Heavenly Lemonade

With the hot summer days are coming up I want to give the recipe of a lemonade that i took from the web site of a famous Turkish food blogger "ev cini". I have made this lemonade for my friends for couple of times and they told me they are in love with the drink. It could be useful to have the recipe ready, to impress your friends on a hot hot summer day. So here is the ingredients serves 4-6 people,

4 lemons
4 cups of water
1 cup of sugar
4 small size peach
4 small size green apple
plenty of fresh mint
plenty of ice

Boil the water in a cattle and mix it with sugar then add the zest of 4 lemons, and put 4 branches of mint. Cover the mixture and wait for it to get cooler. You might wanna do this in advance you can do it 3-4 hours before serving it or the day before. Once the mixture cooled down filter the mixture and get rid of the zest and mint. Then squeze the lemons and add the lemon juice into the mixture. You can put it into the fridge and wait for it to cool down a little more oryou can directly use it.

Right before serving, pick clear and tall glass cups. Slice the apple and peaches and put them inside the cups. Add some ice and fresh mint on top. And add the previously prepared liquid. Put a straw in and enjoy...

The picture is taken by esma.

Turkish Ravioli (Manti) with Mushroom Filling

I am not big on blogging world but every once in a while i read through blogs. So far i can state that the women bloggers tend to give recipes on their blogs. To validate my assumption, i wont break the tradition and give a recipe of vegetarian manti. For those who are not familiar with manti it is fresh pasta with ground beef filling. It is a traditional food and you should definitely eat if you are planning to visit Turkey. I don't know if it is purely Turkish or originated from middle east though. But yeah i changed the recipe a little and used a whole wheat flour, and used a vegetarian filling instead of ground beef. That made the manti a little bigger in size than it should be but you can make the filling more smooth with a food processor and come up with smaller sizes. The smaller the size is the better. It kinda shows how professional you are on making manti. And the other difficulty i came across was working with whole wheat flour. I used a regular whole wheat flour and when i mixed it with a liquid it was very sticky. i would recommend the all purpose flour. If you can find, get the ones made for pasta. (And to be honest regular flour tastes better:))

What you need for dough:

1. 1 egg

2. 2 cups of flour (i used whole wheat, you can go for all purpose)

3. Water

Ingredients for filling

1. finely chopped small onion

2. finely chopped portobello mushroom (any mushroom will do the job)

3. 1 green chilli

4. finely chopped parsley

5. grated mozzarella cheese

7. pinch of salt, freshly grounded black pepper, dried rosemary

8. two table spoons of olive oil

Before starting dough making, prepare the filling. You need to cook the onion first with olive oil then add the rest. Be creative with the filling, add the flavours you like. And to add the mozzarella you need to wait until the cooked ingredients cooled down.

So you need to mix the ingredients for the dough until you get something feels like dough. it shouldn't be very sticky. You will be rolling out the dough, so you want it to have a smooth consistency. If the dough looks too big then divide it into pieces and roll out the pieces. Then make square pieces from rolled dough with knife and put the filling inside the squares. Pull the opposite sides of the squares together and stick them to one another (that process takes forever). After you are done you can bake them and cook in a boiling water or without baking freshly cook them in boiling water.

And be creative with the sauce, traditional Turkish sauce for manti is yoghurt mixed with crushed garlic and melted butter with powder red pepper is added on top.

afiyet olsun...

P.S. comment below if you know where manti is originated from.