Polish bilberry dumplings

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

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

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

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

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

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)

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

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

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

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

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)

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.

Egyptian lentil soup

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

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

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

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

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**)