Chanterelles are mushrooms which I simply can’t pass in the shop, even though they are seasonal or maybe because of that.
It is my shame, but I don’t know any way to prepare them other than this stew with veal and peas, but it sure tastes great!
You can substitute beef for veal, just increase cooking time to ensure meat is soft enough. You can also substitute white dry wine for water, if you feel like this.
Gentle tomato soup with rice filling garnished with freshly chopped basil is a russian variant of tomato-basil soup.
It is beef broth based and if you want to make it more tomaty and thick, reduce amount of water you use for broth and increase amount of tomatoes.
I’ve garnished soup with basil even though it isn’t very widespread in Russia, but it gives a nice kick to flavor of this soup. After all basil and tomatoes are the combination which can never taste wrong.
This soup doesn’t include any meat, it is based on mushrooms and have vegetables (carrot, parsley and celery roots, potato) as well as pearl barley.
Such kind of mushroom soup is very popular in Russia. Various kind of mushrooms can be used in this recipe, but I must say fresh or frozen porcini are the best tasting ones, if you can find them, of course.
If you are not trying to follow Great Lent rules – my advise is don’t skip on sour cream, 1 tablespoon of sour cream to the bowl of mushroom soup not only adds nutrients, but also gives the soup its unique rich taste.
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.
Okroshka is traditional russian cold soup. It is perfect meal for hot summer weather as it is prepared on the base of kvass – russian bread drink – and it is light and very refreshing.
Finding good fresh kvass for okroshka can be challenging outside of former-USSR. You may try russian or ukrainian shop, or, of course, you can prepare kvass yourself. But If you are not lucky with any of these, you can also replace kvass with mineral water, kefir diluted with boiled cold water or even light beer.
Eating soups is healthy, let’s make it also tasty!
Homemade beef broth, a lot of vegetables and meatballs, sounds good for me, what about you?
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.
