Sandwich "No, zombie, no, eat my food and take my women but don't you dare to lay a finger on me!"

Imagine, it's kind of summer and you are hungry. Not so hungry to have something serious but still it's bad enough. Now, imagine, you accidentally have an avocado and maybe a piece of salmon. Does this ring a bell? Right (or no-no-no, wrong, how could you think of that!), it's a sandwich time! What our life would be without sandwiches? A fainting pathetic parody on itself! So, remove the peel from avocado (it's easy if you use a tablespoon), add a bit of salt and lemon juice or concentrate to it and turn it into a greenish mass as if you were trying to come up with how to mimic the alien brain in a B-movie about a clash between aliens and alien zombies. This mass is called a mysterious word guacamole and if you put it on your door post not a single iguana will invade your house. But if you spread this mass on a piece of bread and put a slice of smoked salmon on top then you will get a delicious and super nutritious sandwich. Highly not recommended after 9 pm!

  

Risotto "tear out your tongue or whatever you feel like tearing out"

The world around us changes rapidly. People are not who they used to be anymore, our society evolution takes odd turns every now and then. Though, one thing is constant: we get hungry every few hours. This time I will not tell you about something extraordinary and exotic because I have 1 week exactly till the deadline to submit my master of science thesis (at this point I would like to send warmest greetings to my fellow master students who write day and night and whose reality perception is narrowed to the 60 pages of "if I have more paragraphs and pictures they will occupy more space"). My point: there is a random set of food items in my fridge and after that 10 hours that have passed after lunch the stomach sends hints to what is regarded as brain in those fancy anatomy books: "Food! Taste does not matter, really, and, hey, food!". Weakness is essentially a human feature, so I grabbed what I thought could make something eatable and went to my awesome kitchen that I share with approximately 20 other people.

So, to make my as always long story short: I boiled rice with saffron, warmed up olive oil with cinnamon and pepper, fried a red onion, mushrooms, risen, walnuts, a bit of salad and added a good portion of sweet chili sauce. The time of preparation is equal to how long does it take to boil some rice. Et voilà! A bit spicy, but this is up to the cook. Can contain whatever you have in the fridge, really, unless it's a frozen piece of the piranha who ate up you ex-boy/girlfriend.

Summer leave

Things come and things go. Some of them barely come but nevertheless certainly go. Mostly, it's a question of one's perception. People say there was no summer in Dresden, I disagree, but there is one point which is for sure - the summer's gone. This night, cold, cloudy, heavy and humid, breathed like winter. For such an occasion, I decided that my ears need to warm up with beautiful vinyl jazz and my beloved stomach deserves something warmer than salad.

The art of improvisation is relevant not only in jazz music but in the kitchen, too. The experiment that I made today has half failed but at point which was successful it proved to be worth trying. So, my initial idea was inspired by Georgian cheese bread (kind of) called hachapuri (even though it sounds Indian). I had some layered dough left from one of my previous experiments, some champignons, cottage cheese and chicken. I decided to fry chicken and mushrooms, mix it with cottage cheese and to stuff it into a pocket made of the layered dough. Even after a half of an hour in the oven my "pie" dough was kind of raw. I was hungry so I sent it to hell and ate the filling which turned out to be truly delicious! So, below I will describe in more details how one can treat his or her stomach with warm blessing of chicken and celebrate yet another summer leave.

On a pan warm up some olive oil with cinnamon, basil, black pepper and a bit of what people call curry powder. Start frying an onion, then few mushrooms and grinded walnuts. After couple of minutes add chicken cut in small pieces and fry it for another 3 minutes, it should be half ready. Let it cool a bit, cut some green stuff - salad leaves, for example, and add it the fried mixture, together with cottage cheese. Now, you should keep it at moderately high temperature for a half of an hour in order to let the chicken to get to the perfect condition and all the flavors to interlace. In my case, it happened inside the dough that I had to discard later, so for the next time I'll wrap it in the foil and keep it at 180C in the oven for this half of an hour.

Sandwich "Love me tender"

I want to confess that I'm in love - I'm in love with long summer nights when you can stay awake till early hours and enjoy very simple pleasures of living. This usually renders a person hungry at some point! Here it comes, one of the greatest meals invented by humans - simple, tasty and nutritious: a sandwich. This one is not for lazy time, when you just want to send some degradable carbohydrates, lipids and probably proteins directly to your stomach missing a blessed step of preparing and enjoying.

So, first it's necessary to get some grapefruit flesh. Peel one, and remove the film that divides the segments. I am a peeling maniac, so I do it one by one by hands. If you don't enjoy this subtle pleasure of treating your food just cut it out with the knife then (before dividing a grapefruit in pieces).

From this point it becomes fast - take a piece of bread (I prefer darker sorts), apply some creamy goat cheese on it, put one layer of grapefruit pieces and cover the construction with a slice of smoked salmon. After this the only thing left to do is to enjoy the fresh and tender taste!

Cheese cake muffins with berries "Sister to love"

Some of us are lucky and have siblings. These are very special people, we love them and they break our nerve (or vice versa). When love overcomes all other feelings that are inevitable after, maybe, tens of years of being confined in one place, we want to treat them. This was my motivation for these very tenderly sweet muffins. (original receipt is from here, but it's in Russian and I felt like modifying it a little bit).

So, what you need is:
100 g of biscuit cookies (grind in very small pieces) If you don't have a blender it will take some time to do it by hand, just take something that will help you to destroy the unity of a cookie!
50 g of melted butter (margarine does as good)
300 g of Speisequark (if you live in Germany) or just Almette cheese (if you are fan of Ricotta or Filadelfia they will also do, but this one is cheaper). In Russia you just need to take творог.
60 mg of cream (~30%)
1 egg - just an egg!
0.5 cup of sugar powder (we want things to be tender, right?)
100 g of fresh or frozen cranberries or any other sour berries. I took a mixture of frozen forest berries.
~200 g of white chocolate - half of it you break into small pieces and another half will be our icing.

First you mix what used to be cookies with butter - the substance will appear crumbly, that's ok. This will be a base of our muffins, so distribute the mixture among your muffin forms and press it there with fingers so it would densely cover the bottom. Layer of 5-7 mm thick is ok. Put it into the fridge for ~20 min - meantime prepare the rest of the stuff.
So, blend quark, egg, sugar powder and cream together adding each ingredient one by one. If you don't have blender it's ok to just mix it with a spoon. Start warming up the oven to 150C. Add berries and grinded chocolate. If your berries were the frozen ones first defrost them. Don't discard the juice that they yield upon warming up - you can use to color the icing!
So, when the base is cool just put the blessed mixture on top and bake it for 30 min at 150C. When ready cover each muffin with melted chocolate (I mixed with berry juice). Let them rest in the fridge for 3 hours and enjoy!!! (on the picture - the last survivor)

Salad-not-a-hat

There is an old saying that a true woman is able to make a hat, a salad and a scandal out of nothing. Hats and scandals are not in the scope of this post (sorry to disappoint).

The recipe of a good salad is at the same time easy and difficult: just put whatever you have together and dress it with oil or vinegar or sour cream. In fact, there are two points about making a salad:
1. Be adventurous! Sometimes ingredients that are unthinkable together make a great combination. Like blue cheese and dried fruits. But this will be another story.
2. Main ingredient is not salad leave or tomato but, surprise-surprise, - love. If it is present your salad will be unforgettable. I, for example, can barely forget any of my salads.

Today I want to share a salad that became my classic number one. It doesn't have a name yet, so you can suggest yours. The option that came to my mind - salad-not-a-hat.
I will just list the ingredients because I always measure things kind of randomly when it comes to a salad. A small note: when you cut the tomato add 1 small spoonful of sugar to it to neutralize the acidity and soften the taste.

Tomato, champignons, feta cheese, salad leaves, walnuts, dried cranberries, basil, black pepper, olive oil and a tiny bit of blessed truffle oil.

Lemon Muffins

I will start with one of the recent muffins. They have very nice lemon taste and a cool-looking icing!

First of all, you will need a form for muffins - the easiest way is to get a silicon form for 12 muffins. If you like, you can place paper cups inside to make your muffins more colorful and add you a pleasure of removing this paper from muffins before you eat them. Also, would be good to have a mixer or a blender - you know, to mix or to blend. Be aware of that it might happen that you have more dough then for 12 muffins. In such cases I usually make a supermuffin just on the foil substrate.

Now, what else do you need? About an hour of time (if you have some skills in baking, it's less) and some products:
butter or margarine - 100 g - it should be soft, so take it out from the fridge with some anticipation. In case you forgot, simply melt in in a pot.
sugar - 3/4 of a cup - ok, it's a quite arbitrary measure but count a cup to be 200 ml.
2 eggs
yogurt - 250 ml - sour cream or buttermilk would do as well. After all, it doesn't matter that much.
1 lemon: remove the rind (the yellowish layer of a peel. the lemon will look whitish) and juice the lemon. Put 2 tablespoonfuls of the juice apart - for the icing
also, you can brew ~50 ml of very very very strong coffee in order to make some taste contrast to the lemon. If you want it to be actually distinguishable - reduce the amount of yogurt and make it 100 ml of superstrong coffee.
flour - 2 cups + baking powder - half of a package
a bit of salt, cinnamon and vanilla. Also, couple tablespoonfuls of poppy can do a good job
sugar powder - half of a cup - this is also for the icing.
So, now it's kind of easy. Turn on the oven - let it warm up to 180C.
Take a blender and mix the butter and sugar. One by one, add eggs and mix very well after each. Add yogurt, lemon rind and juice.
In another bowl mix the flour, baking powder and spices.
Now, add the liquid part to the dry part. Mix with the spoon but only till the dough has even consistency. If you mix too long your muffins will not rise and will look pathetic (still, being tasty, of course). Distribute the dough in the muffin form and bake it for ~20 min.

How to find out if muffins are ready? Take a clean and dry knife and poke one of them till the bottom. If the knife comes out clean and dry, it's ready.

Meantime, let's take care of the icing - add 2 tablespoonfuls of lemon juice to the sugar powder and mix. Voila! When the muffins are ready, apply the icing. Be careful, first it becomes more liquid, so there might be some mess. Enjoy! 

Good news, everyone!

Ok, I was thinking of doing this sort of a commitment for quite a while. The fact is that I cook (from time to time) and people eat it (occasionally) and even like it (also, occasionally). My long-term memory is not so strong, so I think it'd be nice to have some sort of a database for the stuff that I cook. And if it helps anybody else to get inspired and maybe bake a chocolate cake then this lj would even be of social good. So, here we go go go!