Apple in a Scarf

Over the years my mother collected a bunch of recipes from her friends and colleagues. In my notes, this one is attributed to someone called Danute. Though I can't recall who that person was, I still make these - lets call it cookies - sometimes. It is a variation of what the Dutch know as Appelflap, Frenchies as Chausson aux Pommes; and there probably are similar things in other cultures as well, apple in a pastry wrap. It is also doable with other fruits, as long as they are reasonably dry, the wrapping itself also can be more creative than this basic version.

Need:
4 eggs
250 g margarine (can also be butter)
200g sour cream
2 tea spoons of baking powder
4 cups of flour
4 apples
2 spoons of sugar
1 tea spoon of cinnamon

Short version would be "knead the pastry, let it cool off in the fridge for half an hour, roll it out". A bit longer version depends on a state of butter/margarine you use and how much you want to fuss with it. In a quicker version you melt the butter, knead it with the rest (except apples, obviously), but then it needs to cool off a bit longer for rolling, and sometimes butter can somewhat stiffen in chunks, making a rolling bit annoying. The more fussy way is to warm up butter/margarine in room temperature until it is soft, mix it with the rest, knead it well and put it to cool off in a fridge.
Either way, once it is cooling off in the fridge, prepare the apples. Cut it in 4 pieces, get the seed pods out. If the apples are huge, cut them somewhat more. Mix the apples with half of the sugar and cinnamon for some extra flavor (you can skip on cinnamon if you do not like it.
After pastry spent a good half an hour in the fridge, you can roll it out, cut it into stripes and wrap around the apple pieces. Sprinkle tops with the other half of the sugar and cinnamon.
Bake, for about 30 min on 180C (depending on how big your apples were it can take +/- 10 min extra).

(Non) Goulash with Prunes

A specialty of Hungarian cuisine, goulash made its way across the Europe. To my country it probably got together with the traveling Hungarian doctors back in the 19 century, if not earlier, especially through the manor and merchant culture. Either way, the further it traveled from home, the less goulashy it became it seems. What my grandparents knew as "goulash" does not have much in coomon with an original Hungarian dish. Actually, what we used to have as a popular dish of the same name in the infamous soviet lunch eateries did not resemble the original either; there it mostly consisted of a few tasteless pieces of a leathery beef swimming in the rather suspicious substance called sauce.
The home made version of our (non)goulash has a few versions, you can add carrots to it, make it with flour based sauce, or even make it with pork, but that recipe I will split to some other post. I usually make this version, with dried prunes and a touch of tomato. The exact amount of beef depends on how many people are at a dinner table, we usually take about 600-800 g for 2 adults and 2 kids to last for 2 days. As it is slow cooking dish, it is something you make one day and then warm up leftovers on the next.

Need:
600 g of good beef, suitable for long cooking.
100 g of boneless dried plums (prunes)
1 spoon of tomato paste or ketchup
50 g of butter or oil
3 onions
3 cloves of garlic
Spices:
a pinch of black pepper,
1 tea spoon of salt (actual amount depends on how salty you like your food, tasting is the key)
1 tea spoon of paprika powder
1 tea spoon of dried oregano
1 tea spoon of dried thyme

Boiled potato for garnish, possibly in a combination with a red cabbage.

Cut the beef into the pieces, more or less a bite size. Chop the onions in half rings.
I use heavy cast iron pot for making it, but it is possible to make it in any pot with a thick bottom. Melt the butter in the pot and add the spices: garlic, paprika, herbs, salt and pepper, then put the meat in, together with onions. Fry it for a few minutes, until it turns sort of glistering and not red anymore. Pour the water in, about 1.5 liter and let it come to boil. Add roughly chopped prunes and tomato paste, turn the heat down and slowly cook it on low fire for 3 hours.
When there is about an hour left to cook, start with the potatoes, so they are ready around the same time when the meat is done. I like boiled potatoes most with it, but fries or other kinds work well too.

Fluffy Apple Pie

There are a lot of apple pie recipes, but there always is the one you tend to fall back to, an all time favorite if you will. This one is definitely the one for me, even though I have a few more apple goodness related sentiments.
So... good 20 years back I used to go to this university cafe, with a very presumptions name "Lambada". It had nothing to do with Latin culture, nor with the famous song; actually it could not have been even more far from it, as it was located in a thick walled old Gothic cellar ("The flight of the Valkyr" probably would have been a more suiting name), but they did have a great apple pie (that was about the only thing that was exceptional about that place to be honest). It took me a bit of puzzling to figure out how to make something similar (because, obviously, they do not print recipes on the menu), but after some trial and error, it turned out to be very simple and fail proof recipe.
Need:
4 eggs
200 g of sugar
200 g of sour cream (thick)
2 cups of flour
50 g of butter
2 tea spoons of baking powder
5 apples

The choice of apples matters, I prefer them to be rather dry and sour, some kind of winter variety. I usually do not peel apples if the skin looks all right, just cut them in chunks (after taking out seed pods of course), but if you peel them it is fine too. Further it is fairly simple:
Melt the butter (microwave works fine too), use part of it to butter the sides of the baking form (I use 20x20 cm form);
Mix eggs, sugar, flour, baking powder and left over butter, until it is smooth;
Pour half of the mix into a form, put in the apples, pour the remaining half of the mix on top of them, make sure that no apples are sticking out (because they tend to burn).
Bake for about 40-60 min on 180C, check with a wooden stick if it is ready (stick should come out clean out of the pie.
Take out of the form (carefully, as sometimes it does not want to come out nicely, plops out and breaks), let it cool off and enjoy; or if you feel like you deserve it, add some sugar powder on top or eat it with a good spoon of whipped cream.

Elf Ears

My grandma used to make these from a left over pastry from the sweet bread she was making. I never got an actual recipe from her, even though I made lots and lots of these when I was a kid; it always was "a more or less" thing, she usually just put about a kilo of flour into a bowl, and then added the rest by the "feel". The name for it also varies, from "little ears" to "little twigs" and similar, but since its ring gets lost in the translation, after moving the country we started calling them Elf Ears, because it is just much more cool. :)

Need
1 kg flour
200 g of butter
1 cup of sugar
7 g of dry yeast (or equivalent of the living one, usually 20g of living one = 7 g of dry)
3 eggs
100 ml of milk

Now there is traditional way to do it, or bread baking machine way. Ever since I got the later, I just set it on Dough program and done, but if you do not have one...

First you mix yeast with sugar and a bit of hand warm milk. When it starts bubbling happily (especially important with dry yeast, to sort of resurrect them back to the living), it is ready to be used. Then you put flour in a bowl, pour yeast into the whole thing, mix it gently and leave to rise for about an hour in a warm place, with a moist towel on top of the bowl. When it rises for the first time, add the rest of the ingredients and knead it properly. My grandma used to take a knife, get a chunk of a dough, cut it and see how much bubbles there is in it - the more the better. Either way, after about half an hour of kneading workout, you put the dough to rise for the second time. Once it is done after another hour, it is ready to be rolled.

So, we get our dough, prepared either way and roll it out. Then cut the dough in stripes, and after that you cut the stripes every 10-ish cm, in an angle, and make an incision in a middle of each piece. Then you take one end of it, and pull it through the incision, forming the "ears" (see image bellow).

The dough tends to dry fast, so it is handy either to have a kid on stand by, making the ears, while you fry those already made, or you have to use a cling film, to preserve the moisture.

Pour about 3 cm layer of oil in a frying pan and fry them on both sides for a minute, until they are nice and golden. Sometimes part of them will bubble out, aka get a "bear belly", which seemed to be a lot of fun and more tasty when I was a kid. Alternatively they can also be fried in a deep frying pan, in oil, just of course you want it to be a fresh oil, not to smell of fish, chicken or fried onions.

After they cooled off a bit, sprinkle with sugar powder for extra sweetness.

Pretsie Cookies

Sometimes I need to make something cookie(ish) with the kids. This recipe is perfect for that, no sharing of the roller/shapes/no drama. You make the pastry, they roll it with their hands into mini snakes, form the pretzel like cookies, sprinkle with sugar. Simple, easy, preschooler can make (and eat) it.

Need:
200g of butter
1 cup of sugar
2 eggs
3 cups of flour
2 tea spoons of baking powder

Knead the pastry, make the cookies, sprinkle cookies with some sugar, bake for 20 min in 180C oven, done.

Po-Stroganovski (Beef Stroganoff)

By most accounts this well know dish dates back to the second half of the 19th century. It originated in the kitchens of count Alexander Grigoriyevich Stroganov, who, like many other wealthy gentleman of that era, was keeping an "open table" in Odessa, which could be joined by any educated and properly dressed member of the society. The dish became popular, due to its taste and the easiness to divide it into portions (novelty at the time) and subsequently spread to the other establishments of fine dining in the Russian Empire.

There are some disagreements over the ingredients and serving. The recipe bellow is the original Russian version, served in the restaurants of Kaunas governorate at the turn of the century (~1900). It does not contain mushrooms, and usually it was served with potato fries and brined pickles. Back in those days mushrooms were available year round (fresh in the autumn, marinaded, salted, dried for the rest of the year), but those were mostly real forest mushrooms, which generally have much more defined flavors than the common button mushroom in our shops. As for the french fries, they were known in Russia due to the popularity of the French culture among Russian nobility, kitchen included, however in some restaurants it was served with a buttery potato mash. Brined pickles work much much better with this dish than the marinaded ones (especially what usually is available at the local supermarkets), because they have less overpowering and more natural flowing flavor.

Need:
About 200 g beef filet (tender parts of sirloin).
2 average sized onions
200 ml beef stock (preferably home made, but cubes can do too, as long as it does not have too much spices, need 1 cube)
100 g sour cream
100 g butter (quality one)
1 table spoon of french mustard (paste without grains)
3 table spoons of flour
Pepper, salt

Garnish: French fries, brined pickles.

Cut beef in bite size cubes or stripes (if there is some doubt about the cut you bought, slightly tenderize it before cutting). Roll them in a spoon of flour, so the beef is lightly dusted.
Cut onion in cubes.
In a pan, melt half of the butter (50g). Add onions. Then, gently place beef on top of the onions, so that it does not touch the frying pan surface. Fry for about 3-5 minutes, until meat starts glistering (but not browning!). Its important not to overcook it, otherwise it will be hard. Take off the fire and transfer meat and onions into an oven dish.

Now the sauce. Mix about half of a glass of the cold beef stock with 2 spoons of flour, whisk it so there are no lumps. Have the rest of the stock at hand. Note: if you are making stock from cube, dissolve the cube in 100 ml boiling water and add the other 100ml cold afterwards, so the stock is not hot when you need it.

Melt butter in a clean frying pan, on a slow fire. Add the stock with flour, mixing vigorously, then thin it out with the rest of the beef stock. Add sour cream, mustard, a pinch of pepper and a pinch of salt.

Pour the sauce over the beef and onions, cover the dish with foil and put into the oven (180C) for about 15 min.

Karpatka pie

Right, I should probably have called this pie Paris- Carpathian Lass, or Karpatka-Brest. The story goes like this: I quickly saved a few recipes for Karpatka (Polish pie) and Paris Brest (French pie) to the same text file, with a though, that I will sort it out later. Later of course came about 2 years too late, when I could neither remember, nor trace back where and what came from; nor to which recipe the random parts of the text belonged. I still wanted to try it though, so I mixed what seemed to be a logical part of each recipe. In the end, after trial and error, there was one version of pastry and 2 versions of cream that were nice. I make the first version of cream most of the time, but some people who tasted it, preferred the second one.

Need:
Pastry:
250 ml of water (can be half water, half milk)
50 g butter
50g sugar
200 g flour
1 tea spoon baking powder
5 large eggs

Cream I:
1 l of milk
3 egg yolks
150 g sugar
1 cup of starch
1 satchel of vanilla sugar
150g butter
400 ml whipped cream

Cream II:
300 g curd cream, without any flavors
100 ml of condensed milk
100 g of butter
1 satchel of vanilla sugar

Pie part:
Boil 250 ml of water, melt butter and sugar in it. Fetch a whisk. Quickly pour all flour into boiling water and whisk like hell! The pastry thing in the pan should turn into one consistency without lumps. Boil it for about 2-3 minutes, stirring with a wooden spoon, then take of the fire and cool off till it is hand warm. It is important to cool it off properly, because if you are not patient enough and start adding eggs too soon, they will basically cook in the pastry and the pie won't fluff out in the oven. So.... WAIT!

Turn oven on for 220C. Start adding eggs to the pastry, one by one (so the pastry can absorb them) and mix well. Now you can either split pastry into two separate sheets, or bake it at once, but then the layer on the oven plate should be a bit thicker. Put it in the preheated oven when it reaches max heat, bake for about 30-40 min. Can turn heat a bit down in the last 10 min.

Take it out, cool off. If it was one sheet approach, cut it in half (aka layers). Add cream in between, sprinkle with the sugar powder on top, or glaze with chocolate/white icing.

Cream I:

Beat egg yolks with sugar.
Slowly bring 800 ml of milk to boil, stirring occasionally as it is inclined to burn at the bottom. Add butter, melt it, add vanilla sugar. Whisk remaining 200 ml of cold milk with starch, add it to the boiling milk, mix it well until it boils again. Add eggs, mix well, boil it for another 2-3 min on slow fire.

Beat cold whipped cream. When the boiled cream cools off a bit, mix it with the cream, gradually.

From this amount there is a lot of cream, proportions can be a bit adjusted according to the own preferences. It is also very good cream for other sorts of pies.

Cream II:
Beat the room temperature butter, until white and fluffy with the mixer (about 10 min). Add condensed milk, beat some more. Add curd, mix it well in (if curd is very wet, get a tea towel and let the water dribble out a bit).
After combined with the pie part, this version has to stay in a fridge to stiffen a bit.

Lil' Taters

At home these cookies are called Little Potatoes, for the obvious resemblance. I called them "cookies" for a lack of a better word for it, as it is something in between a cookie and a cake. Its that kind of sweet you can make when you think there is nothing tasty at home, or when you have some crumbs from the previous project. Or just... when you feel like eating something earthly.


Need:
500g crumbs (plain bread ones normally used for roasts, or cookie/spondge crumbs... as long as it crumbles)
200 g of sugar
100 ml milk
200g butter
1 table spoon cacao powder

Heat milk up, melt butter and sugar in it. Mix cacao with crumbs, then gradually add milk mix and knead it through. Let it cool of in a fridge for 30 min, then make small balls and put back to the fridge to stiffen. Taste can be enhanced by adding nuts to it, or a wisp of cream on top.

Plav

Plav is a dish typical to the Middle-Asian kitchen. There are many regional versions of it, but essentially it consists of meat, rice and carrots, all mixed through in a process of cooking. Generally any meat can do, (lamb, chicken, beef, even fish), as long as it has a bit of fat; which usually poses a problem here, as the only fatty meat you can get is pork, and that normally is not used for its traditional preparation. Traditions aside, pork does just fine, you can even add some lard to it. Rice wise the best are local Middle-Asian rice cultivars, but Basmati rice is good enough substitute for everyday cooking. There are two ways to make it, a real one and a quick one, depending on what you want to achieve (feast or everyday meal).

Need:
300 g of faty beef, lamb or pork
2 large winter carrots
2 onions
1 head of garlic
200 g of dry Basmati rice
1 table spoon of tomato puree (can be replaced by barberry berries (original), or a paste from dried sour plums)
1 table spoon of yellow raisins
2 spoons of butter, sunflower oil or lard
Spices: 1 tea spoon cumin powder, 1 tea spoon coriander powder, a pinch of black pepper, a tea spoon of salt


True version:
Generally making of plav is a bit of a ritual, a communication event with your guests while plav is slowly cooking in your kitchen or even outside on a brazier. Its a good alternative for a BBQ if you have a nice kettle to cook it in over the fire. Tomato puree is used here as a substitute for barberry berries, which are less commonly available, its there to give a bit of sourness to it. Raisins are an optional ingredient, a variation of recipe, I like it better with them though, especially if I use tomato instead of barberry as a sour additive.

So, cut the meat into bite size strips. Cut the carrots into thicker straws, cut onions in halt rings.
Clean and chop garlic. Now in the original version you cook the whole head of garlic, sort of stick it in the middle of the pot, and then squirt garlic paste out of it, but I like to improvise here and just add it normally.

To a pan in which you are going to cook your plav, add a good chunk of lard, and turn the fire to max. Add spices, add meat, fry it until it starts turning golden at the edges, then add carrots, garlic and onions. Stir fry it for a few minutes, then add about 1 liter of water - so it is a bit above the meat and vegetable mix by a few inches. Add tomato puree and raisins. Reduce fire, and cook it for about half of an hour. When it is done you have what is called zirvak - a basis for plav (which, if prepared in larger amount, can be frozen for the later use).

Then we add rice to our zirvak, simply pour it over the vegetable and meat mix, and then carefully pour about a liter of water over it - so, that it does not mess up the layering. Generally water should be more or less a few inches above the rice. Turn the fire hotter and cook it further - somewhere about 15 min or so. To check if it is done you can do two things, one is to do a few holes in the rice, so the steam from the bottom can go up (eating stick is a fine tool for that). Do that and see if there is still bubbling at the bottom, if not, plav is done. Also taste rice from top and see if it is edible, if not, add a bit of extra water. The idea is that the steam cooks the rice. When it is done-ish, mix it properly through, cover a pot and let it rest for another 15-20 min.

Traditionally the drink to accompany it is tea, it also can be served with fresh cucumber salad.

Quick version:

It is for those days when you come home from work and have no time for rituals.

Cut meat, carrots, onion and garlic as above.
Fry meat and vegetables on a frying pan, until soft and done. Mix with tomato paste with a bit of water and add to it at the end.
At the same time, make rice: boil water, add rice, cook for 8 minutes, get the water off the rice.
Mix everything and eat.

Apple sauce

Dutchies love their apple sauce, or, as they call it, appelmoes. I love it too, though I am more familiar with a chunkier version of it, which we normally use as half-jam and a sweet fix (white bread + apple puree = instant cake, or something along those lines). It goes surprisingly well with savory dishes as well; with fish (especially a fattier kind, like salmon), slow cooked beef and lots of other things. It is also one of the simplest things to make and keep for the winter if you have your own apples.

Apple sauce is cooked&mashed apples, with sugar. How much sugar depends on a particular apple cultivar, how you close a jar, etc. If you close your jars hot, in theory you can do it without sugar at all, especially if the apples themselves are a bit on a sweet side, however I would say add at least 100g of sugar per 1 kg of apples, just in case. Sugar acts as a preservative, and the last thing you want is your entire winter stock going kaboom if your apples were tad too sour. Kaboom is not a joke by the way, a pressure building up in a fermenting jar can literally launch it from its shelf.

Need:
1 kg of peeled apples
300 g of sugar

There is no sure way to measure sugar vs non cooked apples, as the amount of water, structure, etc. differs. If you have very sour apples you might want to use more, if you have very dry sweet ones, there can be less. Experiment is your friend there, but 300g/1kg seems to be pretty reliable.

The rest is fairly simple. Peel apples, cut them in quarters, take seed pods out. If apples are on a monster side, cut them a bit smaller. Peel 1kg, add it to the pot in which you are going to cook it, add 300g of sugar, so it coats them, then peel the next 1 kg, add sugar, repeat till the pot is almost full (about by 10 inches from top, otherwise it will splatter annoyingly all over the place when cooking). Cover it, leave it over the night.

The next day you will notice, there is some liquid in the pot. Great! Stir the whole thing through, so you do not have too much sugar stuck to the sides of the pot and put it on fire. Cook for about 10-15 min after it starts boiling - generally to the point that apples start to fall apart, which also depends on variety. I love the local one, Groningen Kroon, the most, as it turns into a perfect sauce pretty much instantly and without much of extra effort required, but there are plenty of other good varieties too.

Either way, when cooking is done, you have to either blend it for a smooth sauce, or mash manually. If you cut apples smaller, you can skip the whole mashing part entirely, and just have it a bit chunkier. Whichever is preferred really, but keep in mind that the whole thing is very hot, so you need to wait before blending it, not to screw your blender. After you blend it, you have to boil it again before adding to the jars for the winter keeping.

Jars:
There are different methods how to close jars for the winter and how to sterilize them. What I do is using glass jars and metal lids which you screw on a jar. It is possible to use the same lid a few times, but eventually it start loosing the tightness, so all in all it is more reliable to always use new lids.

I wash the jars very well with a dish washing soap, then rinse them with boiled water. You can also rinse it with vodka, but I rather keep it to water, does not seem to be much difference there. After washing, place them upside down on a clean towel, so the water can dribble out.

Put lids in a boiling water for 5 minutes.

Take one jar, pour boiling apple sauce into it (with soup spoon), fish out a lid from a boiling water,put it on a jar and close it tight with the kitchen gloves on your hands. Actually that's a hubby job, men can screw it tighter if they put some force to it.

Place all closed jars on a towel, and cover it with a blanket, so they cool off very gradually. Move to a storage after 2 days.