Turkish rosehip-meatballs soup

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 :)

Turkish zucchini patties

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.

Turkish yoghurt soup

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!

Turkish sweet carrot balls

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.

Turkish pumpkin pasta

Polish: makaron
Basque: makarroiak
Icelandic: núðlur
Gujarati: મૈકરોની
Mongolian: хөндий
Faroese: makaroni
Chinese: 通心粉
Maltese: mqarrun
Thai: มะกะโรนี
Slovak: makaróny

I promise, one day I will learn Turkish. Yes, I love all the languages and because of many reasons. The main reason for learning Turkish is the variety of its cuisine and a great number of delicious recipes, especially those vegetarian. I am not a big fan of noodles (I barely eat them) but I absolutely adore pumpkin, so without any doubt I had to try balkabağı pasta.

a packet of penne (rigatone) noodles (I had about 300 gr)
1 cup (better a bit more) raw pumpkin, diced
1/2 cup pumpkin seeds
1 cup broth
1 medium onion
1 tablespoon sour cream

1. Cook noodles as usual

2. Stew diced pumpkin with broth until soft

3. Grind half of your pumpkin seeds and add to the pumpkin broth. Fry the rest with finely chopped onions. Add onions to pumpkin.

4. Pour pumpkin sauce over pasta. Stir. Add sour cream, salt and pepper to taste

(grounded seeds was my invention. You don't have to do it. Just take less seeds and only fry them with onion)

Turkish pumpkin sweet balls

Polish: herbatnik
Chinese: 饼干
Occitan: bescuèch
Samoan: masi
Aymara: misk'i t'ant'alla
Czech: piškot
Maltese: gallettina
Persian: بيسکويت
Saami- keaksa
Scots Gaelic: briosgaid
Zulu: Ibhisikidi
Swiss German: Guetzli
Thai: ขนมปังกรอบ

Biscuits were the main ingredient of this dessert, even if the most laborious indredient was kaymak. Funny, in Poland we have kajmak too, but it means here a cooked condensed milk, similar to caramel, while in Turkey, Balcan and Arab countries it means a thick cream. According to Binnur's recipe, I prepared my "southern" kaymak. The result was a thick cream, which I can not compare to any other thing. Oh, maybe to the Milky Way chocolate bar :) Kaymak and pumpkin? Yes, kaymakli balkabaği :)

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

2 cups 3,5% milk
2 cups 36% cream
500 gr pumpkin puree (cooked, mashed pumpkin)
1 cup round walnuts
1 cup ground biscuits
1/2 cup sugar (or even less)
coconut flakes

1. The first step must begin 2 days before serving. You have to prepare kaymak. Combine milk and cream and boil. Pour into pyrex dish. Cook water in a pan and put the pyrex dish on the pan to let the milk-cream cook thanks to the vapour from the pan.



Simmer for 8 hours, cool and keep in the fridge for 24 hours. There may be milk under your kaymak layer but I found none. If yiu find, use it to some other dish.

2. Cook pumpkin puree with sugar until sugar is melted

3. Add ground walnuts and biscuits to the pumpkin cream. Combine. Cool.

4. Take hazelnut-like, small portion of kaymak and form a ball. Take a handful of pumpkin cream, form a ball and hide inside it previously made kaymak ball. Coat with coconut fkales. Keep in fridge for about 1 hour. Before serving, roll each ball in your hand again, fixing its lovely shape.

Turkish spinach cake

Polish: szpinak
portuguese: espinafre
Dutsch: spinazie
Gujarati: પાલક
Persian: اسفناج
Guarani: ka’anaite
Russian: Шпинат
Greek: σπανάκι
Korean: 시금치
Luxemburgian: Päinetsch
Basque: ziazerba
Irish: spionáiste

Spinach cake (Ispanaklı kek) is a Turkish green wonder. Recipe was taken somewhere from the net. I found several recipes in English and Turkish and compared them and chose something in-between :) It was fun translating the ingredients and way of preparing since I never learnt Turkish, but languages are my passion so when I can join languages with cooking I am twice happy.



3 eggs
1/2 cup oil (mine was sunflower seeds oil)
1 package frozen spinach (450gr)
2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1 tsp baking powder
1 cup sugar
1 sachet vanilla sugar
1 tsp lemon juice

1 cup whipped cream (next time I'll take 2 cups)
1 tsp gelatine (not necessarily)
1/2 cup chopped pistachio

1. Cook spinach in half glass of water until soft, and drain very well. You must receive a spinach puree. Chop it very very finely.

2. Beat eggs with sugar and vanilla sugar until eggs are nice yellowish and sugar is melted. Add oil and continue mixing. Add drained spinach and lemon juice. Mix, mix, mix!

3. Sift flour with baking powder to the spinach batter

4. Grease the pan and strew it with breadcrumbs, pour the mass and bake about half an hour in 180C. When ready, divide into two layers.


(one of thelayers waiting to be covered with cream)

5. Top, middle and aside top with whipped cream (optionally, like in my case, mixed with 1 spoon of melted gelatine) and sprinkle generously chopped pistachios. Yummyyyyy!