Cooking The Crescents

  I don't share much of recipes in my blog, but this time I would like to do it, because besides being the first  proper Russian dish I tried to make in India, it is also the first time I made it myself (as I used to make it always with my Mom before). The dish is called Vareniks (Vareniki) and it consists of two parts: dough and stuffing. Vareniks are to be made in a crescent shape, what I like a lot :)  If you ever try to make them, let me know the result, please :) I am sure you would love it!

Indian wheat flour is called maida

Dough ingredients:

1 kg of wheat flour (Indian maida)
1 tsp salt

1, 5 glass of water (glass = 250 ml)

Dough preparation: put dough into a large bowl, add salt and pour water. Start mixing dough and water together, knead dough until it becomes viscous and you can make a ball out of it. Keep in the fridge for at least 20 minutes in the same bowl. 

                                                                          Stuffing ingredients:                                                        8 middle sized potatoes

3 middle sized onions

salt to your taste

spices and herbs to your taste

 Stuffing preparation:

 Boil jacket potatoes. Let them cool and peel of the skin. Put them in the bowl and mash well. Cut onion into small squares. Pour cooking oil on a pan, let it to heat up a bit and then put onion on it and fry until onion  becomes a little golden, add a pinch of salt, parsley,oregano and red pepper, mix. Add onion mixture to mashed potato. Mix the stuffing well.

Shaping up Vareniki.
  This is going to be a little challenging part of cooking, but good shape of the dish comes with experience.

Take your dough from the fridge, cut a piece of it and roll in a "sausage". Cut the "dough sausage" into equal pieces. Now you have to roll each piece into small circles.

 Where is your stuffing? Take one dough circle and put a small amount of stuffing on it with the fork (or spoon if you wish). Now... start closing the circle from left to the right, make sure the edges stuck to each other. So you will have to have a crescent shaped varenik in the end.

  Find a tray or a wide dish, sprinkle it with flour and lay out the "crescents" onto it one by one.Do the same till your stuffing finishes.
 Boil water in a stewpot and put 10 vareniks into it, boil them until they start floating on the surface, boil for more 5 min and take out, put into a bowl, add a piece of butter so they won't stick. Serve hot. You can eat vareniks with any sauce, but they will taste better with sour cream :) Yumm.

   To have a complete Russian style meal, prepare a Summer salad with tomatoes, cucumbers, onion, pinch of salt and herbs and a tsp of olive oil. Mix well.

***Have a nice day and enjoy your meals!***