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!***

Anniversary Friday moments

   This weekend has been a long one. Me and D both don't feel like going to work. It was so lovely time together, we used to go out and stay at home, enjoying lazy moments :) It is good to work too but to rest is not bad as well :P
   In spite of having no work these days I got busy with some home deals, and on the day of our anniversary I prepared lunch and baked a mango cake! Yea, I am trying to be a homely wife and learn some new recipes.
   So lunch I made was a dish I picked from my Mum. She likes to make it at dacha. It is very easy and tasty! The recipe is here.

  The mango season over here now, so why not to use this delicious fruit for baking when it is easily available in any market. I got  the recipe from this blog post in the internet (where else?:)) Mango cake was tasty, but it took too much time for an oven I use to bake it properly.

  Anniversary day was so pleasant and had surprise for me as well when my husband gifted me flowers and a card with congratulations. I clicked the pictures of the flowers the next day (sorry). These gladioli are so lovely:

 My husband, me and my in-laws spent Friday evening in the Chinese restaurant where we all  tried a Chinese sizzler for the first time. I took the picture just moments  before they started serving it. There was such mixture of vegetables in it plus chicken, fish and noodles! Worth trying if you crave for some tasty exotic food.

   The Friday went on good and smooth as it was supposed to :) There were tasty, beautiful and cozy moments. We had a very nice celebration and now heading towards the next year when our relations would be three years strong!

                          *** Have a great week ahead and have more memorable moments in your life***

Recipe 1.Delight for a "hungry lion"

 This is a delicious story of our yesterday homemade dinner. We don't have a microwave yet, as well as an oven, but we have an electric oven and things come out tasty when prepared in it. So, I experimented as usual. 

 Ingredients needed for this dish are available in indian markets, you just have to find them. 

Main products:
Chicken (chest and leg) - 1 kg
Potato                        - 4 items of a medium size
Onion                         - 3-4 items of a medium size

For marinade:
1-2 tomatoes
1 lemon (indian small lemon, size of a lime)

2 garlic cloves
salt to your taste (better not to make marinade too salty)
spices - such as black pepper and any kind of herbs you can get in the market

 The main flavor of the marinade will be given from garlic and lemon with tomatoes.
When I made this marinade  and smelled it I already knew dinner was going to be yummy!!!
Preparation won't take much time as long as you are passionate about delicious food yourself and want to please your hungry lion - husband :)
 Wash chicken pieces very well  and let water flow off it, you can even squeeze pieces a bit to remove spare liquid. It will prevent chicken being steamed rather than baked.

  Take a bowl, put chicken in it. Cut tomatoes into small pieces. Garlic has to be cut as tiny as possible. Add tomato and garlic to chicken. Cut lemon into two halves and squeeze juice out of it in the bowl with chicken. Add salt, spices to your taste. Mix chicken in the bowl with all added ingredients and let it stay covered for at least 30 min.

  While chicken is being marinated you can prepare potato and onion. Here you can let yourself create: cut potato round or like for french fries, or may be make small squares. Make sure pieces will be thin enough to be cooked in the oven. Same with onion. 

  Oh, time has passed like a shot! Our chicken is very well marinated and we can start cooking itself. I adjusted the temperature on our home electric oven at the maximum 220. But you can cook even at 200 degrees.

  Put marinated chicken in the form (mine was made from aluminum), arrange pieces so that all of them will be cooked well. Spread cut potato and then onion on the top. Put a bit of salt, some spices to give vegetables better taste. There was a small piece of mozzarella left in our fridge - I used it too by rasping on the top.

  Now you have to keep the form with chicken in the oven, cover it and count the time. Approximately 30-40 min. 

 You can also check the readiness of your dish from time to time by piercing chicken with a toothpick. My mum does

like this.

 When dish is ready you will see it. Sprinkle a pinch of oregano before serving.

 My hungry lion was happy and grateful! "Grrrrr" turned to "Mrrrrr" :)

    P.S.  We have this kind of an oven . It was popular during Soviet Union and was called "chudopechka" (чудопечка) literally "miracle oven".