In a winter like this…
…can there be anything more soothing and comforting than a bowl of warm soup? For me, those creamy blended vegetable soups are the best; but if you like poultry – what about some translucent chicken broth with petite dumplings and tender carrots? To make the broth as clear and healthy as possible, we quickly boiled chicken in some water first and poured off that water.
Make this soup immediately before meals and do not leave it overnight: flour from dumplings would diffuse into broth and make it cloudy.
(Below you will also find some more winter pictures that Mom took from the window today. We always feed sparrows in wintertime, and only when it gets really cold, the cautious blackbirds visit us too).
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Russian Vinegret is a type of salad made with beets, potatoes, carrots, pickles and onions. The word derives from the French vinaigrette. This might be because a typical Russian salad dressing is made with sour cream, while for Vinegret you use vegetable oil (which relates to vinaigrette). This is just my guess, however.
Like anything containing beets and root vegetables in general, Vinegret is a healthy salad. It’s also very easy to prepare, but of course you’ll have to be patient about boiling beets. Or, you can find packaged boiled beets in the supermarket.
Vinegret goes along perfectly with salted or smoked salmon.
An important note is to combine the vegetables right before you serve your Vinegret, and toss the beets with oil first. This will prevent beets from staining the other veggies. Potatoes turn red almost immediately anyway, but at least carrots, onions, and pickles will be saved. So be sure to cool your vegetables well before you dice and mix them together.
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Cream soup is a balsam to the palate – soothingly soft and silky, it’s usually packed with well-preserved vitamins – be it made of spinach, root vegetables or seafood. One of my favourite kinds of cream soup is sweetcorn soup with crabs. It’s sweet and very, very creamy.
But the soup we are going to talk about today is no less delicious or healthy than that made of sweetcorn. Just take that beta-carotene-loaded pumpkin and carrot, the vitamin K-packed white turnip and parsley root, kick in some vitamin C from the red paprika, finally add some iron and vitamin B6 from the potato, and potassium from the zucchini. Doesn’t this sound wonderful?
Another thing we love about root vegetable soup is that it’s very versatile ingredient-wise. You can actually use any kind of your favourite root vegetables: for example, why not try sweet potatoes in place of plain potatoes? Or experiment with the garnish: this time we served the soup with croutons, thyme and fresh chili, but it can be just as good with black olives, fresh dill, grated Parmesan, or even pine nuts.
I wouldn’t have said cream soups are very typical for Russian/Slavic cuisine, but vegetables like potatoes, white turnip, carrots and parsley definitely are very popular ingredients in Eastern European cooking.
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Stuffed Peppers is one of those old good recipes which we adapted from a kind of family relic – a gorgeous Romanian cookbook. It’s packed with irresistible recipes of fruit pies, berry pastes and jams, sweetcorn&cheese casseroles, and other meals I drool over. Of course it also includes a variety of poultry and meat recipes – not as exciting for me, yet useful.
While stuffed peppers are a basically simple dish to prepare, this might be pretty time-consuming as you’ve got to prepare all vegetables separately - and also spend some time seeding and stuffing the peppers, of course. But it is definitely worth the wait – also because you can store the peppers in fridge for 2-3 days no problem.
One of the key points here is to blanch the peppers before stuffing them, as a couple of minutes in boiling water makes them much more elastic. It’s also important to choose peppers that are not too thick and fleshy, otherwise you will feel like “hmm there seems to be too much sweet pepper in this dish!”. On the other hand, they should not be very thin, as thin peppers are easy to overcook, especially if you’re going to reheat them afterwards (I accept no microwaved food, just in case).
Everything else is really simple. In this post, we’ll tell you our method of cooking stuffed peppers in two variations: with and without meat. The vegetarian version is for me and it uses eggplant instead of meat.
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We baked this delicious, summery cake for Mom’s birthday just the other day.
A luscious raspberry filling resting on a buttery sweetcrust base and topped with a layer of airy, delicate whipped egg whites, covered with tiny drops of sugar syrup. Those amber-coloured drops appear if you leave the cake overnight; you don’t have to apply them specially, just in case you were wondering:) Just because when people first see this cake they’re mostly interested in how we make these drops of sugar for decoration.
Actually, if you look at the list of ingredients, you will see that it’s very simple.
I have to warn you however, that when you bake this cake, the hardest part is not to eat it all in the process of cooking. Personally I can never restrain myself from having a bit of raw home-made shortcrust pastry again and again while I am busy with other ingredients. Then, the egg whites; whipped with caster sugar and vanilla, they could serve as a standalone dessert, I believe. And of course the sugared raspberries – so ripe and enjoyable. So I am sincerely happy for you if you don’t like raw sweetcrust pastry or whipped egg whites. At least you’ll be able to wait patiently till the cake is ready. I can’t.
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Everybody in our family loves risotto, which we make with or without mushrooms, adding zucchini and white wine. Aww that creamy, tender texture of risotto rice, saturated in olive oil and Parmesan cheese. And yes, we know this is not at all a Russian dish :)
But, sometimes you just don’t have all the necessary risotto components at hand. For example, this time we didn’t have any Arborio rice or Parmesan cheese. So, we decided to cook white rice with vegetables and mushroom stock instead. And it tasted good! The flavourful mushroom stock paired perfectly with eggplants. And fried carrots lent a cheerful warm colour to rice. The day was saved!
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