Polish spring spread

Polish: twaróg
English: curd
Bulgarian: Извара
Icelandic: ystingur
Georgian: ხაჭო
Tamil: தயிர்
Lithuanian: varškė
Spanish: requesón
Tatar: eremçek
Hungarian: túró

Curd cheese summer spread. Delicious!

Romanian lovage sauce recipe

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 :)

Spring cold soups

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!

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

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

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!!!!!

Russian nettle borscht (beetroot soup)

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

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.

Polish black locust fritters

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

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)



And here is another lovely nettle soup which I made at my grandmother's place (beautiful eastern Polish countryside)

Polish elder pancakes

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

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!