The idea of making mini omelettes with cheese filling belongs to Mom. She invented the recipe when we were baking Rhubarb Meringue Tartelettes and she had to use up a leftover fresh egg. She slightly whisked it with a fork, added a slice of cheese, and baked it in a spare baking mould. I didn’t taste this spontaneous omelette, but it looked good! So today we made a more sophisticated version of it – with salty crumbly caraway cheese inside and tiny chanterelles on top. Provided you have some cooked chanterelles in your fridge/freezer, these fine little omelettes are made in 30 minutes from start to finish. Nothing too complicated or expensive, and yet this will definitely surprise your family or guests.
Oh and by the way, I’ve had another bowl of wild strawberries today. Life is better than I expected :)
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Chanterelles being one of my very very very favourite foods ever (they’re definitely in my Top5 favourite foods, even though I’m not sure what other 4 foods make the Top… I guess lemons and… what else..?), I couldn’t resist highlighting this recipe again. We wrote about Chanterelle soup as one of our first blog entries a year ago. We’ve already made it twice this summer, with a few tweaks, and I thought this lovely summer mushroom soup was worth mentioning once again.
Another super-addictive food I’ve had today was wild strawberries. I’m a wild strawberry maniac. Their scent, one of Nature’s sweetest and daintiest perfumes, makes me tremble. Unfortunately these tiny gems are quite expensive, so I don’t think I’ll have more wild strawberries this year… we’ll see. Perhaps it would be a sacrilege to, say, bake with them, but I’d love to try. I’ve had those delicious wild strawberry and cottage cheese tarts at a French bakery near my office, and they were oh so good!
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That’s amazing how quickly I’ve turned into a true, obsessive foodie. It’s also interesting how I manage to turn almost every conversation to food. For a lot of people, cooking and eating is just a part of daily routine, so I try not to be annoying, but somehow I always find myself discussing a new recipe, or a rare kind of spice, or a favourite dish.
Today as I visited my Granny, I managed to restrain my „foodie bug” for exactly 2 hours but then I finally asked Granny to show me her recipe notebook :) I borrowed the notebook from her for a couple of weeks. It’s packed with proven, time-tested recipes. I’m especially drooling over those potato recipes, like home-made potato chips.
I can’t wait for the next weekend when I’ll be able to try some of Granny’s best recipes. I won’t be cooking next Friday night though, because we’re going to see The Nutcracker. It’s a beautiful show, an absolute must-see for anyone who is new to ballet and classical music. I can’t wait!
And here’s a recipe for mushroom and rice balls that we made this weekend. They pair nicely with a sour cream sauce that we adapted from an old Polish cookbook. The sour and milky flavour blends perfectly with the freshness of dill leaves, and the creamy texture is just what we wanted.
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One of the distinctive features of traditional Russian cuisine is that it was very filling. It involved a lot of pastry, dairy products, cereals, bread, and so on. Fruit were mostly represented by apples, plums, cherries, sweet cherries, cherry plums and the likes. As for vegetables, mostly root vegetables like potatoes, turnips, and beetroots were used for cooking. There’re also strong traditions of fasting in the Russian Orthodox Church - you were not allowed to eat meat or fish under several periods of the year, including the very restrictive Lent. My Grandmother also says that in the countryside, meat hardly appeared on the table in summertime.
So, good substitutes for meat were pies. And the fillings for those pies were… quite filling:) Potatoes, eggs, rice, or buckwheat in a pie?! This definitely does seem too heavy nowadays, but people did a lot of physical work back then and they needed heavy meals. Besides, they didn’t have all those addictive snacks that we nibble throughout the day.
I’m convinced that a lot of those recipes can be adapted to modern tastes and lifestyles. And I’m sure they are worth it. For example, I love the Potato and Mushroom pie which we made this weekend. It’s comforting and rustic in a nice way. It has a layer of sliced jacket potatoes, fried onions, and champignons, all topped with sour cream and egg. Finally, add some fresh parsley, which brings you the essential daily dose of vitamins. Mm?
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As soon as I saw Baby Portabella & Mozzarella on Mini Toasts at Sunny-side Up Recipes, I knew I would be making these. The recipe seemed perfect: golden-brown mini toasts topped with melting mozzarella and mushrooms sautéed in rose wine, seasoned with Italian herbs… just perfect! I really wanted to share this treat with somebody, so when Grandmother said she was going to visit us, I know what we’d offer her as an appetizer ;-)
Of course I had to alter Sunny’s ingredient list a little bit – for example, I couldn’t find any Portabella mushrooms, so I took plain champignons. The bread slices I used were bigger in size (I wish they sold such mini-toasts here!), and I removed the crust as it seemed to be too coarse for such a delicate dish. But the bread was really flavourful and I even ate almost all of the crusts while cooking, hehe. Read the rest of this entry »
Blini, or pancakes, are an essential feature of Russian cuisine. Served with melted butter, sour cream, berry jam, honey, or the most luxurious option - caviar, they are made and eaten in gigantic batches during the Maslenitsa week that precedes the Lent. But they are as well eaten all year round – sweet or savoury toppings and fillings change with the seasons. For me, Blini symbolize all the warmth and coziness of home, and I love to cook some pancakes filled with cottage cheese and vanilla for a late Sunday breakfast as a sort of morning meditation.
This time, Mom made Blini with two different fillings: beef and chanterelles. I didn’t take part in making these, so I’ll just write about her method. But be warned: this is quite a time-consuming recipe, as you have to boil the rice, and fry the mushrooms, and of course cook the pancakes. Making pancakes in two skillets at a time is a nice idea therefore.
Let me also remind you that every cook has their own recipe for pancakes. So we’re not calling this recipe anything like “True Russian Blini”, “The One and Only Recipe for Russian Blini” or anything like that – this is just one of dozens of possible options.
Please note that the recipe suggests a choice between beef and chanterelle filling for 12 pancakes, meaning you will need to make 24 pancakes to try both fillings. The more pancakes you make however, the easier it is to calculate the right amount of filling, especially rice. Alternatively, you might use some leftover boiled rice from another meal.
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