Layered Liver Cake

Layered liver cake, dish of traditional Ukrainian cuisine, is often served as appetizer on various celebrations, in fact I tried it first time on a wedding.

For this recipe I used chicken liver, but beef liver will work good as well.

Carrots and onions stuffing can be skipped all together - it will decrease cooking time and reduce amount of mayo to be used (since layers will not need that much mayo to stick together). However carrots go great with liver.

How many layers you get from this amount of ingredients depends on the size of the frying pan you use. I think 11” frying pan is the best - not too big not too small. The ideal amount of layers for this recipe is about 12; if you get more split them in half and assemble 2 cakes.

Celery Root Salad with Apples and Eggs

Knowing me you can probably guess that this tender slaw-like salad made of grated fresh celery root, apples and chopped egg is dressed with mayo.

By the way, celery root here is hardly recognizable: it has nutty taste and (if you are not used to it) tastes nothing like celery stalks, maybe because of apples.

I would define this taste as unusual; if you stumble upon fresh celery root in a store - give it a try, after all celery is known as low-calorie source of dietary fiber.

Tomatoes Stuffed with Fresh Cheese Recipe

These campari tomatoes stuffed with fresh quark cheese, chopped greens and garlic can be nice addition to any celebration table or a cookout: they look festive, taste good and can be easily eaten with fingers.

If you can’t find quark cheese (sometimes called farmers cheese, or fresh white cheese, or tvorog in russian) it may work with feta cheese, but I like it more with quark.

Seeds and pulp from tomatoes as well as top parts - once removed - are not needed for this recipe. You can discard them, or use in some other dish.

Many kind of stews and soups would only benefit from fresh tomatoes. I used seeds and juice from this batch to marinate a nice ribeye steak.

Crab Sticks Salad with Napa and Cucumber

It is time for summer cookouts yet? I bet it is! Who said cookouts should be all meat and bread - add a bit of vegetables and crab sticks :)

Napa gives this salad tender filling; however you can substitute white cabbage for napa - it will work fine, just remember to tenderize shredded cabbage with your hands.

If you use frozen crab sticks, make sure they unfreeze completely and all extra liquid is removed before adding them to the salad.

Georgian Fried Lamb Dumplings (Chebureki)

This is traditional Georgian recipe (and I mean Georgia as a country, not the state). It takes a bit of time and inspiration to cook, but it totally worth it.

Even though it is time consuming, with a bit of organization it can be a fun activity to do for whole family together.

I never been a big fan of lamb meat, but these dumplings taste the best made of it. However you can always substitute equal amount of beef and pork mix for lamb meat.

Ukrainian Tomato and Cucumber Salad with Sour Cream Dressing

This simple salad with tomatoes and cucumbers is very popular in Ukraine, and I don't see any reasons why it wouldn't be liked in any other country which grows tomatoes, cucumbers, dill and sour cream with onions and garlic.

As opposite to summer salad with tomato and cucumbers with vegetable oil based dressing, this one uses sour cream and mayonnaise.

If you are trying to cut on calories – use mix of sour cream and low calorie yoghurt, or just yoghurt as a base for dressing, but, believe me, this salad tastes the best with real sour cream.

Cheese Balls Appetizer

Cheese, clove of garlic, a bit of mayo, shredded coconut and about 20 mins of time it is all you need to prepare cheese balls appetizer.

Cheese goes great with wine. So cheese balls are great for wine tasting or wine party.

Cheese balls are finger food and can be served as is or on crackers.

Cabbage and Chicken Salad

I love cabbage. It is available in the stores whole year, and it somehow manages to preserve such important nutrient as vitamin C (and some others) till late winter. This makes cabbage a good choice of food when your body particularly needs more vitamins.

I consider this a winter salad: cabbage is available any time in the store, as well as chicken and cheese; but it will also taste great when prepared from fresh young cabbage, which is much softer and more juicier.

Additionally, I usually season this salad with dry bread cubes right before serving. I prepare them myself from leftover bread: just dice it and dry in the oven (can't call them croutons, as they don't have any seasoning or oil added in the process of preparation). But I guess you can use croutons from the shop instead or skip this part all together.

Beet Salad with Prunes and Walnuts

Beet salad with prunes, walnuts and onions dressed up with mayo or sour cream or both is one of the traditional salads of ukrainian cuisine.

Also, this dish is one of the not many dishes which uses beets as a main ingredient.

It is very important to use sweet and rich red color beets for this salad. So, when buying beets scratch their skin with a nail: dark red pulp under skin is a sign of good beet, not pink and not white.

It is also important to use good quality walnuts; taste before you buy them: old walnuts can be bitter and using such will make you salad taste bitter as well.

Cauliflower Pancakes

This is my recipe in support of Faina's with Cucee Sprouts cauliholic addiction. I hope you will like it :)

Yet another vegetable pancakes recipe. These are usually healthier choice: they contain much less flour (comparing to usually flour-based pancakes) - batter mostly consist of vegetable goodness and, of course, a bit of eggs :)

I love cauliflower in any of its appearance, and I consider cauliflower pancakes to be one of the easiest and fun ways to cook it.

Salad Dnister (Cabbage, Peas and Sausage)

Salad Dnister (just like a river) is a popular in West Ukraine dish originated in Carpathian mountains region, and made its way to other places as it is easy, not expensive and fast to do and very tasty.

Main ingredient of this salad is shredded cabbage, so you can consider it to be a coleslaw with a sausage and peas dressed with mayonnaise.

A bit of a challenge here would be to find suitable sausage. The closest translation to the kind of sausage you need I could come up with is “half-smoked summer sausage”, however I am pretty sure that sounds weird in english, and if you know how to call it better – please let me know. Krakowska or Ternopil'ska sausage will work here, if you can find any of those in Ukrainian or European shop.

Chicken Salad with Celery and Grapes

I never tried fresh celery stems before we got to US. I was more familiar with celery root – it is largely used to prepare soups and stew or even salads of European cousines, but I can't say eating stem parts of it is as popular in Europe as in US.

According to wikipedia, celery is a source of good low-calorie dietary fibre, which makes it not only tasty (btw I found taste of it fascinating) and also healthy.

Saying all of that, here comes the nice salad recipe for fresh celery stems and boiled white chicken meat; grapes give it a little kick in flavor, as well as almonds. Hope you will like it.

Cabbage and Cucumber Salad

This is one of my favorite salads for fresh young cabbage – fast made slaw with eggs and cucumbers seasoned with fresh dill and mayo to taste.

Usually I take small white head cabbage or a half of it, however it will be the same good with red cabbage (the color will look interesting in this case too :) ) or napa.

Don't forget to cool down hard boiled eggs before adding them to the salad – it is not recommended to mix fresh vegetables with hot ingredients.

Ketchup and Mayonnaise Mix Sauce

This is the easiest recipe for simple cocktail sauce which makes a great addition to boiled shrimps, or fried meat or chicken main dishes. I even serve it as a side sauce for russian meat dumplings (pelmeni).

You can vary amount of each ingredient to taste: if you like ketchup taste more – add less mayonnaise; add more garlic if you want to make sauce more spicy; also fresh parsley can be replaced with cilantro.

Beef Roast under Cheese and Onion

That is probably one of my favorite dinner recipes: slices of beef roast under mayonnaise, shredded mozzarella and onions, and it is very easy to cook.

You can make steps 1-7 some time in advance, then put meat into the fridge and continue later; just get meat to the preheated oven about 1 hour before you are going to serve it. That comes extremely handy when you need to get a lot of other things taken care of right before the dinner.

Some dry red wine is a nice addition to this dish, especially if the dinner is going to get romantic.

Eggplant Rolls

I don't have much to say about this recipe, it mostly says for itself: eggplants and tomatoes - main ingredients – are good combination and garlic doesn't make it any worse.

This recipe isn't much hassle to prepare and ingredients don't cost much; so you can easy get to advised 5 servings of vegetables per day and even enjoy it.

Eggplant rolls taste better while fresh, so prepare them right before serving.

Mimosa Salad

Mimosa, as a fish layered salad, is very popular in all countries of ex-USSR. As well as Herring Under Fur Coat and Salad Olivier, Salad Mimosa finds its place on the table for big holiday celebrations, such as New Year, Christmas, birthdays and others.

It is easy and fun to cook, and due to the layered structure of the salad it should be prepared several hours in advance before serving to allow layers to soak. So the good idea would be to assemble the salad a night before you are going to put it on the table.

By the way this salad name – Mimosa – comes from the bright yellow color and a texture of its last layer which looks very similar to the yellow blossoms of the plant called “mimosa” in Russia.

Chicken with Pineapple Salad

This is one of my favorite chicken salads, you can also call it potato salad or salad with chicken, pineapple and potato. Whatever you call it, it is still delicious. After all, chicken and pineapples are a good combination.

I also found what fire roasted marinated bell peppers are good substitute for the home pickled ones in this salad, and good thing is: those you can actually find in the nearby shop. But you can also use homemade ones if you've got some.

I hope you will enjoy this tasty chicken salad as much as I did yesterday.

Baked Spicy Chicken

It is chicken time! And I think, one of the easiest ways to prepare various parts of chicken (or even chicken in a whole!) is to bake them with some spices.

Baked Spicy Chicken dish is great for the dinner: its cooking doesn't require much of attention, which gives you time to take care of other important things :). However you will need to start cooking it in advance to let chicken soak in the sauce.

So let's mix up some spices, garlic, mayonnaise, pour it over the chicken and bake it all together.

Napa Slaw with Eggs (Cabbage Salad)

You can take any kind of cabbage for this salad, however I prefer napa cabbage (one of variants of Chinese cabbage), as it is more soft and tasteful.

In general this salad is easy to make (as I think any slaw is), very fast to do and of course is nutritious: napa cabbage is rich on vitamin A/Carotene and vitamin C.

If you use napa cabbage, don't make more salad than you will eat for one meal, napa cabbage salads are best to be eaten fresh and loose taste after stored in fridge.

Herring Under Fur Coat (Herring Salad) Recipe

To prepare russian herring salad, “Herring Under Fur Coat”, you need to have whole salted herring. And of course you need to know how to fillet it, so read this post if you don't.

Herring Under Fur Coat is a word-to-word translation of russian name of this salad: “Seledka pod Shuboj”, which represents salted herring under a “coat” of boiled vegetables. So, as you've probably guessed, you will also need boiled vegetables (potatoes, carrots and beats) and green onions. In the rest this is 5-layers salad with a lot of mayonnaise.

This salad requires some time and agility to assemble it, also it needs at least 12 hours for layers to soak after it is assembled. So make sure you have enough time if you decide to make it.

Radish and Soft Cheese Salad

Radish and Fresh Cheese Salad is a tasty way to feed yourself and your family a bit of calcium :)

I did have some troubles finding a suitable fresh cheese for this recipe, it should be fresh white quark (russian: tvorog), neither cottage cheese nor cream cheese will work here.

So if you have the same problem finding quark style fresh cheese like I had, try local Russian / Ukrainian / Polish store, most probably they have it. Of course, you can also make homemade soft cheese yourself, but guess I am too lazy for this, who isn't?..

Egg & Ham Salad

One more option for your everyday food. Healthy and tasty, and easy to make salad.

Egg & Ham Salad is perfect for breakfast or midday break food as it doesn't contain onions.

Russian Salad (Olivier)

Usually people outside of former-USSR call it Russian Salad, however its original name is Salad Olivier.

This salad was and maybe still is the most traditional dish for the home New Year celebration for russian people.

Ham Rolls With Carrot Stuffing

Got people coming over in a 20 mins and got nothing to bite? Make a ham rolls stuffed with fresh carrot & garlic salad.

Easy and fast! Tastes better when accompanied by beer and TV.

Fresh Carrots & Garlic Salad

And again carrots with a lot of vitamin A and carotene. The best way to keep those nutrients from “dying” while cooking is to eat them fresh. And garlic can't spoil it anyhow.

Enjoy Fresh Carrots & Garlic Salad as an healthy addition to your meat meals.

Crab Sticks & Rice Salad

Everybody who tried my crab stick salad fell in love with it after first bite. Now I have no problems deciding what to bring to the party.

This salad is easy and fast to do and the taste is just great. Try it, you will like it!