Saturday, November 6, 2010

My favorite salad

This recipe is a recreation of a salad I used to have frequently in a place that we call Milk Bar in Poland. These are little bars that you could call a socialist response to fast food: very cheap (they have subventions from the city and a meal can cost even 10 times less than in a regular bar or cheap restaurant), fast and traditional dishes such as pierogi (which is the reason why they are still popular, especially among students: everybody loves pierogi), crepes, pancakes, dumplings, traditional soups and few meat dishes - Milk Bars were for a long time the only place where vegetarians could eat. As the name says, there's an emphasis on dairy-based dishes so I don't go there often now. This salad was my favorite and a part of daily combo: barszcz ukraiński, spinach crepes (with garlic sauce- yess) and salad, all for 6 zł (1,6 euro, 2,2 dollar); that is how much you would pay for one hamburger in a fast food. In addition for being really simple to make at home it has a magic power to amaze your guests; and fill them too!

2 cups cooked rice (originally white rice but it's really good with brown)
1 cup cooked brown lentils
1 small raw onion
a handful of fresh parsley leaves
half small red bell pepper, raw or pickled
some salt and pepper, olive oil

Chop the onion and the parsley leaves. Cut the pepper in short, slim stripes and mix with onion, parsley, rice and lentils. Season with salt and pepper and pour some olive oil on the top, but not too much; it's supposed to mix while eating.

As I mentioned before I'm having trouble with posting photos so I was looking for an old photo from my polish blog, but I only found one bad and small that I took with my old phone and posted years ago; so, in case that you don't know how a rice-lentil salad looks like, here's a peak:


This one has no parsley, I believe:)

1 comment:

Corey Wrenn said...

Was easy to prepare, but rather bland. I even added extra herbs and seasoning to the rice and lentils as they cooked. I would recommend using an entire bouillon cube to the rice and/or lentils when they cook. I used fresh/raw red pepper as well. Pickled would probably bring better flavor.