Tag Archives: dinner

Roast quail for St.Valentine Day

Quail may be tiny birds but they pack a real flavor punch. Perfect for Valentine’s Day meal.

There’s something adorable about presenting your Valentine with their own whole bird. The easiest way (and messy) to eat a small quails is with your fingers 🙂 or you can carve it as turkey.

(Click on the photo to see it in a larger size)

Serve one quail per person as a starter or two as a main course.

Ingredients

4 whole quails

4 medium potatoes

2 carrots

2 medium onions

1 small bunch thyme

6-8 juniper berries

2 tbsp runny honey

2+2 tbsp olive oil

salt, pepper

Method

If you’ve got frozen quail, defrost it overnight in the refrigerator.
Take the quail out of the fridge 1 hour before cooking. Wipe the outside of the bird and inside the cavity, using kitchen paper.
Season inside with salt&pepper, put in sprig of thyme and one juniper berry. Tie the legs together with string (optionally).
Season birds with salt&pepper and thyme, brush with honey and 2 tbsp olive oil.
Preheat oven to 200C. Put thinly sliced potatoes, carrots, onions, thyme and juniper berries into a roasting tin. Sprinkle with salt&pepper, drizzle with olive oil. Cook for 15-20 minutes.
Sit the quail on top and roast for 25 minutes more.

Enjoy!

Slow-cooked beef with fruits

In Russian language, we have one word “tomlenie”, which is similar to the word “stewing”, but has a significant distinction. Tomlenie is a slow-cooking process of meat, fish or vegetables in Russian petch (oven/stove, have a look at the pictures of traditional Russian petch here and here).

Nowadays traditional Russian ovens can be found only in out-of-the-way places (villages and provinces, located in the remotest depths of the country).

It’s considered that, slow-cooking in the common oven is close to the “tomlenie” process, but the real taste and aroma of dishes prepared in Russian petch unfortunately couldn’t be done anywhere else.

Let’s try to prepare the closest dish.

First of all, we need a clay pot with a lid.

Be patient! Stewing will take several hours.

Don’t worry! During this time you don’t need to check or mix the dish every 10-20 minutes, thus you can have a break and watch your favorite movie, and even prepare a side dish. 🙂

Beef with fruits

Difficulty: easy
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If you don’t have clay pot-use casserole.

If you don’t have a lid -cover the pot with foil.

Replace cherries with cranberries.

Omit the sugar.

Spice the meat with 1/3 tsp of crushed cardamom, it brings a nice interesting note.

You can add 2-3 tbsp of dry red wine for the better taste (after the frying meat).

Ingredients to feed 4 people:

Beef, cut into 2-3cm cubes – 700g/1lb

Golden onion – 1 big, sliced

Pitted prunes – 150g/5 oz

Cherry fresh or frozen – 150g/5 oz

Sunflower or olive oil for frying- 1 tbsp

Cinnamon – 1/2 tsp

Sugar – 1 tbsp

Bay leaves – 2

Whole black peppercorns – 8-10

Salt, pepper – to taste

some parsley, chopped

Method:

Heat the oil in a frying pan and fry the onion for 5-7 minutes, add beef cubes and fry until slightly browned.
Sprinkle the meat with sugar and cinnamon.
Put the meat in a clay pot, add boiling water (just to cover the meat), bay leaves and peppercorns. Season with salt and pepper.
Don’t forget to close the pot with a lid! 🙂
Transfer to a preheated oven, 200C/400F, for 2 hours.
Check the quantity of the liquid, and add some more water – if desired (the meat always should be in the broth).
Reduce temperature to 180C/380F and return to the oven for a further 1 hour.
Add prunes and cherries (no need to defrost), check the seasoning and return again to the oven for 30 minutes.
Switch the oven off and leave the pot in it (until the oven is still warm).
Sprinkle with fresh parsley.

The good garnish to such meat is a buckwheat porridge, mashed or boiled potatoes. It could be served with broth; in a clay pot or on a serving plate.

Enjoy the holiday dinner! 🙂

Russian kasha

Kasha means porridge. One Russian proverb says “Bread and Porridge is our food”. A pot with a porridge and bread were the main food on a table many years back. A large varieties of cereals are produced in Russia, but the popular and loved one has been the buckweat.

According to old Russian tradition, during the wedding a bridegroom and a bride had to cook a porridge together. If they could cooked a good, tasty porridge that meant they could get on with each other. A porridge was cooked for many occasions like a wedding or Christmas feast, birth or funeral repast. Sometimes a feast was called ‘kasha’. Every hostess had a personal recipe of porridge, which she kept in a secret.

In Russian cuisine a porridge is divided into 3 groups by it’s consistency: liquid (eaten as a soup), oozy (usually for children) and crumbly (the tastiest one). The consistency depends on a quantity of water or milk, in which porridge was cooked.

Millet porridge with butter or lard added was the common meal for Russian labors, who had worked in fields. It’s can be eaten sweet (with sugar, honey, dried fruits) or savoury (with onion, garlic, mushrooms), as a main dish or garnish.

Moreover, millet is rich in calcium, B vitamins, iron, potassium, and contain no gluten.

We need:

pumpkin
millet – 1 cup
water – 1/2 cup
milk – 1 cup
a knob of butter
few dried apricots
raisins
sugar – 1Tbsp
a pinch of salt

Take a pumpkin.

Cut the lid and set aside. Clean all seeds out.

Put a knob of butter on the pumpkin bottom.

Wash millet thoroughly under running tab water. Mix with raisins and sliced dried apricots.

Put the cereal mixture in the pumpkin. Add a pinch of salt and some sugar to taste. Pour the milk and water, cover with the lid.

Bake for 1-2 hours.

Open the lid.

Tasty millet porridge in pumpkin pot is ready!

Serve with honey.

P.S. For 1 cup millet take 1 cup milk+1/2 cup water. Sub millet with rice.

P.P.S. Don’t throw away seeds. Sprinkle over some sea salt and smoked paprika. Add olive oil and bake on a baking paper along with the pumpkin.

Purple peppers and chickpeas!

August 29, 2013
milkandbun
3 comments
beautiful, bell pepper, blog, Blogging, capsicum, chickpea, cooking, dinner, feta, food, food photo, fresh, healthy, healthy eating, lunch, My Life, photography, photos, recipe, recipes, salad, yummy

This summer I’ve been making lots of salads.

It’s still extremely hot in Dubai and one more salad has been done:)

I found these beautiful capsicums at a store, grown by farmers in the Netherlands. They’re absolutely marvellous, aren’t they?

Never seen such deep purple, blackish color of bell peppers. 🙂 They are green inside and have got the same taste as green ones.

So, about the salad. One of the main ingredients are capsicums, as you could guess 😉

I promise, the salad won’t leave you hungry. Chickpeas in it are high in protein! Usually I make it ahead (before fitness class, for example, after I’m so hungry!) so it has plenty of time to marinate.

We need:

1 can chickpeas (drained)
2 big capsicums
100 g feta cheese
juice of ½ lemon + zest of ¼ lemon
extra virgin olive oil (for frying and dressing)
2-3 sprigs of fresh thyme (or dried one is good as well)
1 tsp cumin
fresh mint or/and parsley

Heat the olive oil with thyme and cumin just for 1 minute, add shredded capsicums, toss and stir-fry until they become soft. My purple peppers turned into greenish color 😀

In a large bowl, combine chickpeas, capsicums, feta cheese and lemon zest. Toss to combine. Pour 2 tbsp olive olive and lemon juice over the mixture.

Add some fresh mint and parsley; season to taste with grounded black pepper.

You can serve it immediately, but I heartily recommend to leave it for 30-60 minutes to marinate.

Enjoy!

Russian cold soup-Sveckolnik

Sveckolnik [sve’koljnik] – Russian summer cold soup, which goes really well during the summer heat. The name comes from the word “sveckla”, which denotes beetroot.

When AC and even hundreds of ice cream don’t help you against hot, this light soup refreshes and cools you.

The main ingredient is a raw beetroot, it’s high in vitamins, minerals and fiber that can effect the digestive system in a positive ways.

Raw beets are one of the top vegetables for nutritious raw eating, according to Bastyr University.

You can include this light soup in your balanced diet and it takes only few minutes to prepare it.

Ingredients:

beetroot – 2 small

cucumbers – 3-4

eggs – 1-2 per plate

a bunch of spring onion

a small bunch of dill

1 garlic clove

buttermilk 400 ml

water 200 ml

salt, sugar to taste

sour cream (optional)

Better to choose small young beets. And you can substitute raw beets with boiled, if you like.

Shred beets and cucumbers, put them in a deep plate.

Boil eggs for 10 minutes, let cool and cut them into chunks.

Slice green onions, put it in a cup and add some salt. With teaspoon begin to grind the salt into onions.

Add crushed garlic and mix.

Combine together beets, cucumbers, eggs, onions and dill. Add a pinch of sugar.

For the liquid part buttermilk is mixed with cold drinking water, the volume and thickness of it totally depends on your taste.

If you can find “salted lassi” (yougurt drink)-use it, no need to dilute with water; in Arabian countries it’s called “laban up”, in Russia – “tan”, “sivorotka” .

Pour the buttermilk over dry ingredients and mix well. Sprinkle some dill.