when it is still warm! Don't skimp it, remember to cover the whole waffle with about 5mm of filling! Start from the inside.

Remember, begin with a wafer sheet and end with a wafer sheet - cream should stay inside! Cause...

3. ...cause when you are done with smearing waffles, now you have to wrap your cake into a baking paper or culinary aluminium paper. Leave it in a cool place and load it by putting a heavy big enciclopedia on the top of the wrapped cake! If not, soft (by a warm cream) waffle sheets will probaly deform. By loading our cake, it stays well-shaped and the filling glues wafer sheets (but remember, just like I said before, each sheet needs a lot of filling!) the best would be to leave the cake overnight but if not, than at least 2 hours. After that time, sheets will stay soft and the filling won't run down by cutting the cake!

4. Only now you can cut your cake into diamonds (or any other portions) and put on a plate or... decorate it and serve without cutting.

Now the fifth filling option (after toffe, fruity, helva and peanut filling), the one my mum got from my aunt Basia, who makes the best cakes of the world: sweet and delicious milky vanilla filling

1 cup milk
1 cup sugar
250 gr margarine (important: no butter!)
3 cups powdered milk*
few drops vanilla flavouring
(optionally: 1/2 teaspoon cocoa. If you add 3-4 tablespoons pure cocoa powder, you'll obtain vanilla-cocoa cream)
*If your cream is thick enough, you can add a bit less powdered milk. Or, take 2 cups powdered milk and 1 cup ground walnuts/almods/coconut flakes!

1. In a saucepan, bring to boil milk, margarine and sugar. Pour into a bowl and gradually add small amounts of powdered milk (nuts, cocoa) and flavouring and stir well all the time (make no clumps!). Smear waffles... well... and follow the tutorial instructions above (from point 2) :)

2. Optionally, melt 100 gr milk chocolate with 25 gr copha (coconut fat), decorate the cake, sprinkle with chopped nuts, decorate with nut halves, candies, coconut flakes or anything you like! It's really delicious!

Polish Jews sweet matzo pancakes

2009-03-24T13:40:00.000-07:00

Polish: maca
Slovakian: maces
Arabic: مصة
Hebrew: מצה
Dutch: matse
German: Matze
Russian: маца
Romanian: pască
Portuguese: matzá
Japanese: マッツァー

Many dishes of Polish Jews are today considered regional specialities, and same time Polish regional cuisine left influences in Jewish recipes. Matzo and challah are available in most Polish groceries; Bagels originates in Poland; raw potato fritters, stuffed goose necks, fish in almonds and raisins, red cabbage salad and noodle-curd pies are eaten commonly at Vistula river. Nevertheless, many Polish Jews dishes are today forgotten, but thanks God there still are old cookbooks :) Here is a great recipe for Polish Jews delicacy, sweet matzo pancakes, called chremzel.

100 gr matzo
50 gr almonds
50 gr sugar
4 eggs
200 ml wine
a pinch of salt
a pinch of baking powder
a drop of almond flavouring

1. Grind matzo and peeled almonds in coffee grinder. Heat wine with sugar (leave 3 tablespoons apart). Pour warm wine over ground matzo and almonds.

2. Beat yolks with resting sugar (those 3 tablespoons). Whisk egg whites with a pinch of salt until stiff. Combine yolks with wine matzo, almond flavouring and baking powder. Add stiff egg whites and slightly mix under matzo dough.

3. Fry small pancakes in oil. Sprinkle with icing sugar before serving.

Polish dill soup

2009-03-24T12:26:00.000-07:00

Polish: koperek
Berber: aslili
Dhivehi: ދަމުއި
Manx: lus veein
Greek: άνηθο
Spanish: eneldo
Japanese: イノンド
German: Dill
Persian: شوید
Basque: ezamihilu

Dill was the most favourite seasoning of a Polish medieval poet, Mikołaj Rej. I guess Mikołaj never ate young boiled potatoes with butter and dill, accompaigned by a glass of fresh kefir or soured milk, a popular summer Polish meal, cause in medieval Poland potatoes were still unknown. But I guess he could know the taste of herring in dill, soured cucumbers pickled with dill, fish in dill sauce or dill soup (maybe a bit different than mine). Polish zupa koperkowa, dill soup, is really a very tasty dish. And an extremely easy one, you will be done in 10 minutes!!! Eat dill and you'll be strong, dill was stimulating Roman gladiators and strengthing Egyptian pyramid constructors :)

2 buns dill (from 1/3 to 1/2 cup chopped dill)
1 l vegetable or chicken stock
1 carrot
1 onion
100 gr processed cheese (melted cheese - Polish serek topiony, German Schmelzkäse) or thick sour cream (but it tastes better with cheese!)
tiny noodles (like those , those or those or any other small noodles. Eventually, take 1/2 cup rice and cook it in the stock just like it would be noodles)

1. Chop dill finely and slightly fry in oil. Grate carrot and chop onion and fry them, too. Add them to the stock (homemade or from cube). Add noodles. Cook until noodles are done.

2. Take a cup of the soup and, in a bowl, whisk well with processed cheese or sour cream. Add to the soup and stir. It's ready! You can sprinkle the soup with some fresh (not fried) chopped dill before serving.

US-American buckwheat cookies

2009-03-23T13:11:00.000-07:00

Polish: ciasteczko
Kawésqar: kilíta
Mapunzugun: kochüke kofke
Quechua: qhapukillu
Guarani: mbujapemi
Aymara: misk'i t'ant'alla
Cheyenne: vé'keekóhkonôheo'o
Maliseet: sukolopanis
Naskapi: kwaaihkunaas
Ojibwe: pakwezhigaans

For language fans, cookie in Polish and some native American languages :) For cookie fans, a great cookies recipe, but a special one, with buckwheat flour. I love buckwheat so I couldn't resist, when I saw Alice Medrich's buckwheat recipe from her "Pure Dessert" book. This recipe was circulating in the web between American culinary bloggers. I changed it a little but and I promise, buckwheat flour gives those American cookies a tasty, surprising, nutty twist!

1 1/4 cups flour
3/4 cup buckwheat flour
225 gr soft butter
2/3 cup sugar
1 tablespoon cocoa powder + 1/3 cup chopped peanuts (unsalted)
(originally: 1/3 cup cocoa nibs)
a pinch of salt
few drops vanilla extract

1. Sift both flours with cocoa powder. Beat soft butter with sugar and salt until creamy and fluffy. Mix all the ingredients together and work the dough the way it stays homogeneous.

2. Wrap the dough into a plactic bag and roll it as thin as you want it to have. Or, form a long roll - you will cut slices of it like salami :) After 2-3 hours (or after night) cut cookes using a cookie cutter or knife. Bake 15 minutes in 180C oven.

Israeli date pastries

2009-03-22T15:48:00.000-07:00

Polish: daktyl
Portuguese: tâmara
Xhosa: umhla
Sicilian: rattula
Romanian: curmală
Azeri: xurma
Arabic: تَمْر
Kurdish: salroj
Malay: buah kurma
Mokshan: fig

Mammouls are delicious stuffed pastries, eaten in the whole Near East. They can be filled with dates, walnuts, pistachios, dates with sesame seeds and so on. they are a festivity cookie, eaten (depends on religion of the eater and on the filling) during Easter, Ramadan, Hanukkah and Purim. I ate once great Lebanese mammouls with pistachio filling in the most important moment of my life and that is why I will never forget its taste. Again, using great Elizabeth Wolf-Cohen's book "Jüdische Küche", I prepared Israeli mammouls (מעמול) with date filling and they were incredibly tasty and similar to the Lebanese ones I ate. However, Jewish and Arab recipes differ and I will show you Arab recipe another day, too.

(to make 12 pastries)
175 gr flour
2 tablespoons sugar
2 tablespoons milk
1+1 tablespoon orange blossom essence
90 gr soft butter
100 gr pitted dried dates
icing sugar to sprinkle

1. Combine flour with sugar. Add milk, orange water and butter and knead. Optionally, add few more milk but don't add too much cause the dough can't be sticky! Form walnut-size balls (I made 12).

2. Prepare the filling: chop dates finely and add orange blossom water (or optionally a bit of water to make the consistency better, but I just soaked dried dates in water before chopping them and it made everything easier, I simply strained them and chopped)

3. With your fingers, make a hole in dough balls and stuff each ball with a teaspoon of the filling. Close the balls and form them anyhow you wish. Mammouls can be formed with special wooden molds like these or you can shape them in your hands with a help of tongs (see also here , here and here). To inspire yourself, take a look at these pics: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6.
And here are my no-mould-no-tongs-hand-made mammouls :)

ps. my mum asked me to make mammouls with our homemade chokeberry jam as a filling. I guess I'd like to experiment, I am sure it would taste great!

Israeli olive oil bread rolls

2009-03-20T07:16:00.000-07:00

Polish: oliwka
Romanian: măslină
Ligurian: auriva
Sicilian: aliva
Hausa: zàitùn
Basque: oliba
Kabyle: azemmur
Greek: ελιά
Caló: letaya
Hebrew: זית

To be honest, I hated olives and olive oil. My sister, after her travel to Valencia, brought to us a new habit of sprinkling bread with olive oil and juice squeezed directly with hands from a fresh tomato. I couldn't stand that taste until I went... to Chile. Once my lovely Chilean friends, Susy and Diego, bought a pack of olives for our trip at the sea side. I tried one reluctantly and... I fell in love :) Now I understand my friends who are able to eat the whole jar while going bakc home from the grocery, cause I sometimes do the same. But I don't care, they are healthy and delicious!
My brother bought 1 kg of black olives and I was wondering wether to eat them all, make tapenade or Palestinian ragout with olives and chicken... But yet I decided to try another recipe from Elizabeth Wolf-Cohen's book "Jüdische Küche", which my sister and brother-in-law gave me for Christmas. But I made some small changes in this recipe. If you love olives, try Israeli olive breads, לחם זיתים!

(for 9 buns)
350 gr flour
90 gr buckwheat flour
1 teaspoon sugar
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon oregano
a pinch of pepper
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 tablespoon dried yeast
225 ml lukewarm water
300 gr black olives (pitted)

1. If you use bread machine (as I did), just pour the water to the recipient and add salt, sugar, oil, oregano, sieved flour and yeast and set for a kneading program. If you use your hands, put all dry ingredients into a bowl (sieve flours of course) and slowly add warm water and oil and knead. Cover and set in a warm place to let the dough grow (it takes about 1 hour)

2. When you are ready with 1st point, the dough is twice as big as it was while kneading, chop olives and knead the dough again, together with olives. Form buns (I made 9) and leave them for about 30 minutes to grow again.

3. You can eventually lightly cut your buns lenghtwise or make a cross with a knife. Bake about 20 minutes in 180C oven. And that's it!

Polish (Silesian) herring appetizer

2009-03-18T10:09:00.000-07:00

Polish: śledź
Ukrainian: оселедець
Lithuanian: silkė
Faroese: sild
Mari: селедка
Manx: skeddan
Venetian: renga
Occitan: arenc
Korean: 청어
Indonesian: biang-biang

Hekele is a great Silesian appetizer made basically from herrings. Simple, healthy and delicious, eaten like a salad or with bread.

2 herring filets (mine were about 200 gr)
2 eggs
2 sour pickled cucumbers (about 100 gr)
1/2 onion
1 tablespoon mustard
salt, pepper

I guess my proportions are not proper, cause I should take twice or maybe thrice more herrings, but I personally prefer to not loose the taste of eggs.

1. Cut herrings into small chunks. Boil eggs until hard (about 8 minutes), peel cucumbers and onion, chop everything finely. Add mustard, season with pepper and optionally salt.

2. If you want to transform hekele into a wonderful salad, add few cooked and chopped potatoes and champignons.

I don't like mustard too much so I added 1 tablespoon of mustard and 1 tablespoon of mayonnaise :) That is why my hekele look so white :) Oh, and I decorated the whole plate with chopped chives.

A very similar herring salad is eaten in my family at a Christmas Supper. That is why I add this recipe to my Christmas Menu collection.

Belarussian sweet yeast buns

2009-03-17T08:38:00.000-07:00

Sweet yeast buns, part 2.: Belarussian sour cream buns, cметанники (smetanniki). Very similar to vatrushki, but this dough is less fluffy, more like a typical bread roll and a bit less like a sweet yeast bun. Great for breakfast.

to make 16 buns
dough:
5 cups flour
30 gr fresh yeast
250 ml milk
3 eggs
1 cup milk
2/3 cup sugar
130 gr butter
1/2 teaspoon salt

filling:
1 cup sour cream
4 tablespoons butter (melted)
4 tablespoons flour
2 tablespoons sugar
(optionally 1 egg to smear the surface of buns before baking)

1. Melt yeast in warm milk. Add 2/3 cup flour, whisk to eliminate lumps and set in a warm place, waiting for bubbles.

2. Whisk eggs with sugar, add melted butter and the rest of the ingredients. Add flour at the end. Do it slowly and stop when the dough is not sticky anymore (it depends on the humidity of your flour, but it should be about 5 cups). knead and set aside in a warm place. When the dough is twice as big as it was just after kneading, knead it again and form buns. Just like in vatrushki recipe, make holes. leave buns to grow a bit more, spear with whisked egg (this time I didn't do it, but I recommend!), fill with sour cream filling (just combine together all the ingredients of the filling) and bake about 20 minutes in 180C oven.

Russian sweet yeast buns

2009-03-17T07:22:00.000-07:00

Polish: drożdżówka
Turkish: çörek
Portuguese: pãozinho
Czech: houska
Russian: булочка
French: petit pain
Hebrew: לחמנייה

Ватрушки (vatrushki) are delicious Russian yeast buns, filled usually with fresh cheese, but also with jam, millet, potato puree or apple filling. This is the first of three sweet yeast buns recipe which I just baked: Russian cheese buns, Polish custard buns and Belarussian sour cream buns :)

(to make 8 buns)
dough:
400 gr flour
60 gr butter
60 gr sugar
2 eggs
yeast (25 gr fresh or 7 gr dried)
1/2 teaspoon salt
125 ml milk
1 teaspoon mayonnaise

filling:
250 gr fresh curd cheese (twaróg)
2 eggs (1 yolk separately)
25 gr icing sugar
1 pack vanilla sugar
1 tablespoon butter
1 tablespoon flour

1. Add yeast to warm milk. Set in a warm place for a short time (until it bubbles). After that, sieve flour and add the rest of the ingredients (all of them should be of a room temperature, that is imprescindible when you make a yeast dough!!!) and knead or put them in a bread machine (which I did).

If you do the dough with your own hands, knead until it is homogeneous and elastic. Set in a warm place until it doubles its surface and knead again.

2. Prepare the filling: press the cheese through a sieve, beat eggs with sugar and vanilla sugar (1 yolk waits separately!), add very soft butter, sieve flour and mix everything together.

3. Form apple-size buns. Press each bun with a bottom of a glass (previously, deep it in flour). Leave them for some time to grow again, spread with the resting yolk, fill with cheese and bake (about 20 minutes in 180C oven). Eat warm with a glass of milk.

Ukrainian sauerkraut pancakes

2009-03-17T06:00:00.000-07:00

Polish: kiszona kapusta
Ukrainian: капуста квашена
Italian: crauti
Estonian: hapukapsas
Finnish: hapankaali
Romanian: varză acră
Albanian: lakra turshi
Luxembourgian: Sauermous
Slovak: kyslá kapusta
Dutch: zuurkool

Sauerkraut is absolutely beloved in Poland. I buy it often in a fresh-air-markt near to my home, together with sour red cabbage, sour gherkins and gherkin kvas (to prepare borscht or bread). This healthy cabbage is especially often eaten in the wintertime in the whole eastern, central and northern Europe. The recipe I am gonna show you now is just fantastic. It is a version of potato pancakes, placki ziemniaczane, brothers of Jewish latkes, but in this wonderful Ukrainian recipe, sauerkraut is added. I think I am addicted to oладки з квашеної капусти, potato-sauerkraut pancakes :)

for 6 big pancakes:
200 gr sauerkraut
500 gr potatoes (uncooked)
1 medium onion
few chives
1 egg
salt, pepper and caraway to taste
(if needed, also 1-2 tablespoons flour)

1. Chop sauerkraut, onion, chives and grind potatoes (I was too lazy and ground them in a meat grinder, which method I recommend as it works great even with raw potatoes). Put on a sieve and let the juice flow away. This is important!

2. Add whisked egg and seasoning. If there is still too much juice from potatoes and cabbage, you will have to add few flour.

3. Fry thin big pancakes and serve with sour cream

Polish horseradish soup

2009-03-12T08:14:00.000-07:00

Polish: chrzan
Ossetian: туттургъан
Hebrew: חזרת הגינה
faroese: piparrót
Galician: labestro
Spanish: rábano picante
Greek: αγριοραπάνια
Estonian: mädarőigas
Latvian: mārrutka
Ukrainian: хрін

Horseradish is an important ingredient of Easter menu in Poland. I am slowly composing Easter menu, so last week I was trying a regional recipe for a horseradish soup from southern Poland highlander town, Lanckorona (chrzanówka lanckorońska), to be able to choose the best soup for Easter breakfast. I recommend this spicy soup to all fans of horseradish, turnip, rutabaga, garden cress and radish.

see also: Polish whey-millet soup
see also: Moldovan whey soup

1l whey*
5 tablespoons freshly ground horseradish
5 tablespoons sour cream
1 tablespoon flour
2 garlic cloves
3 eggs
1 teaspoon lovage
salt, pepper to taste
(+ originally ribs and a bit of sausage)

1*. Don't have whey? To obtain about 1l of whey, take 1,5l milk and 2-3 tablespoons vinegar or lemon juice. Bring milk on a low heat with vinegar/lemon juice without boiling, until it curdles. This is it, now you have to separate curd from whey using a fine sieve. (Of course, don't throw the curd, just eat it with scallions, dill and garlic on a slice of fresh bread!)

2. In a saucepan, put ribs and sausage (or a vegetable stock cube), ground horseradish and chopped eggs. Pour whey over the ingredients and slowly bring to boil. Season with salt and pepper. Take the meat off.

3. In a bowl, perfectly whisk flour with sour cream to omit lumps. Add 1 cup of your warm soup from the pan and whisk again. Now add this mixture to the soup and cook. Add lovage and ground garlic 1 minute before serving.

4. Serve with cooked potatoes sprinkled with fresh dill and parsley green.

Polish potato-buckwheat-cheese pie

2009-03-11T16:16:00.000-07:00

Polish: gryka
Lithuanian: sėjamasis grikis
Romanian: hrișcă
Upper Sorbian: hejduška
Hungarian: hajdina
Croatian: heljda
Slovenian: ajda
Czech: pohanka
Bulgarian: обикновена елда
English: buckwheat

The eastern-Polish city Biłgoraj is famous from its buckwheat-potato-cheese pie, called in Polish piróg (or sometimes pieróg) biłgorajski. This is a great winter or early spring dish, when there still are no fresh vegetables available. You can serve it warm with your favourite salad.

1 kg potatoes
400 gr buckwheat
500 gr fresh curd cheese (twaróg)
2 big onions
3 eggs (separate 1 egg white)
1 teaspoon dried mint
salt, pepper

1. Wash potatoes and cook them unpeeled. Peel them olny when cooked and soft. Mash them with a knife or use potato press. Mix potato puree with washed, but uncooked buckwheat grains. Set aside for minimum 1/2 hour - groats will be softer since they are combined with warm puree.

2. Chop onions and fry until golden brown. Crush twaróg between fingers (you could use any fresh cheese, ricotta or feta or anything, but remember, twaróg is not salty at all so if you add a salty cheese, don't add salt anymore or add only a few) or with a fork. Whisk eggs (without that eggwhite) with salt, pepper and mint, add cheese and onion.

3. Combine all the previously prepared ingredients together. Spread with the eggwhite you set aside. Bake in the oven (180C) 90 minutes. Cut into squares and serve with yoghurt or kefir and your favourite salad

ps. my piróg is quite short cause I made only half portion. It should be twice thicker :)

Iraqi carrot soup

2009-03-11T09:42:00.000-07:00

Polish: zupa
Cornish: yskel
Guarani: jukysy
Pitjantjatjara: tjuupa
Irish: anraith
Japanese: スープ
Slovenian: juha
Valencian: brou
Hindi: सूप
Zulu: isobho

A delicious Iraqi soup, again!

500 gr carrots
4 medium tomatoes
4 celery stalks
2 medium onions
2 garlic cloves
100 gr vermicelli noodles
1 teaspoon curry powder
salt, pepper

1. Grate carrots on the finest grater. Cut celery stalks into thin slices. Puree peeled tomatoes. Cut onions into slices. Grate garlic cloves.

2. In a saucepan, fry onions in oil. When they turn golden, add garlic and tomato puree. Fry until tomato puree thickens. Transfer to the pot with 6 cups of water

3. Now it's time to fry grated carrots and celery slices (separately). When carrots are sligltly yellowish and sceleries a bit brownish, transfer them to the soup pot, too. Season and bring to boil. Cook about 10 minutes, add noodles, cook 10 minutes more (or until noodles are done)

French (+ Jewish) pear tarte

2009-03-09T13:21:00.000-07:00

Polish: gruszka
Cree: ᑳᔒᐅᐯᒋᓯᑦ
Blackfoot: ómahkínaotohton
Cheyenne: éškôsa'ehe
Quechua: pira
Mohawk: katshe'kahik
Guarani: yvavo’ĩ
Papago: pihlas
Maliseet: sikusq

Happy Women's Day! I know it was yesterday but better later than never! I wish all the best to all the women of the world, and especially to food lovers and guests on my blog! i baked something for you - a great French pear-almond tart (tarte aux poires et amandes), I usually try to use season fruits and vegetables but I just wanted so much to eat this tarte yesterday that I had to prepare it :) I took this recipe from a great book written by Elizabeth Wolf-Cohen titled "Jüdische Küche".

175 gr flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
4 tablespoons icing sugar
120 gr butter (or, as suggested in the book, parve margarine)
2 egg yolks (+ 1 tablespoom cold water)
2 eggs
50 gr sugar
90 gr ground almonds + 2 tablespoon sliced almonds
few drops almond aroma
2 big pears (about 500 gr)

1. Prepare the pie crust pastry: knead flour, icing sugar, salt, butter / margarine and 2 yolks whisked with 1 tablespoon cold water. Cover with paper and set in the fridge for 2-3 hours (or better overnight)

2. Butter a tarte-form and sprinkle with flour, roll the dough and fill the form. Put a sheet of baking paper on it and spread some beans to bake blind . Bake 10-15 minutes in 200C

3. Peel pears and cut into thin slices and arrange them on the baked shell. Separate yolks and whites from 2 left eggs. Beat yolks with sugar until almost white and fluffy, add ground almonds and aroma. Whisk whites until stiff. Add to yolk cream and pour over pears. Sprinkle with almond flakes. Bake about 30 minutes in 180C. I recommend to cover the tarte with baking paper to prevent excessive toasting of the top of the tarte. It smells delicious and tastes really really great! We ate it just as it was, au naturel :P but I guess a great idea would be serving it with vanilla sauce, whipped cream or ice-cream!

Iraqi lentil-pumpkin soup

2009-03-08T16:44:00.000-07:00

Polish: zupa
Bashkir: Һурпа
Armenian: սուպ
Quechua: chupi
Hebrew: מרק
Chinese: 汤
Tatar: aş
Marathi: रस
Mari: шӱр
Czech: polévka

I could eat soups for breakfast, lunch, supper, dessert, five o'clock tea... The one I am gonna write about now, Iraqi lentil-pumpkin soup (schurbat adas ma qar) is one of the best soups that a human being could ever imagine.

1 kg pumpkin flesh*
500 gr tomatoes
300 gr red lentils
2 big onions
pepper, salt, paprica to season

1. Cook (washed) lentils in 2 l water for 1/2 hour

2. In a frying pan heat some oil and fry chopped onions until goldenbrown. Add diced pumpkin flesh (cubes should be rather small) and saute. Puree peeled tomatoes (or grate tomatoes with kitchen grater as I always do) and add to the pan; stew few minutes more (tomato puree should thicken a bit)

3. Add the content of the pan to the pot with lentils, season and simmer on a low heat 1/2 hour more. Serve with Arabic bread and slices of lemon.

*you can take zucchini instead of pumpkin

Estonian rye bread mousse

2009-03-07T15:02:00.000-08:00

Polish: chleb żytni
German: Roggenbrot
Albanian: bukë thekre
Finnish: ruisleipä
Russian: ржаной хлеб
Swedish: rågbröd
Greek: ψωμί σικάλεωσ
Bahasa Indonesia: roti hitam
Portuguese: pão de centeio
Czech: žitný chléb

Does a simple rye bread serve only to prepare sandwiches? In Baltic countries deffinitely no. Once I found in a grocery a delicious yoghurt with rye bread crumbles from Lithuania. Since that time I was looking for other sweet dessert recipes with rye bread. For instance, in Estonia people know how to prepare delicious rye bread sweet soup, rye bread pudding or cake or a wonderful rye bread mousse (leivakreem). I guess if there is rye bread ice cream? :)

To prepare 2 portions of leivakreem, you need:

few slices of rye bread (about 100 gr)
300 ml whipping cream
1 tablespoon butter
a pinch of cinnamon
40 gr sugar + 40 gr vanillasugar

1. If your bread slices are not dry enough, dry them in a toaster or oven. Then, grate

2. Fry bread crumbs in butter with sugar. Add cinnamon and set aside to cool

3. Whip the cream and when ready, add cooled breadcrumbs. Serve with any kind of sour jam (I used mirabelle)

ps. some people also add 1 teaspoon of gelatine to the mousse (just sprinkle the gelatine with few cold water, set aside for 5 minutes, warm shortly in microwave and beat together with whipping cream. Of course in this case you'll have to wait about 2hours before serving the mousse)

US-American stuffed butternut

2009-03-07T11:12:00.000-08:00

Polish: dynia piżmowa
English: butternut squash
Spanish: zapallo anco
Swedish: bisampumpa
French: courge musquée
Quechua: lakawiti
Tamil: கல்யாணப் பூசணி
Hebrew: דלורית
Dutch: muskaatpompoen

A great recipe for American stuffed butternut squash:

1 medium butternut squash (1 kg)
100 gr blue cheese (I took Bavarian Blue)
1/2 cup crushed walnuts
1 onion, 1 garlic clove
a handful of breadcrumbs
optionally: salt, pepper

1. Cut cleaned squash lengthways in two halves, scoop out the seeds. Put some butter and mashed garlic in each cavity, brush with oil and sprinkle with salt and pepper. Bake 1 hour in the oven (200 C). The flesh has to be tender.

2. Scoop the flesh, leaving about 1 cm of flesh attached to the skin. Put it into a bowl with the butter-garlic juice. Mash it with blue cheese, chopped onion and nuts. You can add your favourite herbs (thyme, basil, oregano). Spoon back into squash halves and sprinkle with breadcrumbs. Bake about 15 minutes more.

Russian milky rutabaga soup

2009-03-02T16:01:00.000-08:00

Polish: mleko
Vepsian: maid
Udmurt: mel
Sakha/Yakut: үүт
Tatar: söt
Kalmyk: sün
Tuvin: süt
Bashkir: Һөт
Buryat: hün
Chuvash: cĕт

Language freaks will surely enjoy a small translation list of milk in few Russian Federation languages (plus, Polish, as always).
Food freaks will surely enjoy a milky recipe. So everyone is content :)

Milk soups are a part of my childhood memory. In eastern Poland milk soups in hunderts of varieties are eaten especially as a breakfast or a light evening meal. After milk, they can contain noodles (bought or homemade ones), grits, rice, millet, carrot or pumpkin. Milk soups as a dinner are more popular in Russia. There are plenty of varieties and I want to share milk-rutabaga-buckwheat soup recipe, cause it is one of those which I already tried and really liked.

see also: Polish milk and couliflower soup
see also: Polish milk and pumpkin breakfast soup

So here it is, Russian молочный суп из брюквы. To prepare it you will need:

500 gr rutabaga
500 gr potatoes
100 gr buckwheat
1 tablespoon butter
1 l milk
salt and caraway

1. Cut rutabaga in 2 halves. Put into a saucepan with cold water and bring to boil. Pour the water away, peel and cut rutabaga into cubes. Peel and cut potatoes into cubes, too.

2. Wash buckwheat. Boil 1 l water, add buckwheat, cubed vegatables and butter. After 10 minutes of cooking, add milk. Cook on a low heat and season with salt and caraway.

Russian cranberry kvas

2009-02-28T14:04:00.000-08:00

Polish: żurawina
Mari: турнявӧчыж
Hungarian: tőzegáfonya
Inupiaq: qunmun asriaq
Lithuanian: Spanguolė
Ukrainian: журавлина
Karelian: karpalo
Vepsian: garbol
Estonian: jõhvikas
Frisian: feanbei

My today's hero is cranberry. This red small round fruit is actually even called a superfruit due to its nutrient content and antioxidant qualities. Three huge northern countries use this fruit in an interesting way. Canada and USA have their cranberry sauce, muffins, compotes, jellies, cakes and wine, while Russians... well I think I discovered only a low percent of Russian cranberry recipes, besides cranberry kissel all of them are exotic and worth trying, just imagine: cranberry-vegetables-fish cold soup, differrent vegetable salads with cranberries, fish or chicken baked with cranberies, cranberry-wheat drink, patties with cranberry filling, cranberry pancakes, cranberry meringue, cranberry infusion and so on... I will surely try some of them, especially because I adore cranberries but I usually only eat dried cranberries as a snack or buy cranberry ice cream, and because my first meeting with Russian cranberry recipes was successful. I made cranberry kvas (квас клюквенный).

1 kg (fresh, not dried!) cranberries
500 gr sugar
40 gr yeast
5 l water

Wash berries carefully, set in a saucepan and pour boiling water over them. Boil until berries break up. Separate friots from the water. Take 1 cup of cranberry water and mix with yeast to dissolve it. Add sugar and a cup with dissolved yeast to the rest of cranberry water. Set aside for several days until bubbles appear.

After that, pour kvas into bottles and store in a cool place few days before drinking.

Swiss mirabelle tarte

2009-02-23T09:56:00.000-08:00

Polish: mirabelka
Spanish: ciruela amarilla
Persian: آلو قطره‌طلا
Portuguese: mirabela
Austrian German: Kriecherl
Romanian: corcoduş
Swedish: mirabelle
Russian: мирабель

Mirabelle is the oldest kind of plums. My father makes a delicious mirabelle syrup which we drink later during cold winter dark evenings, and my mum prepares wonderful mirabelle jam, sweet and sour.

It is not a season to buy mirabelles now, you will have to wait until next late summer, but if you like these yellow small plums, don't forget to try Swiss mirabelle tarte, Mirabellenwähe!

150 gr flour
50 gr ground almonds (almond flour) + 3 tablespoons (separately)
1 teaspoon sugar
1/2 teaspoon salt
80 gr butter
1 kg mirabellen (weight with seeds)
50 ml milk
150 gr cream cheese
2 eggs
3 tablespoons sugar + 3 tablespoons vanilla sugar
icing sugar to sprinkle

1. Sieve flour, add ground almonds, sugar, salt and cold butter. Knead fast while adding 5 tablespoons water. Leave in the fridge for 1/2 hour (or more, can be left overnight) and after that, fill the tarte mold with the dough.

2. Throw the seeds from mirabelles away. Spread 3 tablespoons of ground almonds over the dough (which is already in the mold) and put mirabelles on it.

3. Mix milk, cream cheese, eggs and both kinds of sugar together. pour over mirabelles. Bake about 50 minutes in 180 C oven (or until the top is golden)

some Polish traditional sweets

2009-02-23T08:12:00.000-08:00

Dear food lovers!
The blog is 1 year old. I abandoned it for some time but now I am back and ready to share recipes and pictures again. Thank you for the comments and for asking to continue the blog. I'll try to do my best :) Especially about Polish cooking.

I had 5 culinary opportunities left (opportunities to bake something special and celicious, of course): All Saints Day & Polish Independence Day, my birthday, Christmas, New Year and carneval (mardi gras or "thick thursday", tłusty czwartek", as it is called here in Poland... I was gathering recipes and pics I made in the meantime and will show you some of them.

1st November is when you find more people at the cementary than at the street, at least here in Warsaw. People bring tons of candles and flowers, clean tombstones, prey, have a walk. It is a kind of magic time and I like to spend that day at Powązki Cementary to visit Polish soldiers, actors and writers. I always bring home cementary sweets: round hard dry buns with a hole inside, bound like a chaplet with a twine, called obwarzanki and hard white and red stripped candies called pańska skórka. Pańska skórka is a regional candy from Warsaw, sold especially in November, but lately also anytime at the old town square, and its recipe is top secret. Obwarzanki can be bought even in supermarkts, but only the crispy thin variety; the obwarzanki that look like tiny buns are available only during the Independence Day and at the cementery.
Here you can see obwarzanki (thick version), prażynki (those big crispies) and szyszki (puffed rice balls with caramel, called "cones")

even if homemade puff rice szyszki look and taste so differrent because of higher content of caramel or chocolate:

If you have some obwarzanki (maybe from Polish or Russian markt) and wanna eat them in an old Polish way, just soak them for 1 hour in sweet red wine (eventually in milk). When they are soft, fry them in butter. Sprinkle with icing sugar and eat warm.

Take a look at some regional delicacies from the beautiful city Poznań. I was there with my brother in November and of course we brought home Rogale Świętomarcińskie (St.Martin croissants). 11 November, together with Polish independence Day, is also St.Martin Day. In ancient pagan tradition that day's tradition was to offer ox or an ox-horn-shaped bun. Catholic church adopted this tradition by joining it with St.Martin and the bun's shape was just a symbol of St.Martin's horse's shoe. The filling is made by a special white sort of poppy and differrent dried fruits. Here it is, together with delicious crunchy "tube" cakes (rury) and a special, "fried" cheese -serek smażony- another Wielkopolska and Silesian tradition: curd cheese fried with caraway.

And than... end of December came. Like all food lovers, I was using this great opportunity to bake kilograms of delicious cakes, cookies, gibgerbreads and all this kind of stuff. Take a look at my Christmas ginger cookies :)

The last thursday of carnaval (the last thursday before Ash Wednesday) is called tłusty czwartek (fat thursday). This day you HAVE to eat pączki, Polish donuts, and a kind of long sweet fried pieces of thin dough, called faworki or chrust (literally, brushwood).

The same dough can be formed into roses and baked. Roses are called róże karnawalowe. Believe me or not but shape determines the taste (in noodles or fried dough... really!)

Queues to buy those delicacies are soooooo long! It is great to make them at home but both are quite complicated to prepare. The best pączki in Warsaw are from Blikle, but my mum makes great ones, too. But this year we had no time to prepare them for thursday, but there still is the last chance to eat them on Ostatki (Mardi Gras, the last day before Ash Wednesday, which is in Poland a day of fasting and you should eat only 1 full meal, but without meat, eggs or dairy products). Ostatki are tomorrow so keep your fingers crossed so that we manage to fry my mum's pączki and you will get the most wonderful recipe in the world :) Until now, take a look at Blikle donuts.

2008-09-17T18:21:00.000-07:00

Hello to all food-lovers! My dearest readers, I am sorry if lately I don't post too often. It will change soon, I promise. I still have to post some wondeful recipes with old pics, that wait on my usb to be posted, and which made with the old camara and don't have the best quality, but as soon as I do it I will post new pics of good quality. There is still Polish bilberry soup, Romanian quince soup, Portuguese carrot cake, German leek pie, Turkish lentil and potato croquettes, Estonian buckwheat-rutabaga soup and some more waiting to be posted. In the near future I am gonna show you how to prepare French fennel cake, French red cabbage soup, US-American nut soup, German elderberry-plum cake, Swiss mirabelle cake, Georgian spinach spread, Greek mastic ice-cream, Brasilian sweet potato cake, Polish sorrel soup, several Polish ancient desserts with groats/cereals, Portuguese bean cake, US-American cidre pie, sweet Jewish haroset and Arabic sellou, Russian honey-wafer cake and many many differrent tasty dishes from all over the world, so don't forget to drop in!!! See you soon,
Ewa

Brasilian cornmeal-yoghurt-lemon cake

2008-09-16T17:09:00.000-07:00

Polish: mąka kukurydziana
Portuguese: fubá
Swedish: majsmjöl
French: farine de maïs
Spanish: harina de maíz
Russian: кукурузный мука
German: Maismehl
Dutch: maismeel
Japanese: コーンミール
Danish: majsmel

Since corn is one of the most commonly eaten vegetables in South America, cornmeal is also widely eaten. There is a plenty of cornmeal recipes especially in Brasilian cuisine: cakes, fried sweets, buns, cookies, puddings. I like this one: bolo de fubá com iogurte e limão, cornmeal-yoghurt-lemon cake.

1 1/2 cup cornmeal
1 cup wheat flour
1 tablespoon baking powder
1 1/2 cup sugar
1 cup lemon yoghurt
1 cup oil
2 eggs
1 tablespoon lemon zest
1 pack vanilla sugar
a pinch of salt
1/3 cup goiabada or candied lemon zest chunks

1. Beat eggs with yoghurt and oil. Add 1 tablespoon lemon zests, salt, sugar and vanilla sugar and beat until sugar dissolves.

2. Sieve both flours with baking powder. Add slowly to egg-yoghurt mass and whisk all the time. When everything is smooth, add goiabada cut ínto chunks (or candied lemon chunks) but spnkle them with a little bit of flour (this way they will not fall down during baking).

3. Prepare a tray by smearing with butter and sprinkling with thin dry coconut flakes. Pour the dough and bake 45 minutes in 180C. Before serving, sprinkle with icing sugar

Portuguese papaya flan

2008-09-16T15:11:00.000-07:00

Polish: papaja
Vietnamese: đu đủ
Tongan: lesi
Thai: มะละกอ
Yucatec Maya: put
Zulu: uphopho
Portuguese: mamão
Malayalam: പപ്പായ
Bahasa Melayu: betik
Telugu: బొప్పాయి

Crème caramel, flan, flam, bánh flan, leche flan, pudim de ovos, caramel custard - this dessert is a celebrity, worldwide beloved. I was never a fan of it cause I never ate a really delicious one, probably. Here in Central Europe other custard and pudding-like desserts are eaten. So I decided to prepare a flan on my own. With papaya flavour :) The technique was interesting, expectations were high and results... won out! Make yourself this Portuguese papaya flan, pudim de papaia, it's worth your effort!

(makes 4 small portions or 1 big)
1 medium papaya, not ripe!
3 eggs
50 gr flour
150 ml milk
100 gr butter
400 gr sugar
(+ more sugar to prepare caramel)
zest of 1/2 lemon (ground)
(+ you will need 1 big or 3-4 small bowls which are suitable to bain-marie cooking, and 1 big tray for the water!)

1. Peel papaya and cook it until soft (check with a fork constantly! It doesn't take much time!). When ready, drain it, throw the seeds away and press through a sieve or puree the fruit.

2. Combine milk, flour and lemon zest. Add to papaya puree.

3. Whisk eggs with sugar. Add melted butter. Add to papaya puree and stir well.

4. Prepare caramel: pour sugar into the saucepan (I tool about 1/2 cup, but here the measurements are not that important... if you have a ready, bought liquid caramel, you can probably use it too), add a little bit of water (2-3 tablespoons or more) and stir on a low heat until you have caramel. When still warm and liquid, pour it into the bowl (one big or 3-4 small ones) and move the dish the way so that its walls are covered with caramel. Pour papaya cream into the bowl(s), place it in the tray with water and place the tray (with water and bowl(s) in the oven. Bake 30 minutes in 180C. When still warm, take off from the bowl(s) and serve.

Russian rolled oats blintz

2008-09-16T15:05:00.000-07:00

Polish: bliny
Russian: блины
Ukrainian: Млинці
Belarussian: бліны
Erzya: Пачалксеть
Lithuanian: blynai
Yiddish: בלינצע
Hebrew: בליני
Swedish: blinier
Japanese: ブリヌイ

What is the differrence between blintz, pancakes, crepes, naleśniki, galettes, palatsinken? Well... The main thing to remember is that blintz are always made with yeast. But remember, Central and East-Slavonic nations love all kind of fried batter cakes and know thousands of differrent recipes for them. In Russia, no-yeast crepe-like thin pancakes are called блинчики (blinchiki) and thick, smaller pancakes, often made with fruits or sour milk, are called oладьи (oladi). The most popular blintz are made of a mixture of buckwheat and wheat flour, but you can make blintz from ground rolled ots, millet flour or maize starch. You can serve them with sour cream or melted butter and caviar, herring, sturgeon or salmon meat, or on a sweet way: with honey or jam. I am gonna show you in this post Russian rolled oats blintz, Блины овсяные

2 1/2 cup rolled oats, finely ground (powder)
1 1/2 cup wheat flour
1/2 cup whipping cream
3 cups milk
30 gr fresh yeast
2 tablespoons sugar
2 tablespoons butter
3 eggs

1. Sift ground rolled oats and wheat flour into the bowl. Heat 1 cup milk (don't bring to boil!) and pour it over yeast and stir fast. Pour yeast milk on the flour. Add the rest of milk. Set in a warm place to grow.

2. Whisk eggs with sugar, melted butter and cream. Add to the dough and stir. Fry thin blintz on a saucepan without oil (or with just a drop of it).

Turkish rosehip-meatballs soup

2008-09-16T15:00:00.000-07:00

Polish: klopsik
Hungarian: fasirt
Italian: polpette
Sicilian: purpetta
Bahasa Indonesia: bakso
French: boulette
Catalan: mandonguilla
Sardinian: coyetta
Albanian: qofte
Portuguese: almôndega

Meatballs are one of the essential ingredients of this great autumn Turkish soup. Aparts of them, kuşburnu çorbası contains not much more than rosehips. In opposite to Swedish rosehip soup, this one is not sweet at all. Tastes unforgettably.

(makes 3 portions)
500 gr rosehips
1 l water
200 gr chopped meat
a pinch of salt, pepper and cumin
1 tablespoon butter
2 tablespoons flour
1/2 - 1 teaspoon dried mint

1. Wash rosehips, cut into halves and cook in 1 l water 30 minutes or until soft. Drain very well but don't throw the rosehip water away! Pour it into a deep bowl. Press the resting rosehips (as much as you can) through a sieve into the bowl with rosehip water. Throw seeds and peels away.

2. Prepare meatballs from meat, season with salt, pepper and garlic. I also added chopped fried onion but this is my little invention which original recipe didn't contain. Fry them shortly in oil together with dried mint

3. In a saucepan, melt butter and add flour. Stir and add rosehip water and puree from the bowl. Bring to boil, it will be thicker after cooking with flour. Reduce heat, add meatballs with mint and cook about 15 minutes more. Serve and enjoy!

I dedicate this recipe to my dear friend Asuman who nabbed me when I was collecting rosehip buds under her window :)

US-American autumn vegetable soup

2008-09-16T14:30:00.000-07:00

Polish: jesień
Armenian: աջռւն
Uzbek: kuz
Erzya: cёксь
Pashto: منۍ
Võro: süküs
Chuvash: Кĕркунне
Tigrinya: tzödia
Abkhasian: хкаарачан
Somail: dayr

Autumn slowly appears in central Europe again. Autumn is for me always more than welcome. There are not many things in this world better than floundering in colourful leaves, buying lovely orange pumpkins at the local markt and cooking and eating one of the most delicious soups of the world, US-American apple-rutabaga soup .

(makes 4 portions)
about 100 gr buter
1 cup chopped onion
1 cup grated rutabaga
1 cup grated apples (unpeeled)
1 cup grated carrots
1 cup grated sweet potato
1 cup grated squash or pumpkin
1l stock (vegetable / chicken)
1 cup heavy cream
salt, pepper, cayenne pepper, cumin (optionally: mashed garlic clove)
1/4 maple syrup (I added Turkish mulberry molasses)

1. Fry onions in butter until goldeb brown. Add the rest of the vegetables, stir constantly, fry them all together for about 10 minutes more on a low heat

2. Add sock, increase heat, bring to boil and cook about 20 minutes or until vegetables are soft.

3. Puree the soup or press through a sieve (I pureed only a half of my soup cause I like to bite little vegetable chunks). Add the rest of the ingredients and season to taste, reheat and serve!

ps.
I am sorry, but you have to use your imagination while looking at this picture. Its colour is much mre intensive but due to my poor camara it is impossible :(

ps2.
Top this soup with chopped dill or parsley. Pumpkin or sunflower seeds would be a great idea too!

German leek pie

2008-09-16T08:48:00.000-07:00

Polish: por
Albanian: preshi
Spanish: puerro
Sepedi: diliki
Welsh: cenhinen
Uyghur: کراث
Romanian: praz
Bahasa Indonesia: bawang bakung
Cornish: kenynen
Greek: πράσο

What was first, French quiche of German savoury Kuchen? Don't feel mistaken, Kuchen means usually sweet cake, but sometimes is used to describe savoury pies. In Germany people usually eat Zwiebelkuchen, onion pie, but I personally consider leek pie, Lauchkuchen, much tastier.

125 gr butter (1/2 pack)
250 gr (1 1/2 cup) flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 tablespoons water
2 cups chopped leeks
1/2 onion
1 scallion
1 cup sour cream
3 eggs
2 handfuls grated cheese
optionally: 1 handful ham / sausage cubes
(+ butter, breadcrums)

1. Prepare the dough: knead butter with flour, salt and water until your dough is elastic. Set in the fridge until you are done with the rest of the preparations.

2. Fry chopped leks in butter or oil, low the heat. Add chopped onion and scallion and simmer until they all are soft.

3. Beat egg yolks with sour cream and (optionally) ham chunks. Whip egg whites until they are stiff and stir lightly in the yolk-sour cream mass. Spread butter into your pyrex dish, sprinkle with few breadcrumbs and cover with the dough (roll it possibly thin). Put vegetable chunks on the dough layer and pour egg-cream over it. As the last step, pour grated cheese over it and bake (30-40 minutes, 180C)

Slovak potato pancakes (sweet or savoury)

2008-09-12T02:30:00.000-07:00

Sepedi: tapola
Ruanda: ibiraya
Suahili: kiazi
Sestwana: lekwele
Bemba: ifyumbu
Shona: mbatátisi
Swazi: li-tábhane
Zulu: ilizambane
Xhosa: izambane
Hausa: dànkálȉ
Lingala: mbala
Maasai: ilpiasi

This is a small collection of "potato" in several African languages. Africa is known to be by far the most linguistically diverse continent. The number of African languages is usually put at around 2000 but it is difficult to estimate. I love languages and don't like to be "eurocentric" but for me it reslts quite difficult to find good african resources. But with potato, it worked :) Even if yam would be Africa's staple starchy root vegetable, not potato. While here, in Central Europe, potato is very, very important. And Slovakia is a country in the heart of Europe. And Slovak potato pancakes (lokše) are really tasty!

see also: Lithuanian potato fritters
see also: Slovak potato dumplings

1 kg potatoes
300 gr flour
1 egg
a pinch of salt

optionally:
+ vanilla sugar, icing sugar and apple mousse
+ slices of ham and grated cheese*

1. Cook potatoes, peel, mash and mix with flour and egg. Add a pinch of salt and, if they will beserved sweet with apple mousse or jam, you can add vanilla sugar (1 teaspoon or more)

2. Sprinkle your workplace with flour. Roll the dough thinly, as thin as you can. But beware, it is a hard work! Don't get descouraged cause the final result is really great!

3. Fry thin pancakes in few oil.

4.* There are some ways of serving savoury lokše. Here is one of them: leave one pancake on the pan and fry it only from 1 side. As quickly as you can, put a slice of ham and grated cheese (or slices of cheese) on 1 halve of the pancake. Cover with the secon halve, close the edges well by pushing them with a fork. Fry a bit more to be sure that the cheese inside melts.

(my version without ham)

(sweet lokše with apple jam)

German Bratwurst salad

2008-09-03T09:24:00.000-07:00

Polish: rzodkiewka
Mohawk: yotsihkwatskàra
Tagalog: labanós
Basa Java: lobak
Italian: ravanello
Manx: rahgyl
Silesian: radiska
Portuguese: rabanete
Tongan: lētisifoha
Albanian: rrepkë

Radishes taste like spring. I never thought they could go so well together with my beloved Bratwurst! I really love German Rostbratwurst, a kind of delicious white sausage. It can be grilled, fried, cooked, but I mostly buy it covered in filo sheet and baked this way, a kind of German hot-dog, my favourite outdoor snack (cause I rarely eat something outside, I am a kind of home-cooking fan). If you still find radishes, make yourself this German spring salad, Bratwurstsalat. Tastes great also during the first days of autumn :)

1 Rostbratwurst
1 bunch radishes (if you take 1 Wurst, 1 cup radish slices would be enough, but it's up to you)
1 bunch scallions
1-2 gherkins or cucumbers pickled in vinegar
1 teaspoon mustard or ground horseradish
1 teaspoon white wine vinegar
1 teaspoon vinegar-water taken from the jar with gherkins/pickles
1 teaspoon oil (olive, canola)
salt, pepper + a pinch of sugar

1. Fry / grill / cook Bratwurst. I think cooking it would be the best choose cause cooked slices would combine so good optically with radish slices, but it's up to you. When you are ready, cut Bratwurst into thin slices. Same with radishes. Cut scallions into rings and gherkins into cubes.

2. Prepare the sauce: combine vinegar, oil, mustard/horseradish and season with salt, pepper and sugar. Pour over salad and set into the fridge for about 1 hour - it will taste much better then eaten inmediately. Serve with slices of Schwarzbrot or any kind of integral or rye bread.

Polish layered cake (wafer or cookies) + peanut & cocoa filling

2008-09-02T08:14:00.000-07:00

Polish: wafle
Spanish: oblea
Turkish: kağıt
Japanese: ウエハース
Italian: cialda
Russian: Вафля
Croatian: vafel-list
Hebrew: ופלה
Portuguese: obreia
German: Oblaten

If you like layered wafer cakes and would like to make some on your own but you have no possibility to buy wafer sheets (my advice: Polish or Russian groceries!), you can use butter cookies instead of wafer sheets and fill them with the same filling as you would do when using wafers. This kind of cookie layered cake will ressemble German layered cookies-chocolate cake, called Kalter Hund (cold dog) which I am going to post soon.

see also: Polish filled wafer cake (with 3 filling options)
see also: Polish custard crackers cake

500 gr butter biscuits (petit beurre / Leibniz type)
1 cup sugar
2 tablespoons flour
2 tablespoons cocoa powder (the pure one, without sugar or powdered milk)
250 gr margarine (no butter!)
2 eggs
1 pack vanilla sugar + a pinch of salt
5 tablespoons milk
10 butter biscuits, ground
1/2 cup peanuts, crushed

1. Melt margarine in a saucepan. Add flour, whisk and bring to boil. Add sugar, cocoa and milk.

2. Whisk eggs with vanilla sugar and salt. Add to the saucepan together with ground biscuits and crushed peanuts (peanuts, if salted, should be covered with boiling water first to melt saltiness) and reheat, stirring all the time.

3. Prepare a tray and cover it well with kitchen aluminium paper or baking paper just like you did with Polish custard cake on crackers. Spread some filling (not more than 5 mm) and cover with next layer of biscuits. Repeat until filling is over. The last layer should be cookies. Cover with aluminium sheet, set in the fridge and put something heavy on the top of the tray. Leave overnight.

Of course, this filling is great to be used with typical waffers. the amount of cookies depends on teh thickness of your filling layers and of the size of your tray.

Egyptian fried pastries

2008-09-02T07:05:00.001-07:00

Polish: Ramadan
Albanian: Ramazani
Lithuanian: Ramadanas
Greek: Ραμαζάνι
Kazakh: Рамазан
Arabic: رمضان
Persian: ماه رمضان
Portuguese: Ramadão
Wolof: Koor
Telugu: రంజాన్

The Muslim Holy Month begins. Every laic knows it is about fasting. Of course fasting is only one of the exterior manifestations and Ramadan means much more than fasting only. And, fasting doesn't mean abnegation of all delicacies, quite to the contrary, after the sunset, delicious sweets are, well, maybe not obligatory but more than welcome. One of them is called dates from Siria, balah el Sham, Egyptian sweet fried cakes.

dough
1/2 cup oil (you can give less!)
1 cup water
1 1/2 cup flour*
4 eggs
vanilla sugar (1 pack)
a pinch of salt

sirup
1 cup sugar
172 cup water
lemon juice (about 1 tablespoon or to taste)
+ coconut flakes (1/2 - 1 cup)

1. Pour oil and water in a saucepan, add salt and bring to boil. Sift flour and stir until you obtain a plain dough which doesn't stick to the pan. Set aside to cool a bit.

2. Prepare syrup by cooking the ingredients (sugar, water and lemon juice) together. When thick, set aside to cool.

3. Whisk eggs with vanilla sugar. When oil dough is template, you can start adding egg mass little by litte while stirring constantly. Check the consistency; the dough has to be quite thick. If needed, *add some more flour.

4. Place the dough into a pastry bag with a star shape tip. Press the dough into frying oil and fry until golden brown but on a low heat. Otherwise your dates will be crispy outside and raw inside! When ready, put them on a paper kitchen towel to avoid excessive oil contain. When still warm, deep them into the syrup for some minutes. You can deep warm dates in cold sirup or cold dates in warm sirup. Then roll in coconut flakes.

My balah el sham are a bit long, almost like Spanish churros. They are traditionally about 3 cm long.

Pictures will be available very soon. I just have to find them on my pendrive :)

German elderberry soup

2008-09-02T03:17:00.000-07:00

Polish: bez czarny
Manx: berrish hrammanagh
Persian: آقطی سیاه
Turkish: kara mürver
Bosnian: zohva
Russian: бузина черная
German: Holunder
Basque: intsusa
Italian: sambuco nero
Swedish: fläder

Holunderbeerensuppe / Fliederbeersuppe is a kind of late summer-autumn north German delicacy. Must be made from very ripe elderberries; if the winter is not frosty people enjoy elderberry soup even in the wintertime. As a rule, elderberry juice tastes tart but after some sesoning it becomes deep fruity rich flavour.

(3-4 portions)
1l elderberries
1l water
1 pack vanilla sugar (or vanilla stick) + more sugar to taste
2-3 cloves
1 stick cinnamon
1 teaspoon lemon juice (i added instead a teaspoon of freshly made sea-buckthorn juice)
a zest from 1/2 lemon
1 apple, 1 pear
1 tablespoon potato starch

1. Wash berries, take off from the stalks and measure about 1 liter. Cook them in 1 liter water for about 20 minutes (until they soften and break). Press through a sieve and throw the seeds and rests away. Pour into the saucepan again. Add vanilla stick/sugar, cinnamon stick, lemon zest, cloves, lemon juice and sugar to taste. bring to boil. if it is still too tart for you, add 1/2 cup apple juice.

2. Mix potato starch with a little bit of water and add to the soup. Whisk well and boil. Lower the heat.

3. Peel apple and pear (throw seeds away), cut into slices. Add to the soup.

Advice:
Usually this soup is eaten with milk-semolina balls, but I don't like them. You can serve your soup plain, with noodles (for instance ribbons), with crepes cut into long noodles or with semolina balls (Grießklößchen). How to prepare them? Cook thick semolina in milk or milk mixed with water with a pinch of sat and vanilla sugar. Add egg (half egg, one egg or more, depending on how much semolina dough you have) and cook them in water. When ready, put on the soups surface and let them swim :) Some people cook them directly in the soup but it's up to you.

Rutabaga croquettes

2008-08-30T01:25:00.000-07:00

Polish: brukiew
French: chou-navet
German: Kohlrübe / Steckrübe
Danish: kålroe
Icelandic: gulrófa
Russian: брюква
Estonian: kaalikas
Scottish english: neep
Japanese: スウェーデンかぶ
Thai: รูตาบากา

Rutabaga seems to be a very versatile vegetable and people from central Europe were eating them ages ago. During the IWW in Germany were written recipe-books with rutabaga recipes: rutabaga marmalade, rutabaga casseroles, rutabaga soups, false Sauerkraut, false apple mousse and even rutabaga coffee... "in the morning, rutabaga soup... in the afternoon, rutabaga steaks... in the evening, rutabaga cake"... So you can imagine why is this delicious vegetable so unpopular around here. In Warsaw you can never find them, in any supermarkt, at any markt, and for the first generation after the IIWW rutabaga is nothing but animal futter. Oh they just don't know how much do they loose... cause rutabaga tastes really great. Here is a proof, my own recipe for rutabaga croquettes.

see also: Kashubian rutabaga soup

(makes 10 croquettes)
1 cup cooked, mashed rutabaga*
1/2 cup grated cheese (Edam, Cheddar and so on)
1/2 cup rolled oats
1 egg
1 medium onion
some flour
some rolled oats
salt, pepper
optionally: some curry powder, some chopped dill

1. Chop onion finely and fry. Whisk the egg. Combine mashed rutabaga (* you can also take 4/5 cup rutabaga and 1/5 cup potatoes or of course change these proportions) with finely grated cheese, fried onion and rolled oats. Set in the fridge for 1 hour. Atfer that time add salt, pepper, (curry, dill) and 1/2 egg.

2. Prepare 3 plates: first with beaten egg (the resting half), second with flour and third with rolled oats. Form croquettes and roll them in flour, then in egg and at least in rolled oats. Fry and serve (warm or cold)

Cuban green plantain soup

2008-08-28T03:52:00.000-07:00

Polish: plantan / banan skrobiowy
Swedish: kokbanan
Portuguese: banana-da-terra
Dutch: bakbanaan
German: Gemüsebanane / Kochbanane
French: banane plantain
French Antillais: banane farine
Korean: 요리용 바나나
Arabic: ‏موز الجنة

Green (unripe) plantain soup could be eaten anywhere where plantains grow, but the recipe I post here is Cuban. Sopa de plátano verde has some variants, as you will realise while reading the recipe, and tastes absolutely wonderful. Plantains should be green. I don't know what happens if they are ripe and yellow, well, surely the taste won't be the same.

see also: Ecuadorian green plantain stuffed fritters

600 ml vegetable stock (optionally water)
*1 unripe, green plantain
1 onion
**(optionally some more vegetables, like 1/2 sweet potato, 1 carrot, a handful of chickpeas, 1 potato, chopped parsley green, 1 celery stalk)
cumin, salt, pepper

1. Peel green plantain. It may be easier if you cut the peel lengthwise. Cut into 1-2 cm chunks or cut very thin chips. Fry them in oil.

2. Heat the stock in a saucepan and when starts to boil, add resting vegetables (**but this is optionally; some people prefer just to taste plantains. Anyway, I took 1 small potato, diced, and a handful of canned chickpeas. *If you decide to not take any other vegetables, you may want to take 2 plantains).

3. Back to plantains. If you have chunks, work with a fork to mash already fried pieces, add 1 cup of stock, bring to boil (it will be thick) and pour into the saucepan with the rest of the stock. If you chave chips, fry them until crispy, pulverize in a blender and add to the stock. Cook until all the ingredients are soft. Now it's up to yu if you want to puree everything until smooth or puree only a half or mash vegetables with a fork. I like smooth pureed soups but some crispy pieces are always welcome.
You may put some fried onion chunks on the top and serve with lemon slices

1st variant: smoothy pureed

2nd variant: with chunks

Polish custard cake without baking

2008-08-27T10:26:00.000-07:00

Polish: krem
Hungarian: tejszín
Japanese: カスタードクリーム
Dutch: banketbakkersroom
Swedish: grädde
Hebrew: קרם
Italian: crema pasticcera
French: crème pâtissière
Basque: pastel-krema
Persian: سس کاسترد

Between two layers of salty crackers you find a sweet... custard! Custard creamy filling is the main ingredient of this Polish cake, kremówki. There are several variants of this simple delicious cake, the classical is custard cream between two filo sheets, cut into squares and sprinkled with icing sugar: it was the most beloved dessert of John Paul II :) My version requires no baking so it is practical and useful for those who at the moment have no oven but would like to pinch a bit of something sweet. Don't be afraid, salty crackers that you should use would not disturb nor distruct the taste! Using salty crackers is a must here, don't take sweet butter cookies (petit beurre or Leibniz or similar) cause you will be dissappointed; they melt and the whole cake losts its consistency. If you are afraid of saltiness, just bake 2 filo sheets :)

see also: Polish filled wafer cake (with 3 filling options)
see also: Polish wafer or cookies cake (with 1 more filling option)

about 150 gr salty crackers
250 gr margarine (don't replace with butter cause you will obtain vanilla sauce instead of custard!)
2 packs vanilla sugar
1 cup flour
3/4 cup sugar
4 egg yolks
1 l milk
icing sugar

1. Pour 3 cups of milk into a pan, add margarine and vanilla sugar and heat until boils.

2. Beat yolks with sugar until white and creamy, add flour and the rest of the milk and mix until homogeneous.

3. Pour slowly yolk-flour mixture to the pot with milk and margarine and stir constantly. Reheat and whisk until homogeneous in consistency. Filling is ready.

4. Cover a tray with baking paper or aluminium paper. Put the first layer of crackers. Spread the whole cream on them and cover with the second layer of crackers. Set aside in the fridge overnight, the tastes have to compose together through night. Before serving, cut into squares and sprinke with icing sugar.

Portuguese sweet chickpea pockets

2008-08-25T15:02:00.000-07:00

Polish: ciecierzyca
Pashto: نخود
Macedonian: Леблебија
Greek: Ρεβιθιά
Bengali: ছোলা
Mapunzugun: kalfan
German: Kichererbsen
Arabic: حمص
Thai: ถั่วหัวช้าง
Slovak: cícer baraní

Don't be angry on me. I know we have still 4 months until Christmas but I couldn't wait... Anyway, I wouldn't mind if someone makes for instance pascha (Polish -also Russian and Ukrainian- Easter fresh cheese dessert) in December or fry Polish Christmas carp in the summertime... :) So here they are: delicious Portuguese pockets with sweet chickpea-lemon filling which just melt in your mouth: azevias de grão, a Portuguese Christmas dessert dish, absolutely delicious!!

(to make 25-28 pockets)
dough:
250 gr flour
75 gr butter* (cold)
1 egg
a pinch of salt
a bit of water, if needed to knead the dough

**filling:
250 gr chickpeas (canned)
150 gr sugar
zest from 1 lemon or 1/2 orange
a pinch of cinnamon
2 egg yolks
(optionally: 1 handful ground almonds)

+ (optionally***) oil to fry
+ powdered sugar to sprinkle

1. Find a good movie and put a comfortable pillow under your back while peeling chickpeas (yes, you should throw away that thin "membrane"...)

2. Knead all the dough ingredients together. You may need a little bit of water to make your dough elastic but it is optionally. I think that you can replace butter with *vegetable oil or *margarine. Some recipes require the use of *lard. If you have nothing against this ind of fat you should do your azevias with lard exactly, cause it is the most traditional and typical way. Set the dough in the fridge until you are finished with the filling.

3. Blend "naked" chickpeas with lemon zest, sugar, cinnamon (and optionally almonds) and yolks. If needed, add some water (but I didn't). I must admit that I didn't add cinnamon. When I prepare something with cinnamon, I always add too much of this spice cause I just love it and then everything tastes so similar and cinnamon taste dominates. I wanted to feel chickpeas and not necessarily cinnamon, so I just added two times more lemon zest and the taste was fantastic!

4. Roll the dough thinly on your workplace which should be sprinkled with some flour. Cut rings using the edge of a glass, mug or bowl, depending on the size that you wish to obtain. Proportional, put a tea- or tablespoon of a filling and close dough rings forming half-moons. Fry (***or bake!), sprinkle with powdered sugar and control yourself to not eat half of the portion before serving to your family!

**some more information about the filling:
you can serve azevias with chickpea filling, the one I just wrote abozt, but azevias are also eaten with sweet potato (azevias de batata doce), kind of sweet white pumpkin (azevias de gila / chila) or white beans (azevias de feijão). I can't help you with gila/chila cause I've never seen it nor tasted, but if you prefer to make a filling with sweet potato or white beans then just cook those vegetables and add same ingredients as you would add when choosing chickpeas. Just beware cause sweet potato is already a bit sweet. Some recipes omit yolks. Good luck in experimenting! If it is still too difficult and you would like to have an exact recipe how to prepare similar pockets with sweet potato, I will post very soon a very similar, but Spanish recipe, to make truchas de boniato, Canarian Christmas sweet potato delicacy.

Polish (Kashubian) rutabaga soup

2008-08-25T06:25:00.000-07:00

Polish: Kaszuby
Kashubian: Kaszëbë
Catalan: Caixúbia
Occitan:Cashobia
Czech: Kašubsko
Romanian: Caşubia
Italian: Casciubia
German: Kaschubien
Slovenian: Kašubsko
Estonian: Kašuubid
Upper Sorbian & Silesian: Kašuby

Kashubia pretends to be one of the most beautiful regions of Poland and deserves this denomination. Even called "Kashubian Switzerland". Well not because of mountains or chocolate, no... But if we start to divagate, we will easily find several common points. Kashubians speak their own ancient beautiful language (similar to Polish, Kashubian belongs to Slavonic language family) which is unluckily out of national protection, unlike then in Galicia, Catalonia or Bavaria... Without entering into complains or monologue about Kashubian culture, I would like to share with you some Kashubian cooking traditions, and today it will be a delicious and easy recipe to make Kashubian rutabaga soup, in Kashubian: zupa z żeltich wreczi / in Polish: zupa z brukwi.

1/2 kg (about) goose meat (traditionally goose necks)
(+ optionally broth vegetables, which means for example 2 carrots, 1/2 leek, 1/2 celeriac and 1 parsley root - if you are lazy, use vegetable broth instant but of course it won't be the same. If you are a vegetarian, cook a vegetable broth from the vegetable listed above, or take instant broth, and add 1-2 tablespoons olive oil or any other native oil: flax, pumpkin seed or canola)
1/2 kg rutabagas
1/2 kg potatoes
1 1/2 l water
a pinch of marjoram
salt and pepper

1. Cook meat and broth-vegetables (no need to cut them) in water. You may, as said above, prepare broth in another way.

2. Peel and slice rutabagas. Pour boiling water on them - they will loose some of its bitterness. Add rutabaga slices to broth and cook on a medium heat. In the meantime, peel and dice potatoes. Rutabaga has to be added first cause it needs more time to be soft. Take the meat off. Some people would take the broth vegetables off, too (like me, I hate cooked celeriac). Divide the soup from vegetabels using a sieve and a) blend vegetables, b) mince them with a fork, c) blend half of them and mince another half. Season with majoram, salt and pepper.
Put pieces of cooked meat in serving soup bowls and pour the soup. You may serve it with bread.

my version: vegetable Kashubian soup with chunks (no blended rutabagas!). I really hope that Kashubian purists will not be angrily oppositing by argumenting that the real Kashubian rutabaga soup needs to contain goose necks... Surely, traditionally it HAs to contain goose meat and I am sure it tastes much better made this way. But if you don't eat meat or at the moment you can not find goose necks, try the vegetarian version and you will not be disappointed!

Polish lentil patties

2008-08-09T03:35:00.000-07:00

Polish: soczewica
Mapunzugun: jügi
Basque: dilista
Breton: pizenn rous
Persian: عدس
Hebrew: עדשה
Russian: чечевица
French: lentille
Greek: φακή
Upper Sorbian: sok

I love lentils almost as much as I love all kind of patties, fritters or pancakes, especially those savoury ones made from differrent kind of vegetables. If you already tried any of the patties / croquettes that I showed on my blog (grain croquettes from buckwheat , rolled oats or quinoa; sweet croquettes from black locust, apples or carrots; fish croquettes from codfish or herring; pulse/nut croquettes from soybean or walnuts; vegetable croquettes from aubergine, zucchini or spinach - yes, the spinach dumplings can be fried as patties too), I think you may like to taste soczewiaki, Polish lentil-potato patties, too. This dish comes from north-eastern Poland.

(ingredients for 8 patties)
1/2 cup red lentils
potatoes (*see point 1.)
1 big onion
salt, pepper, optionally cumin and curry powder
flour, a bit
garnish: tomato slices, lettuce, parsley

1. Wash potatoes, don't peel them but cook in salted water. The best would be to peel them and leave in the fridge overnight but if not then at least for 2 hours. After that time, grate them with a vegetable grater, not necessarily very fine. Take 1 cup and 1 full tablespoon of grated potatoes - this is the dough for the patties.

2. Wash lentils carefully, until the water in which you wash them is clear. Cook washed lentils in 1 1/2 cup water, covered, on a low heat. After 20 minutes start cooking on a high heat stirring constantly, to obtain a thick lentil puree. Add salt, pepper and optionally curry powder and cumin. I say optionally, cause those last two are not an ingredient of typical soczewiaki, but in my opinion adding curry powder and cumin makes them taste much, much better.

3. Take walnut-size balls from potato puree and roll so thin as you can. You can do it in your hands. Potato dough shouldn't be sticky but you may like to sprinkle your hands with flour. Put a walnut-size ball of lentil puree on each potato sheet and hide it by closing potato sheet and roll.

4. When ready, sprinkle each croquette with some flour and deep-fry. In another saucepan, fry thinly sliced onion half-rings until golden brown.

5. Drain croquettes on a kitchen paper, put a bit of fried onion on each croquette and serve warm or cooled with fresh vegetables.

Swedish rosehip dessert soup

2008-08-08T11:43:00.000-07:00

Polish: owoc dzikiej rozy
French: cynorrhodon
Armenian: Մասրենի
Luxembourgian: Mullebutz
Hungarian: csipkebogyó
Finnish: ruusunmarja
Catalan: gavarró
Russian: Шиповник
Breton: agroazenn
Danish: hyben

Summer is a great time. From now until October you can pick rosehips and prepare yourself this delicious nutritive thick sweet velvety soup. The recipe comes from Sweden, where rosehip soup is called nyponsoppa and is very popular, even ready to buy in tetra boxes in supermarkts.

see also: Polish rosehip dessert
see also: Turkish rosehip-meatballs soup
see also: German elderberry soup

1l ripe rosehips
1l water
sugar (about 4-5 tablespoons)
vanilla stick
(optionally heavy, sour or whipped cream)
almond flakes, raisins, little almond cookies (amarettini)

1. Wash rosehips, cut into halves and pour into boiling water with vanilla stick. Cook on a low heat until rosehips are soft (it takes about 30 minutes). Put rosehips aside and keep the water in which they were cooked.

2. Press rosehips trough a fine sieve. Keep rosehip puree in a bowl and pour the rest (peels and stones) back to the rosehip water. Cook again and strain, it should be quite thick. Take 3 amounts of this rosehip water to 1 amount of rosehip puree, add sugar to taste and it should be thick enough. if not, add more rosehip puree. It takes a bit more time than cooking rosehips and adding cornstarch but the soup has a rich intensive taste due to this proceedings.

I am not sure if Swedes eat their sweet fruity soup just like Poles, in the summertime as a light dinner, or rather as a dessert. Anyway, serve with heavy, sour or whipped cream (if you like), sprinkle with raisins, almond flakes and amarettini.

What to do with the rest of rosehip puree? heat it in a saucepan with vanilla mark and 2 tablespoons butter. You will receive a delicious breakfast spread :)

Polish rolled oats croquettes

2008-08-08T10:58:00.000-07:00

Polish: owies
Portuguese: aveia
Scots Gaelic: coirce
Persian: یولاف
Catalan: civada
Swahili: oti
Hungarian: zab
Tamil: ஓட்ஸ்
Latvian: auzas
Albanian: tërshëra

Oats are not only horse or chicken fodder :) Don't forget: "oats are only fit to be fed to horses and Scotsmen", and "England has the finest horses, and Scotland the finest men", cause they eat oat porridge, pancakes and cookies and drink oat beer. Scotsmen and other nations of northern Europe especially, cause oats are grown throughout the temperate zones and tolerate raining moist cold weather, so even in Iceland oat cookies are made with icelandic oats :) In Poland some people prepare rolled oat savoury patties (kotleciki owsiane) for a warm evening meal.

(8 croquettes)
cup rolled oats + a handful more
1 cup water / vegetable stock
1 medium potato / 1 big champignon
1/2 cup parsley green
2 big onions
1 egg
salt, pepper, curry powder (to taste)
1 scallion
2-3 garlic cloves

1. Pour rolled oats into a bowl and add boiling water / stock. Cover and set aside for 15 minutes.

2. Chop onions, scallion, mash garlic, grate potato (or champignon). Fry all of them in a saucepan until onions are golden brown.

3. Combine soaked oats (they should absorb the whole water and become a mush) with fried ingredients, finelychopped parsley, whisked egg, salt, pepper and curry powder. Form round croquettes and roll them in the resting rolled oats. Fry in oil and serve with salad or sauce. I served it with cooked buckwheat and tomato slices.

Polish buckwheat patties

2008-08-07T10:15:00.000-07:00

Polish: gryka
Basque: artobeltz
Bulgarian: елда
Spanish: alforfón
Hungarian: hajdina
French: sarrasin
Waloon: boûkete
Ukrainian: гречка
Slovenian: ajda
Chinese: 蕎麥

So you may think that buckwheat is eaten only as a bulgur-like porridge by eastern Europeans and Ashkenazi Jews in North America? You are so wrong! The groats may be used for Polish buckwheat-curd cheese filling for dumplings and you will find them in famous delicious Polish and German black pudding. Buckwheat flour (non glutinous!) is even more prevalent: in Slovenian nut roll (potiča); in French (Brittany) pancakes (galettes) or Russian (blini) or Slovenian ones (idinska zlevanka); in Slovenian dumplings (Žganci) or Austrian ones (Sterz; in Korean jelly (memilmuk); in Japanese noodles (soba) or Italian ones (pizzoccheri)... of course there are much more dishes that are still unknown to me... And today I am gonna show you how to prepare Polish (eastern-Polish) buckwheat-curd cheese patties, hreczniaki.

1/2 cup buckwheat
1/2 cup tvarog (fresh curd cheese)*
1/2 cup chopped parsley green
1 big onion
1 egg
1 scallion
1/3 cup flour (integral flour more than welcome) + a bit more to sprinkle
salt, pepper to taste

1. Cook buckwheat in 1 cup water (or vegetable stock) until soft but still loose (no mush!); you should obtain 1 cup of cooked buckwheat porridge

2. Mash cheese with a fork.
*If you find no East-European tvarog cheese, take any fresh white cheese, be it Turkish, Greek (feta inclusive) or anything, but not too salty. But then, control the adding of salt! I had no right cheese at the moment so I took Turkish cow milk feta-like cheese from the can and I couldn't complain about the final result!

3. Mash cheese together with buckwheat, egg, chopped and fried onion, chopped and fried scallion, chopped parsley green, salt and pepper. At the end add flour (prepare 1/3 cup and add it spoon by spoon, until you reach a right consistency, which means until you will be able to form croquettes).

4. As said above, form croquettes and sprinkle them with flour. Now they are ready to be fried. Serve warm with mushroom sauce (or any other sauce) and/ or cooked vegetables (or salad) as a dinner or serve cold with a salad.

Turkish zucchini patties

2008-08-06T11:36:00.000-07:00

Polish: cukinia
Estonian: puhmik-õlikõrvits
Japanese: ズッキーニ
Catalan: carbassó
Portuguese: aboborinha
Malagasy: korizety
Greek: κολοκυθάκι
Icelandic: dvergbítur
Marathi: दोडके
Occitan: cogorgeta

It is great that God created zucchini! This lovely vegetable can be eaten in a sweet or savoury way. Remember Egyptian zucchini pudding? In Australia you can find sweet zucchini cake! (which I am gonna prepare as soon as I am in a kitchen with an oven...) In Poland and Russia zucchini fritters are seasoned in a sweet way, too. With sugar and sometimes honey and sour cream. Quite to the contrary, Turkish zucchini patties, mucver, contain salted cheese and savoury seasoning. I eat them sometimes for breakfast :) The ingredients are the following:

2 medium zucchinis
1 egg
1/2 cup feta cheese (or similar)
a handful chopped parsley green
a handful chopped dill
3 scallions
3 garlic cloves
1/4 cup flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
salt, pepper, cumin

1. Peel and grate zucchinis. Sprinkle with salt and set aside for 15-20 minutes. After that, squeeze as much as you can

2. Mash cheese with well squeezed zucchini, chopped scallions, parsley and dill, mashed garlic cloves, flour mixed with baking powder, beaten egg and salt, pepper and cumin (to taste). Fry and serve warm or cooled with vegetables.

Nepalese lentil soup

2008-08-04T11:07:00.000-07:00

Polish: imbir
Tamil: இஞ்சி
Portuguese: gengibre
Turkish: zencefil
Twi: kekadru
Silesian: zozwor
Arabic: زنجبيل
Italian: zenzero
Finnish: inkivääri
Basa Jawa: jae

Ginger is one of several ingredients that make this Nepalese lentil soup differrent to the Egyptian one, and deffinitely adding ginger changes the taste a lot. Ginger also stimulates the secretion of saliva so your reaction by tasting this soup would be differrent, too :) This time the recipe is from "the second hand"; I found it in a German missionary magazine so I don't have the original name of this dish and I am not 100% sure if it is really original Nepalese recipe and a soup often eaten in this country and made of those ingredienta and prepared in this way. But I have to believe the recipe, cause it was given by a nepalese restaurant chef living in Germany. I tried it and I am in love in this soup :) The ingredients are the following:

350 gr red lentils
1 l vegetable stock
200 ml cream (I took sour cream 10% fat)
1 stick ginger (2 cm)
3 tomatoes, medium
1 big onion
1/2 teaspoon curcuma
1/2 teaspoon cumin
2 tablespoons butter
salt, pepper

1. Wash lentils carefully. Boil some water and pour it over tomatoes; peel them and throw the seeds away. Cook lentils, tomatoes, finely grated ginger and curcuma powder in vegetable stock until lentils are soft (20-30 minutes). When ready, puree everything or press through a sieve.

2. Add cream to the soup, season with salt and pepper and make warm.

3. Cut onion into thin slices and fry in butter with cumin powder.

4. Divide the soup into portions, put some fried onion in the middle of each bowl (you can decorate it with parsley green, too) and enjoy!

Brasilian sweet corn pudding

2008-08-04T10:07:00.000-07:00

Polish: kukurydza
Malagasy: katsaka
Zulu: ukolweni
Bambara: kaba
Basa Jawa: jagung
Nahuatl: cintli
Slovenian: koruza
Thai: ข้าวโพด
Ossetian: Нартхор
Bantu: pémbá

My Peruvain friend was somehow surprised that in Poland we have basically only yellow corn in cans and not much idea what to do with the fresh one, besides grilling or cooking and eating with melted butter and salt. Plus, cornflakes and corn porridge cooked with milk and sugar for children. Oh yes, and we have (at least in my city) great corn bread, yellow and soft. While in Peru there are so many variants, including the purple one, an ingredient of mazamorra, purple corn pudding, something I am dreaming about to try :) Maize is a staple food in many regions of the world, just remember Italian polenta, Romanian mămăligă, African sadza, Mexican chicha and tortillas, Peruvian mazamorra :) and so on, without forgetting corn syrup and cornflakes. Maize can be prepared on a sweet or savoury way and to proove the first declaration, prepare yourself a Brasilian dessert, curau (when made from fresh yellow maize; when white dried and soaked in water is used, the dish is called canjica), which is a kind of milk pudding with corn.

see also: Egyptian zucchini pudding

4 fresh corn cobs
1/2 cup milk
1/2 cup coconut milk
sugar to taste
cinnamon

1. Grate corn cobs using a fine vegetable grater. If your grater is not very fine, you can puree the corns in a pood processor. Strain through a strainer and squeeze with a spoon to divide bagasse from juice. Throw bagasse away, keep the juice.

2. Put the maize juice in milk and cook until thicker. After about 20 minutes of low cooking and stirring, add coconut milk and sugar to taste (I added 5 tablespoons vanilla sugar) and cook some minutes more

3. When the cream is homogeneous and thick, pour it into bowls and set aside to cool. Set in the fridge for about 2 hours. Sprinkle with cinnamon and serve! (traditionally, especially during Festa Juninha, Midsummer Night!)

Spanish liver soup

2008-07-30T06:54:00.000-07:00

Polish: wątroba
Zazaki: kezebe
Maltese: fwied
Lingala: libale
Aymara: k'iwcha
Basque: gibel
Bahasa Indonesia: hati
Nahuatl: Ēltapachtli
Vietnamese: gan
Russian: Пе́чень

Liver is, in my opinion, a food that you love or hate. Contrarily to what you may think about eating liver, it doesn't have to be boring and monotonous. Livers fried in onions; livers mashed with hard-boiled eggs into a breakfast spread; livers stewed in tomato sauce with sweet red pepper slices... and even eaten raw, as liver sashimi. What I didn't know is that there is also a liver soup. Eaten in several regions of Spain (and also Latin America) especially during the slaughter, named originally sopa de hígado; pureed or with liver chunks, tastes really good. The ingredients for 2 portions are the following:

1 - 1 1/2 cups liver (poultry)
3 cups water (some will add 1 cup wine, too)
1 big onion
1 green or yellow pepper
1 garlic clove
3/4 cup yesterday's bread chunks (or rice or thin small noodles*)

1. Prepare liver (cut what has to be cut out) and clean it (I spread it with flour and pepper and then I wash it - to reduce the smell). Cut into small pieces and fry 5-10 minutes while stirring.

2. Pour water over fried liver and bring to boil.

3. Chop onion and pepper and fry. Add to the soup. Control the softness of liver. When almost soft, add bread chunks. Cook a bit more and liquidate the soup. Bread chunks will make the soup thicker and velvety. But you can also add rice or noodles. You can reserve some liver chunks to serve on the top of the soup or you may cook the liver and set fried vegetabels aside and sprinkle them over the soup before serving. You can sprinkle the soup with chopped scallions or parsley. Some people add almonds to the soup and cook and grind them together with the liver, some people don't puree the soup but just leave liver chunks - the coise is yours :) My soup (liquidated, with some chopped liver and scallions on the top) looks like this:

Spanish sweet eggplants

2008-07-30T04:18:00.000-07:00

Polish: bakłażan
Tajik: Боқлаҷон
Suahili: mbilingani
Romany: patlazhùy
Albanian: patëllxhani
Sranan: bulansyey
Catalan: albergínia
Tagalog: talóng
Finnish: munakoiso
Papiamento: berehein

I was wondering more than once which plant is a vegetable and which is a fruit. Recently an Egyptian told me that in Egypt strawberries are considered vegetables... or rather, students are taught that strawberries belong to the vegetable family. But since I know that it is possible to make a sweet cake from spinach, parsnip, zucchini or beet and add quinces, pears or apricots to meat savoury dishes, nothing is impossible. Going back to the divagations about aubergines and traditional dishes made of this, like Indians say, "king of vegetable", but prepared on a sweet way, I suggest Spanish (Menorcan) berenjenas dulces, sweet eggplants. Actually, I know two sweet eggplant Spanish dishes. Both have a long tradition and are more than probably ancient, medieval, Arab influence. Berenjenas dulces are more sopisticated than berenjenas a la miel, eggplants fried in a batter and dipped in honey. The second recipe will be posted here soon, too.

2 eggplants (rather big)
1 potato
1 tablespoon sugar
1 tablespoon breadcrumbs
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon powder
1 egg
1 teaspoon butter
+ some more butter and breadcrumbs

1. Cook unpeeled potato in water with a bit of salt. When soft andstill warm, peel and mash it and set aside.

2. Cut eggplants lengthwise in 2 halves and cook 15 minutes in boiling water. Drain well and set aside to cool. Using a teaspoon, take the pulp away, but leaving 1/2 cm-thick marge of eggplant pulp. Now you have "boats" from the skin and 1/2 cm pulp.

(left: aubergine pulp, middle: aubergine boat, right: aubergine half)

3. Mash eggplant "meat" together with potato and fry 5 minutes in butter. Set aside to cool. After that, add sugar, cinnamon, whisked egg and breadcrumbs. Taste and check the consistency, if needed add some more sugar or breadcrumbs.

4. Fill the "boats" with sweet aubergine-potato filling, cover with butter scraps and sprinkle with breadcrumbs. Bake in the oven (180 C) for about 20-30 minutes (you have to check if the surface is already golden-brown and crunchy)

(filled boats)

(filled boats with butter and breadcrmbs, just before being baked)

Ecuadorian green plantain stuffed fritters

2008-07-21T05:30:00.000-07:00

Polish: plantan / banan skrobiowy
Swedish: kokbanan
Portuguese: banana-da-terra
Dutch: bakbanaan
German: Gemüsebanane / Kochbanane
French: banane plantain
French Antillais: banane farine
Korean: 요리용 바나나
Arabic: ‏موز الجنة

I have not much experience with musaceae... As the most of Central Europeans, I thought that banana is the yellow curved sweet fruit... I had no idea that besides of cavendish sort, there is a plenty of other varieties, inlcuding red bananas and plantains... But I must aware those for who this vegetable is a mysterious riddle, just like it was for me: plantain can be eaten either green or mature, while banana only mature; plantain can be eaten only cooked, baked or fried, while banana can be eaten raw. They are eaten widely as a staple food in the equator area, very often thinly sliced and fried as chips. The recipe below is more sophisticated: empanadas de verde, Ecuadorian green plantain stuffed fritters

see laso: Uzbek pumpkin puffs
see also: Cuban green plantain soup

4 green (unripe) plantains
1 egg
2 tablespoons butter (soft)
a pinch of salt
flour if needed
1 cup grated cheese
1 big onion, chopped finely

1. Peel plantains. Cook 3 of them in water with salt until soft. Grate finely the fourth one. When the three other plantains are soft enough, let them cool in the water in which they were cooked, and mash them together with the grated, raw plantain

2. In a food processor mix well plantain dough with butter, egg and a pinch of salt. Set aside and let rest for some hours (you can leave it overnight in the fridge)

3. Fry chopped onions until golden brown. Mix with grated cheese.

4. Sprinkle your workplace with flour. Take plum-size balls of plantain dough and roll so thin as you can. Fill each "pancake" with a mixture of cheese and onion. Close well with your fingers or using a fork. Set in the fridge for some time (1/2 h) and fry about 5 minutes from each side. They are absolutely delicious and the melted cheese-onion filling is just fabulous!

Polish milk-cauliflower creamy soup

2008-07-17T10:56:00.000-07:00

Polish: kalafior
Estonian: lillkapsas
Hindi: फूल गोभी
Bahasa Indonesia: kubis bunga
Romanian: conopida
Latvian: ziedkāposti
Cree: ᑳ ᐙᐹᒡ
Gujarati: ફૂલગોબી
Czech: kvìták
Albanian: lulelakër

This Polish milk-couliflower soup, zupa kalafiorowa na mleku, comes from Kresy - this is how are called in Polish language the regions that formerly belonged to Poland and today to Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania. Kresy literally mean borderland and factually, those regions were Polish eastern and boundary grounds. Those places, be it western Ukraine or Lithuania, are magical. It was a place where "east" met "west" and cultures, languages and religions were coexisting. I could write pages about this places but don't wanna introduce more nostalgy, since this soup reminds of a happy summertime. Observe: cauliflower cooked in milk loses its unpleasant smell.

see also: Polish milk and pumpkin soup

(for 4 portions)
500 gr cauliflower
250 gr potatoes
3 cups milk
salt, sugar, pepper, nutmeg, curry (to taste)
1 onion + butter + a handful of parsley
lemon juice

1. Divide cauliflower into same size "roses" and put for 15 minutes into a bowl with water and a tablespoon of lemon juice.

2. Take 2 cups milk and two cups water. Peel and dice potatoes. Add potato dices and couliflower roses to boiling milk with water, add salt and sugar (1/2 teaspoon of each) and cook until vegetables are soft. It takes about 15-20 minutes (try with fork)

3. Using a sieve or a food processor, puree vegetables. Heat the 3rd cup of milk, pour the milk with water inwhich vegetabels were cooked, add vegetable puree and season to taste with nutmeg, salt, pepper, curry powder (the last one not too much!) and lemon juice (or vinegar); you can add a bit of fresh ground garlic, too

4. Fry finely chopped onion in a butter together with parsley (or coriander) green. They are ready when golden.

5. Serve the soup in plates / bowls and pour butter-onions on the top

Polish bilberry dumplings

2008-07-15T10:12:00.000-07:00

Polish: czarna borówka / jagoda
Lithuanian: mėlynė
Ukrainian: Чорниця
Estonian: mustikas
Northern Sami: sarri
Saterland Frisian: bikbäie
Catalan: nabiu
Irish: sméar gorm
Turkish: yaban mersini
Welsh: llus

Bilberries are one of the most favourite summer fruits of Poland. Depending on the region they are called jagody, czarne borówki, czerniny, jagodziny, czernice... The list is long :) You can buy them on a markt but many people collect them on their own in the forest, just like they do with differrent types of mushrooms. Then you can only bake bilberry muffins or typical sweet yeast buns called jagodzianki, prepare bilberry soup, kissel, jelly, cheesecake, eat bilberries with whipped cream or blended in a smoothie, with noodles and cream or as a filling to the most beloved dumplings, called pierogi. I am gonna share with you today this delicious summer recipe: pierogi z jagodami, Polish dumplings with bilberries!

(for about 20 dumplings)
dough:
1 cup flour
1/3 cup hot water
a pinch of salt
filling:
1 cup bilberries*
1 tablespoon sugar
1 tablespoon dried breadcrumbs
+ 1/2 cup sour cream
+ flour to roll

1. Sieve flour into a bowl. Pour boiling water over it and knead when it becomes bearable to handle. Add salt and knead until elastic and homogeneous. Set in fridge for 1 hour to rest.

2. For the filling, mix berries with sugar and breadcrumbs. Without breadcrumbs the filling may flow while cooking and will splash while eating all the time :)

3. Sprinkle your workplace with flour. Roll the dough so thin as only possible and using a glass, cut circles out. You may also take a bit of dough (walnut size), roll it in your hands and then roll thinly to obtain same circles

4. Fill each circle with 1/2-1 (depending on how big is your circle) teaspoon bilberry mix and join both sides of teh dough to form half-moons. You may decorate the rands the way I did or by pressing them with a fork.

5. Put the dumplings into boiling and salted water and cook 5 minutes. The dough is thin so they are ready so fast. Drain and serve with sour cream sprinkled with sugar.

*Nota bene:
you can use other fruits, too: raspberries, brambles, strawberries, sweet or sour cherries

Spanish cold tomato soup

2008-07-15T01:12:00.000-07:00

Polish: pomidor
Czech: rajče
Hausa: tùma̋tìr
Tagalog: kamatis
Malagasy: voatabiha
Inuktit: ᒥᓗᑦᓱᑳᒐᖅ
Kazakh: Қызанақ
Hungarian: paradicsom
Romanian: roşie
Telugu: టమాటో

Tomato is a perfect ingredient for summer cold soups. In Spain there are two famous cold soups which main ingredients are tomatoes: salmorejo and gazpacho. They contain similar ingredients and are made in the same way, so what's the differrence between them?
Salmorejo cordobés, the most typical one, differrently to gazpacho, contains no other vegetables than tomatoes and garlic, while in gazpacho you will also find cucumber, pepper and onion. Salmorejo has a thicker texture due to higher amount of bread and oilve oil and lack of water. The detailed recipe for this extremely simple and tasty summer soup is the following:

(2-3 portions)
1 kg tomatoes, very ripe
2 slices / 100 gr of yesterday's bread (only the white part)
2 cloves garlic
1/2 cup olive oil
salt, pepper to taste
(optionally: 1 tablespoon sherry vinegar)
boiled eggs (1/2 egg pro person)
(optionally: jamón serrano slices)

tomatoes without seeds / tomato juice (don't throw it away! Drink it!) :) /bread slices

1. Peel tomatoes and throw the seeds and juice away. Grate or puree in food processor.

2. Mince garlic and mash with a pinch of salt

3. Soak bread in olive oil, add vinegar and mash until homogeneous

4. Combine all the ingredients. Soup should be creamy and thick. You could set in the fridge for 1/2 hour. Serve with chopped boiled eggs (and serrano slices)

(soup is deliciously red but unluckily you can't see it on my picture, made in the evening...)

Brasilian sweet potato pralines

2008-07-11T03:38:00.000-07:00

Polish: orzech kokosowy
Suahili: mnazi
Tagalog: niyog
Thai: มะพร้าว
Marathi: नारळ
Mongolian: наргил
Vietnamese: quả dừa
Persian: نارگیل
Laotian: kok mak phao
Italian: noce di cocco

Good news for all the fans of Turkish sweet carrot and pumpkin balls! Brasilian docinhos de batata doce, sweet potato balls, belong to the same family, that's sure :) In this case, besides the obvious ingredient which is of course sweet potato, you will need two coconut products: coconut milk and flakes. A great party-idea would be to buy little muffin / praline forms and hide sweet balls there.

see also: Turkish pumpkin balls
see also: Turkish carrot balls
see also: Banana-aniseed balls

1 cup sweet potato puree*
1/2 cup sugar
1/2 cup ground almonds**
2 tablespoons butter
1/2 coconut milk
1 cup coconut flakes

1. Cook peeled, diced sweet potatoes and puree them*. Take one glass of the puree and set aside. Soak almonds** in milk for 1 hour, drain, pour boiling water on them and after 1/2 hour, peel and grind. take 1/2 cup of them.

2. In a saucepan, combine sweet potato puree, coconut milk and sugar. Cook while stirring, until it becomes some thickness. Pour into a bowl, when still warm add butter and stir well. Butetr should melt and everything should be creamy and homogeneous. Add ground almonds and 2 tablespoons coconut flakes. Set in the fridge for 1 hour.

3. After that time, form lovely balls (walnut-size) from the mass and roll in coconut flakes. Put the balls to the fridge again and take them off just before serving. You may roll them in your hands once again before serving.

Turkish yoghurt soup

2008-07-11T03:11:00.000-07:00

Polish: mięta
Portuguese: hortelã
Aymara: muña
Hindi: पुदीना
Ossetian: Битъына
Croatian: metvica
Breton: bent
Maltese: nagħniegħ
Kazakh: Жалбыз
Tagalog: polios

Dried mint gives the essential flavour to this delicious Turkish yoghurt soup, called yayla çorbası. What does exactly mean this name? Well... plateau soup :) Western Turkeys landscape consists of plateaus, where mountain countryman families pasture their herds and where it is too hot to keep fresh milk sweet, that is why yoghurt is much more popular. Yoghurt soup has a pleasant sour taste and is a great ligt meal for the summertime.

2 cups vegetable broth
2 cups water
2 cups yoghurt
2 tablespoons flour
1 onion
1/3 cup rice
1 tablespoon lemon juice
1 egg
1 tablespoon butter
1 tablespoon mint (dry)

1. Chop onion finely and fry in oil until golden. Add rice and fry 5 minutes together with onion. Add water and broth and cook until rice is done.

2. Separately, whisk yoghurt with egg and flour. Stir all the time while heating on a very low heat. Add several spoons of cooked, warm onion-broth little by little and whisk constantly, until you combine broth and yoghurt. Do it carefully and gradually to accustom yoghurt to high temperature, so that it won't curdle. Rice and lemon juice should be added, too.

3. Melt butter in a saucepan, add dried mint and fry for 5 minutes, without burning butter, on a low heat. Pour soup into a bowl and add a bit of mint-butter-sauce on the top. Serve!

Austrian apricot dumplings

2008-07-09T05:27:00.000-07:00

Polish: morela
Armenian: ծիրան
Albanian: kajsi
Tajik: зардолу
Kannada: გარგარი
Greek: βερικοκιά
Chech: meruňka
Mongolian: чангаанз
Kurdish: mijmij / qeysî
Uzbek: o'rik

I don't know any recipe how to prepare prunus armeniaca in Armenian way... (suggestions more than welcome!) but for sure, one of the most delicious ways of eating apricots is Austrian Marillenknödel in Butterbröseln: apricots hidden in creamy dumpling, cooked and coated in roasted breadcrumbs. Attention! This dough is different than the one in strawberry dumplings recipe! That dough was more fluffy, light and very delicious but unluckily didn't form solid balls after cooking. If visual effects are important to you, choose this dough ;) (In Poland, Germany and Slovakia similar dumplings are prepared, but with potatoes as one of the ingredients of the dough. I will post some recipes for them soon!)

see also: Austrian strawberry dumplings

dough
200 g flour
250 g Quark (in Austria: Topfen) or fresh cheese curd of 20% fat
4 tablespoons semolina
1 egg
100 g butter
a pinch of salt
a bit of flour

filling
8 medium apricots (fresh!)*
8 cubes sugar* (the best would be brown)
50 gr butter + 1/2 cup dried breadcrumbs
powdered sugar

1. In the evening prepare the dough: combine all the ingredients and leave in the fridge overnight

2. Wash apricots, cut slightly just to take the seed off. Put 1 cube sugar into each apricot (if you don't have them, take 1 teaspoon sugar instead of each sugar cube, but never use honey! It will flow away and you will be unable to close the apricot in the dough)

3. In a pan, bring water with a bit of salt and oil to boil. Divide the dough into 8 equal portions (dough balls should be about the size of apricots - see picture above), form balls and roll them. Cover each apricot with a dough "pancake" and roll well in yur hands until you get lovely shaped balls. Put into the saucepan and cook 12-15 minutes.

4. Put dried breadcrumbs and butter (you can add a pinch of cinnamon too) into another pan. butter should melt and breadcrumbs should fry in it until golden. When dumplings are ready, drain them well and put into the pan with breadcrumbs and butter. Move the pan this way so that the whole dumplings are covered with breadcrumbs. Put on the plate and sprinkle with powdered sugar; you can serve them with cream or vanilla ice-cream.

* of course you may have bigger or smaller apricots... the main rule is: so many sugar cubes as many apricots you have. I also suggest to not take the huge, apple-sized apricots. Walnut-sized are perfect.

New Zealandic sweet potato soup

2008-07-08T01:32:00.000-07:00

Polish: słodki ziemniak
Catalan: moniato
Quechua: kumar
Tonga: kumala
Ilokano: kamote
Nahuatl: camohtli
Aymara: apichu
Sango: babolö
Kikuyu: ngwaci
Gujarati: રતાળુ

Sweet potato seems to be really interesting: you can bake or cook it or eat raw, you can serve it sweet or spicy, there is sweet potato flour, chips, pies and alcohol beverages; even its leaves are eaten, mostly in Africa. Solomon Islands produce 160 kg of batata per person each year, and Burundi 130, while where I live most people never seen it nor tasted it. Among the recipes that I tasted, New Zealandic sweet potato soup (called kumara soup) is really worth trying it. Also in the summertime; even if kumara soup, differrently to Polish summer borscht and Mexican avocado soup is a warm dish, it is still great for summer, cause it is light in digestion and in my personal opinion soups are, together with salads, one of the best meal for the summertime.

(for 2 portions)
1 sweet potato (250 g)
1 medium onion
1 garlic clove
1 teaspoon fresh, ground ginger
1/2 cup vegetable broth
1 cup milk
1/2 cup coconut milk
1 tablespoon curry powder
salt, pepper, cumin, oil

1. Chop onion, mince garlic clove. Fry them in oil together with ground ginger. When golden, add curry powder.

2. Grind kumara (Maori name for sweet potato) and add to fried vegetables, fry a bit more (jntil it becomes orange-golden colour) and if needed, add more oil. After about 5 minutes, add broth and cook until almost soft. Puree or pass through sieve or do it partially and leave some vegetable chunks.

3. Pour into the saucepan and cook on a low heat. Add milk and coconut milk little by little, stirring constantly. Try it and add as much cumin, salt and pepper as you wish. Plus, sprinkling the soup with chopped parsley or coriander leaves or dill is always a wonderful idea.

Mexican avocado soup (2 versions)

2008-07-07T06:06:00.000-07:00

Polish: awokado / smaczliwka
Greek: αβοκάντο
Lingala: sabúká
Nahuatl: āhuacatl
Quechua: palta
Swazi: lí-kotapéni
Uyghur: ئاۋكادۇر
Suahili: parachichi
Lao: ໝາກອາໂວກາໂດ
Vietnamese: bơ

Butter pear? Alligator pear? Midshipman's butter? Vegetable butter? Yes, "the fertility fruit" :) If you wonder why is avocado called this way, take Nahuatl language dictionary and you will find that "āhuacatl" means "testicle", due to its shape. Considered as aphrodisiac and perfect for beauty purposes (face masks and so on) but in the past Spanish conquistadors in Mexico were using the juice of the stone as a substitute of ink! I wonder if they knew the taste of Mexican avocado soup, sopa de aguacate. I guess they did :)

1st recipe
1 medium avocado
2 cups broth
1 clove garlic
100 g heavy cream
1 tablespoon lemon juice

1. Puree avocado with lemon juice. Add minced garlic and heavy cream, conbine until homogeneous.

2. Add gradually lukewarm broth to avocado cream and whisk. You can sprinkle the soup with chopped coriander or parsley leaves.

2nd recipe
1/2 cup chili pepper, red or green, chopped
1/2 cup chopped onions
1 medium avocado
1 clove garlic
2 cups broth
1 tablespoon lemon juice
oil to fry

1. Chop peppers and onions finely (so many to obtain 1/2 cup of each vegetable) and fry until soft. Add minced garlic and fry a little bit more. Add 1 cup broth and bring to boil. Set aside to cool.

2. Puree avocado with lemon juice. Add gradually second cup of broth (lukewarm) and whisk. Add broth with vegetables. Now you can puree the whole soup or leave vegetable chunks. My first soup was without any vegetable chunks so I didn't puree the second one.

Notes
- some people replace 1/2-1/4 of broth with white wine
- chopped parsley and / or coriander are a great accompaniment to this soup
- serve lukewarm or cooled. Never boil avocado!
- if this kind of soup seem too "thin" for you, serve it with croutons, toasts, tortillas (or any other kind of flatbread) or boiled and fried tomato slices. Fried gambas would be a tasty alternative too.

Lime tree blossoms syrup

2008-07-03T07:43:00.000-07:00

Polish: lipa
Hungarian: hársfa
Catalan: tell
Finnish: lehmus
Estonian: pärn
Ukrainian: Липа
Chinese: 椴树
Basque: ezki
Vietnamese: chi đoạn
Persian: نمدار
Danish: lind

Rose petals, robinia blossoms and dandelions are gone, sweet woodruff starts blooming so is since then useless in this season, elderberries grow instead of elder blossoms but still I have one suggestion for all those who will dream in the cold winter evenings about some sweet delicious homemade blossom syrup in their tea, instead of sugar: lime tree (linden) blossoms. Great for all who bear with sleepless nights, cause just like lime tree blossoms tea, this syrup helps relaxing and brings sound sleep. Lime tree blossoms syrup is to be prepared this way:

3 cups sugar
1 1/2 cup water
1/2 cup lemon juice
optionally: one orange
2-3 cups lime tree blossoms

(uncleaned blossoms)

1. Clean lime tree blossoms from the resmaining leaves. I know it sounds hard and takes some time, but you need only the blossoms. Leave them on a white sheet of papter for about 1 hour so that all the tiny insects leave their homes. It is important to gather the blossoms from clean, non-polluted areas away from the contamination, cause basically you shouldn't wash them to preserve pollen!
2. Cook a syrup from sugar, water and lemon juice. Leave for some time (let's say, about 1/2h) on a low heat to thicken. Take away from the heat and Set aside to cool downs

3. When the syrup is lukewarm and the blossoms clean from insects, put the blossoms into the syrup. You can add slices of orange (with or without peel, depending on the quality of the orange and your personal taste) to taste or add some more lemon juice according to your palate. Cover and put in the fridge for 3-5 days

4. Strain well, squeeze lemon slices, bring to boil, pour into clean bottles.

ps. There is no picture of the syrup in the bottle. it just looks the same as sweet woodruff syrup... golden and thick.

Danish buttermilk dessert soup

2008-06-30T07:13:00.000-07:00

Great recipe with a bad picture :( Koldskål is a Danish summer dessert, actually something between sweet cold soup and (butter)milky drink. Some people drink it with a straw, other eat with a spoon. If you prefer the second variant, serve it with Danish kammerjunker cokies, or your favourite biscuits, wafers or butter / cardamom (or other) cookies.

1 portion:
1 cup buttermilk
1 egg yolk
25 gr vanilla sugar
1 tablespoon lemon juice
cookies (kammerjunker or similar)

1. Beat yolk with vanilla sugar to obtain a creamy froth

2. Slowly add buttermilk and lemon juice and continue whisking. You can season it with lemon peel. Optionally, sprinkle with crunched cookies. Very refreshing, enjoy!

(my version, delicious even without any cookies)

Moldovan whey-vegetable soup

2008-06-30T06:29:00.000-07:00

Polish: cebulka dymka
Thai: ต้นหอม
Romanian: ceapă verde
Catalan: calçot
Malay: daun bawang
Korean: 파
German: Frühlingszwiebeln
Cebuano: sibuyas dahunan
Bulgarian: пресен лук
Dutch: bosuitjes

Scallions / spring onions are an inportant ingredient of many spring and summer dishes, especially soups, egg dishes and of course salads, probably more common in Asia than anywhere else. Some people tend to choose scalions instead of onions cause it is much nicer to chop scallions than onions, that's sure :) They are one of the main ingredients of this Moldovan summer vegetable-whey soup, sîrbuşca

see also: Polish whey-horseradish soup
see also: Polish whey-millet soup

2 medium potatoes
2 medium carrots
2 spring onions (scallions)
2 cups whey
1 tablespoon cornmeal
2 tablespoons butter (or more), the best would be clarified one
salt, pepper

1. Clean, peel and dice potatoes. Cook them in whey until soft.

2. Fry chopped scallions and grated carrots with (clarified) butter, until carrots are golden-orange and scallions smell.

3. Add fried vegetables to the saucepan with cooking soup. After boiling, add cornmeal and cook about 5 minutes more.

Polish summer cold soup

2008-06-26T10:11:00.000-07:00

Polish: burak
Turkish: pancar
Ossetian: цæхæра
Finnish: punajuurikas
Slovak: navadna pesa
Bahasa Indonesia: bit
Sestwana: segwere
Portuguese: beterraba
Hebrew: סלק
Albanian: panxhar

The last entry was about beets. This one will be about beets, too. And it is not the end of beet entries ;) I am sorry, but I like beet soups too much :) And this one is perfect for the summertime: cold Polish beet soup, called chłodnik. Actually, some people call it here in Poland chłodnik litewski, which means Lithuanian cold soup. he fact is that a similar or even same soup is eaten in Lithuania (known as Šaltibarščiai), Belarus, Ukraine and probably Russia, too. My recipe is Polish. this is the most beloved summer soup of my father. As a child I didn't like it but believe me, there is nothing better and more refreshing during the summertime, when you just don't want to eat anything warm. Especially recomemnded for gazpacho, tzatziki and tarator fans :)

see 2 other cold soup recipes

(2 portions)
1 bunch young tiny beets with leaves*
1 beetroot, medium (1/2 cup shredded beet)
1/2 cup radish slices
1/2 cup cucumber slices
1 handful chopped dill
1 handful chopped chives
1 big garlic clove
salt, vinegar, sugar
2 cups buttermilk / soured milk / kefir
2 eggs

1. Cut young beets into small cubes and chop the leaves finely. Cook with a little bit of water, only to cover the vegetables, until soft. If you can't find young beets with leaves, *take a handful of parsley green instead plus 1/2 cup beet juice (from the jar with pickled beets) instead of the water that should be cooked with the leaves and young beets.

(this time I had to use canned beets, too)

2. Peel and cut beet into cubes and cook with salt, a bit of sugar and vinegar. If you don't have fresh beet, take the one from the jar or pre-cooked and packed and don't worry cause it will taste really good, too.

3. Chop finely all the herbs. Vegetables have to be cut finely or shredded, too. Mince garlic and mash with salt. Boil eggs for 10 minutes with a bit of salt.

4. Pour buttermilk into a bowl, add cooled *beet-leaves-water or *beet juice from the jar, chopped vegetables, herbs and garlic with salt, optionally a bit more salt to taste. Leave for 1 hour or more (even overnight) in the fridge. Serve with boiled egg cut into halves pro portion, sprinkled with some more fresh dill. You can eat it like that or serve with young boiled potatoes with dill and butter.

(chłodnik is gonna have some rest in the fridge now)

Russian nettle borscht (beetroot soup)

2008-06-25T01:48:00.000-07:00

Polish: barszcz
Lithuanian: barščiai
Finnish: borssi
Russian: борщ
Greek: Μπορς
Persian: سوپ برش
Korean: 보르시
Japanese: ボルシチ
Hebrew: חמיצה
Swedish: borsjtj

Borscht is a soup. Warm or cold, with a variety of ingredients, but with one must: beetroots. With or without sour cream, with potatoes or huge white beans, with boiled egg, little stuffed dumplings or fried savoury pancake roll - so many possibilities, depending on the region, season and occasssion. Polish Christmas borscht, for instance, is nothing else but a beetroot broth served in a cup, which you can just drink. Of course, there are exceptions from each rule, so there are some borscht with no beet: in Russia you can find green borscht made with sorrel, and in Poland during the Eastertime people eat white borscht, made from fermented rye flour, bacon and sausage. As you already know or guess, the homeland of borscht is Eastern Europe. During the surpingtime it is worth to try Russian nettle borscht, борщ с крапивой.

see also: Polish spring nettle soup

2 cups vegetable broth
1 cup beetroot, cooked and diced*
1 cup nettle leaves
2 tomatoes
leeks
garlic (1-2 cloves)
sugar, salt, pepper
optionally: sour cream

1. Prepare beetroots: cook them on your own or use pre-cooked or even canned beets (I know, it is not easy to find fresh beets in each country) and dice or cut julienne (into long thin "matches"

2. After dividing nettle leaves from the stalks, pour some boiling water over the leaves, so that your nettle is not excessively scorching :) This step is very important! After pouring boiling water, nettle will not burn your fingers anymore and you can now chop it

3. Dice tomatoes and mince garlic with a bit of salt

4. Heat the broth. When boiling, add beets, nettle, tomatoes and garlic. Add a bit of sugar and pepper and optionally more salt to taste. Cook 5-10 minutes (vegetables are already pre-cooked and tomatoes don't need much time)

5. You can eat the borscht as it is now, or serve with a tablespoon of sour cream on eah plate.

German sweet woodruff syrup

2008-06-13T05:01:00.000-07:00

Polish: przytulia wonna / marzanka wonna
Upper Sorbian: wonjaty sydrik
Platt: Möösch
Estonian: lõhnav madar
Icelandic: ilmmaðra
Japanese: クルマバソウ
Manx: lus vollagh
Italian: caglio odoroso / stellina odorosa
Slovak: marinka voňavá
Danish: skovmærke

(pic taken from the net)

Sweet woodruff is a smell and taste of German spring and summer season. At the beginning I thought that Waldmeister mean nothing but forester (yeah, artificially flavoured and coloured green "forester" ice cream, cheesecakes and puddings :P) But yes, now I finally know the incredible sweet woodruff. I found it in a forest next to the Baltic coast. If you have a chance, collect some and prepare this sweet woodruff syrup (Waldmeistersirup), so popular in Germany. You can drink it with water, pour over pancakes or ice cream or, just like some Germans do, add to beer or mix with other alcohol (but I am not a specialist in this area so I can't give you many tipps, sorry...)

I will share now two recieps with you. First using sugar and second: honey and apple juice.

1st recipe
1 bunch sweet woodruff (only the one that is not blooming yet!)
4 cups sugar
2 cups water
1/2 cup lemon juice (+ 1 teaspoon citric acid)

1. Cook a syrup from water, sugar, lemon juice and citric acid.

2. When the syrup is cool, pour into a bottle and deep sweet woodruff in it. Let stand for about 5 days in the fridge or any other cool place

(sweet woodruff macerating in sugar syrup)

3. After 5 days, divide the plant from the syrup. Close the syrup in the bottle. In Germany people would add few drops of green food colouring, since there everything related with sweet woodruff should be green. You can do it as well :)

2nd recipe
1/2 l apple juice (without sugar!)
250 g honey
1 bunch sweet woodruff

1. Deep woodruff in apple juice for 20 minutes. After this time, divide juice from the plant

2. In a saucepan, cook (very short!) apple-woodfuff juice with honey. Still hot, fill the bottle. To prepare a delicious drink, dissolve 1 part of apple-sweet woodruff syrup in 4 parts mineral water.

Egyptian lentil soup

2008-06-11T02:05:00.000-07:00

Polish: soczewica
Chuvash: Ясмăк
Mokshan: babanjsnavnae
Gujarati: દાળ
Arabic: عدس
Swahili: dengu
Guarani: kumanda mirĩ
Malagasy: voa
Kurdish: nîsk
Albanian: thjerrëz

Lentil soup is eaten worldwide, hence it has many, many variants. In my family we rather eat lentils as a filling to differrent dumplings and fritters while pulse soup contains rather yellow peas or big white beans, so I was very excited to learn this Egyptian way of preparing other pulse, protein-reach and vegetarian soup, شربة عدس, which makes your body warm in the wintertime.

1/2 kg lentils (red or yellow)
1 mediom potato
2 medium tomatoes
a medium bunch of carrots
some garlic cloves, depending on your personal taste (I take 5-6 cloves)
1 medium onion + 2 more
salt + cumin
lemon (chunks)

1. Wash lentils and put them in a saucepan with 1/2-3/4 l water. Start cooking and in the meantime peel and dice or grate carrots, onion, potato and garlic, cut each tomato into 4 chunks and add those vegetables to cooking lentils. After several minutes, take tomatoes off and peel them (it will come very easily to peel them now). Add salt and cumin o taste. Cook on a low heat until the lentils are disintegrated and vegetable chunks soft (about 1/2 hour)

2. Cut finely the rest of the onions and fry until golden brown. Rub already cooked soup rub through a sieve or blend in a food processor. Pour back into the saucepan, add fried onions and cook again.

3. Serve with lemon chunks (so that each person can pour lemon juice) and bread

Egyptian-style fish

2008-06-11T01:48:00.000-07:00

Polish: ryba
Erzya: калт
Abkhazian: аҧсыӡ
Tatar: balık
Somali: kaluun
Navajo: Łóó'
Uyghur: بېلىق
Bashkir: балыҡ
Tajik: моҳӣ
Burmese: ငါး

-> fish (I used Lachsforelle - a kind of trout with pink, salmon-like meat)
-> marinade: salt, cumin, garlic, lemon juice, flour
-> rice, onions
-> tahina, vinegar, parsley, grlic

1. Clean the fish and throw away everything that has to be thrown. Clean the skin of the fish with a knife. Cut the fish into portions and cut the skin of each portion.

2. Prepare spices: mix about 2 teaspoons salt with same amount of cumin, add 5-6 minced garlic cloves and so much lemon juice until you obtain a spreadable cream. Spread it on the fish skin and put into the holes you cut on the skin same as inside the fish. The best would be to put the fish to the fridge overnight, but if not, some hours are enough.

3. You should not eat fish with other rice than onion rice :) So cut onions finely into chunks and fry until slightly brown. Put in a saucepan and cook with 1 cup water. When boiling, add washed rice (as much as you want but let's say 2 cups of rice + 2 medium onions) and so much water so that there are about 2 cm water over the rice surface. When it starts boiling, simmer on a low heat until ready.

4. Sprinkle fish chunks with flour and fry. Serve with onions rice and tahina cream mixed with vinegar, water, chopped parsley and minced garlic.

Kashubian / German buttermilk sweet spread

2008-06-10T10:24:00.000-07:00

Polish: maślanka
Chuvash: yйран
Xhosa: ixibhiya
Finnish: piimä
Chinese: 酪漿
Marathi: ताक
Slovakian: pinjenec
Suahili: mtindi
French: babeurre
Vietnamese: nước sữa

Do you remember manjar blanco, Latin American spread / cream / filling? There is a traditional Kashubian and/or German breakfast bread spread, very similar to the Latin American one, and the technique is so similar, too. Buttermilch Honig, or buttermilk honey, great with fresh crunchy bread (integral bread, too!) or pancakes :)

1 l buttermilk
500 gr sugar
optionally: a little pinch of cinnamon or vanilla

Cook buttermilk with sugar in a pan on a low heat and mix constantly until you obtain a creamy thick spread (takes about 1/2 hour)

Palestinian mutton-rice-vegetables dish

2008-06-04T07:20:00.000-07:00

Polish: baranina
Portuguese: carneiro
Norwegian: lammedeig
Russian: Баранина
Dutch: schapevlees
Danish: fårekød
Czech: skopové
French: mouton
Breton: kig-dañvad
Shona: nyama yehwai

Makluba (مقلوبة) is a Palestinian dish from mutton, rice and vegetables, but as far as I know eaten also in the rest of Levant countries. In Arabic its name means nothing else but... "upside down", and Spaniards call it "arabic paella". Factually, there are many similarities between those two dishes: both contain similar ingredients (rice, vegetables, meat) cooked in one pan and were rather a poor dish, prepared from the resting pieces of meat and differrent vegetables. Today it is eaten usually on fridays and served to the guests to offer them respect and honour. But why is it called "upside-down"? After cooking, you should invert the content of the pan into a plate. If you are lucky, it will conserve the shape of the pan, but mine didn't. Anyway, taste counts ;)

(ps. the pics are of a bad quality; I am sorry for that, but you have to believe me, this dish tastes wonderful even for me, who never liked meat too much)

2 medium aubergines
2 big tomatoes
1 medium couliflower
1 big onion + 1 small onion
1/2 kg mutton shoulder*
1 1/2 cup basmati rice
cumin

1. Chop the small onion, fry until smelling and golden, add mutton (*I had about 3/4 kg mutton with bones and after cooking and throwing the bones away, there was 1/2 kg meat), fry a little bit and cook in 1/2-3/4 l water until soft

2. Peel and slice aubergines, sprinkle with salt and set aside until drops appear on its surface. Drain with a kitchen paper towel or with your hand, and fry

3. Divide cauliflower into chunks, cook for a very short time (about 5 minutes) in water with salt cumin

(beginning with tomatoes and moving as a clock needle: tomato slices, fried eggplants, mutton chunks, mutton broth, eggplants being drained, fried cauliflower chunks)

4. Wash rice, divide meat chunks from the broth

5. Prepare the pan: put some spoons of the fat that swims on the surface of your broth or spread some spoons oil, and cover the bottom of the top with thick slices of the big onion. This is actually my invention cause I like the taste of onions and here onions serve as a protection layer instead of backing sheet (some people put baking sheet on the bottom of the pan, some put tomatoes). The second layer are thick slices of tomato and the third are slices of fried eggplant. Then you put 1/2 amount of washed, drained rice. Next layer should be meat, then cauliflower, then the rest of the rice and then eggplant slices.

6. When ready with the layers, pour the broth over the dish. Broth should reach the top of the last layer, if it does't, add water. Taste the broth if there is enough salt. Cover the pan with aluminium sheet and simmer until rice is ready (usually about 1/2 hour). After that try to take the makluba away as it was a cake :) You can sprinkle it with toasted pine nuts and serve with yoghurt.

Polish black locust fritters

2008-06-03T09:33:00.000-07:00

Polish: robinia akacjowa / grochodrzew
Upper Sorbian: běła robinija
Korean: 아까시나무
Serbian: багрем
Romanian: salcâm
Vietnamese: dương hòe
Czech: trnovník akát
Slovakian: agát biely
Ukrainian: біла акація
French: robinier faux-acacia

Black locust is a grateful tree. Belongs to the pea family and is improperly called acacia (but caling it false acacia is true, following the latin name robinia pseudoacacia). Probably you often have a walk around your country plot and smell its intensive aroma and you even never thought that you could pick some and prepare delicious fritters. In my homeland, Poland, black locust fritters (racuchy akacjowe) are maybe not the most common sweet snack, but belong to the most favourite childhood memories of the summertime in the countryside and people still willingly prepare them in the springtime, if they only can find black locust tree away from the contamination of big cities and cars. There are several recipes to prepare this great breakfast dish or sweet evening snack; here is mine:

1 cup* black locust flowers**
1 apple (should be sour!)
1 cup flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 cup condensed milk (7,5% or 10% fat)***
1 egg yolk
1 pack vanilla sugar
salt

1*. After collecting black locust, what you have to do is to switch on some interesting film so that in the emantime you can divide flowers from the panicles. Some people (see elder flower pancakes recipe) just deep the whole panicles in the batter. You can do it of course but a) it won't taste that good, b) black locust is generally considered toxic, with the exception of the flowers!

2. Beat egg yolk with vanilla sugar and a bit of salt. Add condensed milk (3,5% whole milk or yoghurt can be used instead***).

3. Swift flour with baking powder and add to the milk-yolk cream

4. Peel apple and cut into tiny chunks or grate it. Apple is important to add somesour taste; otherwise, fritters taste a bit insipid (some say that similar to soap :P) Mix with the batter and add black locust flowers. I once added a handful of chopped rose petals** to make the fritters look more colourful ( observed no differrence in taste). Mix everything well and fry.

(black locust fritters with rose petals**)

Polish spring nettle soup

2008-05-30T11:21:00.000-07:00

Polish: pokrzywa
Kazakh: қалақай
Upper Sorbian: wulka kopřiwa
Ossetian: Пысыра
Arabic: القراص
Quechua: ithapallu
Greek: Τσουκνίδα
Armenian: եղիճ
Icelandic: netla
Estonian: kõrvenõges

I am a big fan of nettle, so I really egg on all the people to eat it, especially now, in the spring time. The nutritious value of nettle is countless and if you know how to prepare it, it will taste really great, especially for spinach-fans. But remember to collect only the young nettles, those before blooming, caose only they contain tons of vitamins, minerals and flavonoids. Some tips? Prepare nettle leaves just like spinach and eat with curd cheese or use as a filling to pierogi (dough recipe here and here) or vegetable pie or quiche; add nettle leaves to salads and vegetable fritters; combine chopped leaves with fresh cottage cheese and garlic or add the leaves to scrambled eggs or omlette; finally, cook netle soup! One of the variants you can find below!

see also: Russian nettle borscht

1 l. broth
1 cup nettle leaves
1 big onion
1 egg
(optionally: 1/2 cup cream)*

1. Boil 1 cup water, add nettle leaves and leave for 1 minute. Throw the water away (this will take the excessive sipcy taste away) and put the nettle leaves into cooking broth and cook on a low heat for about 15 minutes.

2. Dice onion and fry with a bit of oil until soft and golden.

3. Blend nettle leaves and pieces of fried onion with a bit of broth. Mix with the rest of the broth.

Serve with cooked chopped egg (about 1/2 - 1/3 egg pro person). You can also add cream to cooking broth or blend the cream with nettles and onion, or put a bit of cream on each plate before serving the soup*; you can also sprinkle your soup with copped almonds, pine nuts or bread chunks (fried with oil and garlic and diced)

Polish elder pancakes

2008-05-28T10:44:00.000-07:00

Polish: bez czarny
Upper Sorbian: hołdračk
Bosnian: zovha
Arabic: بيلسان
Occitan: saüc
Albanian: shtogu
Galician: bieito
Lithuanian: juoduogis šeivamedis
Quechua: yana rayan
Cornish: skawenn

When you smell black elder's blossoms during an evening walk, you know it's late spring. In Poland the blossoms are fried in a batter and eaten with powdered sugar; in north Germany a soup from the berries is very popular; in Romania you can even buy a kind of Fanta with elderbery taste, and in Hungary elderberry brandy; in central Europe it is quite common to prepare a thick syrup from the blossom and lemon juice; you drink it dissolved with water or add to flavour your tea. Blossoms are dried and prepared as an infusion, too. This spring I dried some panicles which I am gonna drink in the wintertime, I also made a syrup and pancakes from the elder. Today I am gonna share the recipes for the elder pancakes, in Polish: placki z kwiatow bzu.

1 cup flour & 1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 cup milk
1/2 cup sparkling, carbonated water
1 small pack vanilla sugar
1 egg white
1/2 - 1 cup elder blossoms
(eventually: 1 tablespoon lemon juice)

1. "Crumble" the panicles of elder to separate blossoms from the stalks. Some people deep the whole panicles into the batter but the taste of the stalks can destroy the whole pancake... I mean, in my opinion my way of making pancakes is much better than the fritters-methode... But it's up to you... My advice is to use blossoms only. It takes some more time but it is worth it! When you choose ripe paniles, blossoms will divide easily from the stalks!

2. Sift the flour with baking powder. Add water, milk and vanilla sugar. Combine. Beat the egg white and add gently to the batter. Add elder blossoms, they should be all covered with the batter. Now you can add lemon juice, too.

3. Fry! Just like regular pancakes. Serve sprinkled with powdered sugar, with homemade marmalade, honey, butter, maple syrup, dandelion syrup, manjar (How to do this Latin American spread? You can learn it from my recipe for Peruvian suspiro), nutella... So many possibilities!

Polish spring dandelion syrup

2008-05-13T09:53:00.000-07:00

Polish: mniszek
Ossetian: Къаппа-къуппа
Upper Sorbian: mlóč
Old Prussian: pėinė
Ukrainian: Кульбаба лікарськ
Estonian: võilill
Faroese: Vanlig várhagasólja
Basque: txuntxumela
Aymara: qhanapaku
Luxembourgian: Bettseechesch
Persian: قاصدک

(pic taken from wikipedia)

May is the only month here in Central Europe to collect dandelions. There are so many reasons to collect them! To decorate your living-room sunny-yellowish or to several culinary purposes: false capers from dandelion buds, salad from leaves, kind-of-honey, lemonade and marmalade from flowers, kind-of-coffee even... yes, from roasted roots... and even alcoholic drinks (liqueur or something like this, I am thegreatest dabbler of the world about alcohol). Anyway, we are in the middle of spring here now so if any of you have a meadow or a lea full of dandelion somewhere around, don't hesitate and dedicate oe morning (this is very important: collected in the morning and in the sun, dandelions will contain pollen and nectar!) to collect dandelion blossoms! You will need three days to prepare the dandelion syrup, called in Poland sometimes miodek majowy (may honey) but it is worth it!

500 dandelion blossoms :D
1 lemon
1 orange
1 kg sugar

1st day
- Collect dandelion blossoms, as already said, before noon. If you find yellow stains on your fingers it means, there are pollens in your dandelions and that means the syrup will be tasty and healthy :P At home, let the flowers rest for one hour on a white paper, so that all the tiny insects could leave their homes. Don't wash!

- Leave dandelions in 1 liter water, together with orange and lemon slices. You can peel the fruits or cut with their skins (if bio) and cook for about 15 minutes. Leave.

2nd day
- Drain the flowers very, very, very wel, using a drainer and a spoon. Add sugar and cook 1-2 hours on a medium heat.

3rd day
- Cook again, for about half an hour or until you receive your beloved thickness.

- Stir into glasses, close them and then... eat on a toast together with frish cheese or butter or take a spoon to sweeten your tea!

I hope that the recipe is clear. If not, leave your question in the "comments" field and I will answer quickly. There are some more ways to use dandelions in the kitchen; even if at the moment I have no good camara, I will tell and show you how to prepare some more flower food soon!

Polish apples in jackets

2008-04-03T16:09:00.000-07:00

Polish: jabłko
Mohawk: sewahyowane
Blackfoot: ápasstaamiinaamm
Navaho: belasana
Anglonquin: waabimin
Ossetian: фæткъуы
Inuktitut: kimminaujaq
Polabian: jobkú
Votic: õuna
Livonian: umar

Apples are everywhere! In English in pineapple and aubergine (mad apple is one of its synonys), in French in potato (pomme de terre), in Old English in cucumber (eorþæppla)... but there is also apple mint... elephant apple... alligator apple... apple snail... apple of eye... apple of discord... apple butter... Adam's apple... Newton's apple... and... Ewa's baked apple :P Originally this Polish dessert is called apples in jackets or apples in dressing gowns (jabłka w koszulkach / jabłka w szlafrokach)

2 cups flour*
125 gr margarine
1 egg
1 egg yolk
1/2 cup powdered sugar
1 pack vanilla sugar or few drops vanilla aroma
3 tablespoons cream (should be thick)
salt ( pinch)
apples: about 8 (I can't tell you exactly; it depends on your apple's size)
1/2 cup marmalade, sour*
powdered sugar + cinnamon to sprinkle
+ flour to sprinkle the workplace

* the Polish name of the flour I used is krupczatka. I will not give you the number, cause the numeration differs depends on the country. Take the flour you would use to make shortcrust pastry: a grainy one (called semolina flour)

** homemade would be the best: I used homemade mirabelle jam, but gooseberry, sea-buckthorn and currant would be great too. If you don't have any of those, take bilberry or bramble or actually anything which is at least a little bit sour

1. Sieve flour, add cold margarine and hack with a knife. Usually it is not recommended to do it with hands because we don't want the margarine to melt with the warm of our hands, cause this dough has to be crunchy after baked. Add egg, yolk, 1/2 cup powdered sugar, vanilla sugar / aroma, cream, salt and knead fast with your hand (has to be done fast for the reason mentioned above). Let in the fridge until you are ready with apples, but the best would be to let it rest for at least 30 minutes

2. Peel apples, divide into halves and take the seeds off

3. Take small amounts of the dough from the fridge, roll them on the surface sprinkled with flour. Roll until thiner than 1/2 cm. Put a half of an apple in the middle, fill with marmalade and cover with the resting dough (see the picture, it serves better than my words :P)

4. Preheat your oven until 200-220C. Butter your tray and sprinkle it with semolina, breadcrumbs, coconut flakes or simply with flour. Bake about 15 minutes or until golden. When ready, sprinkle with sugar and / or cinnamon.

Belarussian curd rolls (pancakes)

2008-04-02T03:50:00.000-07:00

Polish: twaróg
Albanian: gjizë
Russian: творог
Tatar: eremçek
Swedish: kvarg
Spanish: requesón
Romanian: urdă
Hungarian: túró
Latvain: biezpiens
Dutch: wrongel

Curd roll covered in chocolate is one of the Central and East European snacks. Probably it's because Central and East Europe is a true kingdom of milk and its products, from buttermilk and kefir through differrent kind of curd and fresh cheese until curd pancakes, breadrolls, crepes, buns, dumplings and thousands of differrent curd snacks, until innumerable variety of cheesecakes. My grandmum has access to fresh cowmilk and she makes her own curd, of course, and soured milk. Coming back to my Belarussian Recipes book, I tried Belarussian curd rolls, Батончики творожные. They are actually a kind of pancakes, we prepare very similar ones in Poland. Curd rolls available in grocery stores are not fried, and also remember that frying curd pancakes is a bit difficult cause it drinks oil and becomes golden brown very fast. But still, they taste really good!

500 gr curd / fresh cheese
1 cup flour
1 egg
2 tablespoons cream
1 tablespoon sugar
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
powdered sugar to sprinkle

1. Rub curd with cream and sugar. Whisk egg, mix flour with baking soda

2. Add egg to the curd, when homogeneous add flour and mix well

3. Roll the dough and cut into 10 cm slices. Fry and sprinkle iwth powdered sugar

Moldovan aubergine pancakes

2008-04-02T02:26:00.000-07:00

Polish: bakłażan
Sranan: bulansyey
Malagasy: baranjely
Kashmiri: वाँगुन्
Tagalog: talóng
Bahasa Melayu: terung
Swahili: mbilingani
Papiamento: berehein
Tonga: paingani
Tajik: Боқлаҷон

Back to the discussion what should be called fruit and what should be called vegetable... How about aubergine? Actually, it should be denominated a fruit, cause from biological point of view it is a true berry, together with plantain, guava or grape. Let's see: there are several dishes from aubergine in the world cuisines that are sweet: Indonesian sweet aubergine stew semur terong, breaded eggplants dipped in honey (also Asian delicacy), Turkish eggplant marmalade (is it really sweet?) and Japanese eggplant... ice cream! (about the last one I am absolutely unsure of its sweetness, since Japanese produce and... consume... crab, eel, cheese or potato ice cream...). Aubergines are something new in Poland, my grandmum for instance never cooked them. I like them a lot, that is why regularily I browse the net in search of some new aubergine recipes, since there are no original Polish aubergine recipes. Lately I visited www.moldova.org and I found a nice collection of Moldovan recipes. First I tried eggplant pancakes, placinta cu vinete, something really, really tasty!

1 big eggplant
1 egg
3-4 tablespoons flour*
salt, pepper

1. Bake eggplant in the oven until its skin becomes dark. Peel, take the seeds off if they are big. Drain and chop.

2. Whisk the egg, add flour* (the recipe speaks about 1 tablespoon but I had to add more cause with only one I couldn't fry the pancakes), chopped eggplant, salt and pepper to taste.

3. Fry! What a great alternative for Polish potato pancakes! Serve with salads or pickles.

Polish carrot pancakes

2008-04-01T11:28:00.000-07:00

Polish: tarka
Lithuanian: trintuvė
Luxembourgian: Rapp
Persian: رنده
Estonian: riiv
Russian: Тёрка
Hebrew: פומפייה
Finnish: raastin
Turkish: rende
Portuguese: ralador

...yes, kitchen grater :) The most important (and actually the only one) utensil to prepare Polish carrot pancakes, racuszki karotenki. Could be served as a warm sweet supper, dessert or breakfast, with cream, powdered sugar or cinnamon. After deliberating yesterday wether a carrot is a fruit or a vegetable, I decided to add one more sweet carrot recipe to my blog, also one of my favourites. I guess I really like carrots served in a sweet way. This recipe will be sent to Joelen to join her Tasty Tools Blogging Event. I have no special tips about kitchen grater... and my family already ate all the pancakes while only now I realised that I should make a pic with both pancakes and a grater :( But I hope I can still join, Joelen?

and the recipe:

1/2 kg carrots*
1 cup flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
2 eggs
a pinch of salt
cinnamon, icing sugar

1. Grate raw peeled carrots very fine (take the side of the garter with the smallest "eyes")

2. Whisk eggs with salt, sieve flour mixed with baking powder. It should be ready to fry but if you ffind it too loose, add a bit more flour. Fry, sprinkle with cinnamon and icing sugar

*you may add half grated apple too

Turkish sweet carrot balls

2008-04-01T04:41:00.000-07:00

Polish: marchewka
Belorussian: морква
Armenian: գազար
Turkmen: кәшр
Maltese: zunnarija
Zulu: ikhalothi
Urdu: گاجر
Guarani: makychĩguasu
Estonian: porgand
Gujarati: ગાજર

Why is avocado considered a fruit and carrot or pumpkin - a vegetable? Right... Is carrot actually a fruit or a vegetable? The European Union didn't want to preoccupy baout this issue and an adequate decree declares that it is a fruit. So that Portuguese carrot jams can be classified as required. If in Portugal there is carrot jam; in Poland apple and carrot pie filling, carrot sweet fritters and carrot sweet dumplings; in Belarus sweet carrot and semolina puddings; in Spain, probably not very popular but still eaten carrot flan; and carrot cakes are eaten worldwide: then is carrot a fruit? We could divagate, multiplying arguments and reasons. In the meanwhile, prepare yourself another wonderful carrot dessert, Turkish carrot balls, havuçlu toplar.

see also: Turkish pumpkin balls
see also: Brasilian sweet potato balls
see also: Banana-aniseed balls

1 cup carrot puree (peel and cook carrots in water with salt and sugar, mash)

1 cup cookies, pepit beurre / leibniz type (mash them or grind in coffee grinder)

1 cup ground walnuts or a mix of walnuts and hazelnuts

a pinch of cinnamon

(about) 1/2 cup sugar, or to taste*

some biscuits, coconut flakes and / or cornflakes

When you have all the ingredients already prepared, just combine all of them and form lovely balls. I add 1/2 cup of powdered milk* to sweeten and make the mass thicker, but the original recipe require sugar* or sometimes a bit of butter / margarine (about 50 gr). Sprinkle with ground biscuits, coconut flakes or cornflakes (the last one is my invention). It is one of my favourite desserts.

Polish sand cake

2008-03-30T03:08:00.000-07:00

Polish: piasek
Chechen: гхум
Samoan: oneone
Romansch: sablun
Xhosa: isidibi
Old Prussian: smėltės
Mongolian: элс
Thai: ทราย
Inupiaq: maġġaq
Aymara: ch'alla

... Sand? Why did someone call this cake a sand cake? No, there are no unpleasant lumps that crack and rustle between your teeth... Quite to the contrary, Polish babka piaskowa, sand cake, has a lovely soft consistency, because of the addition of potato starch. Polish babka piaskowa is a sister of German Sandkuchen (even the names eman just the same) but as I observed, in German recipes you should take same amount of wheat flour and starch. Instead of potato starch you could use cornstarch* (I am almost sure cause I saw cornstarch in several Sandkuchen recipes) and maybe even tapioca* (I am experimenting with tapioka lately, its consistency reminds me of potato starch)

4 eggs
200 gr powdered sugar
150 gr wheat flour
100 gr potato starch*
200 gr soft butter
1 teaspoon baking powder
3 tablespoons milk
arak aroma / 1 tablespoon arak / vanilla / zest + juice from 1 lemon

1. Mix well soft butter with sugar. When homogeneous, add yolks one by one

2. Mix wheat flour with potato starch and baking powder, sift half of it to the eggs, add milk, mix and sift the rest of the flour

3. Beat whites. When stiff, combine with what you obtained in point 2. Also now add flavour (vanilla, arak, aroma or lemon)

4. Bake about 1 hour (depending, as always, on your oven) in 180C. Sprinkle with powdered sugar.

Polish herring croquettes

2008-03-29T04:47:00.000-07:00

Polish: śledź
Kashubian: stupka
Korean: 청어
Latvian: siļķes
Ukrainian: оселедець
Norwegian: sild
Georgian: ქაშაყი
Luxembourgian: hierk
Arabic: رنجة
Scottish Gaelic: sgadan

Herring has been a known staple food source since 3000 B.C. Here, in the Baltic sea region, herring is one of the most popular fishes. There are various methods of preparing it: raw, pickled, fried and even fermented... In Poland it is a must to eat herring during the lent before Easter and at the Christmas Eve Dinner, usually raw, cut into chunks with onion slices and oil. In my family we often eat this kind of herring salad for breakfast. Let me also propose a warm dinner dish: Polish herring croquettes, krokiety śledziowe.

see also: Portuguese codfish fritters

2 herring fillets, those without bones and heads, that were cured in salt (+ water + milk)
1/2 kg potatoes*
2 big onions
1 egg
1/2 cup breadcrumbs
pepper, dill
a bit of flour to sprinkle

1. Soak herrings overnight in water with a bit of milk to remove excessive salt

2. Cook potatoes (* if you want to obtain less herringy taste, take 1 kg of potatoes). Chop 1 onion and fry until golden brown

3. Using meat grinder, grind together soaked drained herings, cooked potatoes and the second onion

4. Combine the ground ingredients with breadcrumbs, chopped dill and lightly beaten egg. Add pepper to taste, you don't need to add salt cause herrings are already salty. Knead a bit.

5. Form croquettes, sprinkle with flour and fry. Serve with salads (tastes good with beetroot or raddish salad) and yoghurt with dill, parsley or chives

pictures of some Polish Easter dishes

2008-03-27T02:06:00.000-07:00

Easter is already gone...
Where I come from, the main ingredient of Easter is of course egg. Not mentioning pisanki and any other kind of painted or waxed eggs, the main dish of Sunday's Easter breakfast would be boiled eggs with mayonnaise and chives. So simple. Besides, there are plenty of ways to prepare eggs: in pockets of ground meat, chopped eggs stuffed in egg shells and fried and so on. People usually prepare homemade pate, baked ground meat with boiled egg inside or stuffed roast. Breakfast is 100% complete with traditional soured rye flour soup (żurek) with a bit of white sausage and boiled egg, and a tray full of differrent sausages and black pudding. The last but not least: before you eat, you share 1 egg, 1 sausage and 1 slice of bread plus salt and pepper with all the companion at the table; this symbolic amount that represents the whole Easter table has to be hallowed the day before.

Here is a small representation of Easter breakfast dishes:

eggs & obligatory bittercress

baked meat with quail eggs & eggs in meat pockets & toothpick-cubes & egg with mayo & hallowed piece of food to share (bread, sausage, egg with salt and pepper)

ground meat cake with quail eggs again

date & almond & chocolate cake, one of 1000 variations of so-called mazurek

pascha: curd cheese dessert with cocoa, raisins and succade, here with homemade bounty balls

babka: originally should be from yeast and minimum 20 eggs but I made a small one with lemon and orange and baking powder (shame, shame on me :P)

second variation about mazurek, typical Easter cake (this time with almonds and cooked yolks)

Egyptian vermicelli with sugar

2008-03-25T18:25:00.000-07:00

Polish: krajanka / nitki
German: Fadennudeln
Portuguese: aletria
Turkish: tel şehriye
Spanish: fideos
Estonian: niitnuudlid
Bresciano: formentì
Greek: φιδές
Persian: ورمیشل
Czech: vlasové nudle

I am not a big fan of pasta; actually, I prepare them sparsely at home. Once a month or less. But Egyptian-style sugar vermicelli is something I really like, depsite of being pasta :) It was the first Egyptian dish I actually tried. Cheap, easy and sweet, is a good alternative if you wanna eat something sweet but your fridge is empty. I hope you will enjoy شعرية بالسكر, Egyptian vermicelli with sugar recipe, as well!

vermicelli (let's say, 1/2 pack / about 1 cup)
ghee, 1 tablespoon or more
water (about 1/2 liter)
sugar to taste, about 5 tablespoons

1. Fry vermicelli in ghee until golden brown, stirring all the time. Do not burn them!

2. In a saucepan, dissolve sugar in water. Add golden vermicelli (together with ghee in which it was fried). Cook on a medium heat until vermicelli are soft

3. You can serve it hot or cooled (my idea is to sprinkle the dish with cinnamon and serve with vanilla quark)