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.