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:)

Apples with marjoram

This is my favorite side dish: caramelized onions, sautéed apples, all covered in marjoram and lightly salted. My mom always made it for liver dishes; I always hated liver and ate apples only. Today I make them to eat with baked dishes and casseroles or root vegetables; they go well with beans.
I use sour apples and big, juicy onions.


Apples with marjoram, serves 4


1 kg apples
2 big onions (there should be about 1 cup of diced  raw onion)
4 tablespoons dried marjoram
olive oil ( I use it for the taste, the most common option is sunflower or rapeseed oil)
a pinch of crushed allspice and some salt

First, dice the onion and cut peeled apples in cubes. Heat the oil you use on a pan and add marjoram and allspice; stir and add the onions. When translucent, add the apples and stir to cover them in herbs. Sprinkle with salt, wait till they start to pour out their juice and cover, so they steam in low heat (you may add some water to start). Sauté until tender, uncover and let the juice evaporate. Serve warm as a side dish to a savory, salty meal.


I'm having trouble with the photo, so I'll try adding it later, from another computer.

Vegan MoFo reactivation! drozdzowki

I'm not really good in keeping promises. I try. Sometimes it doesn't work.

I was thinking about reactivating this blog and decided that this year's MoFo is the best motivation for me. My goal was to post at least 15 recipes and blog every day  - we'll see how it's gonna work:) I failed with yesterday's post because All Saints is a big holiday in Poland, people come to cemeteries to decorate the graves, meet with family and take a traditional walk in the dark to see all that beautiful lights. Between a family dinner and  typical holiday rush I just had no time to write my recipe.

And it's really good - drożdżówki are baked good eaten as a brunch snack at school, work, etc. Nobody actually makes them at home, but vegans, obviously, make everything:) It's basically a sweet yeast pastry, like a roll, with filling inside and some crumbles on top. There are many kinds - without crumbles, with jam, budyń (something like custard), fruits, but my favorite are filled with cheese and totally covered with crumbles and that is what we're gonna bake.

I made those  using live active yeast, but since I know that the rest of the world is using dry, I changed the recipe. Also, the most important thing is that all the ingredients are in the same temperature - lightly warm. Makes 4 big rolls.

DOUGH

1 teaspoon active dry yeast

half cup + 3 tablespoons sugar

1.5 cup soymilk

2 cups flour

1/4 cup melted vegan butter

some vanilla extract

a pinch of salt

First mix in a small bowl the milk, yeast and 3 tablespoons of sugar and make sure it all dissolves. Then add vegan butter and mix. Finally add the rest of the ingredients and form the dough; let it sit in a warm place till it doubles (about 20 minutes). When it rises, sprinkle the dough and your hands with flour and form 4 rolls, flatten them on a greased sheet (so they look like overdosed fluffy pancakes) and make a hole in the middle. 

FILLING

100 g plain tofu (I used firm, since it's the only one I can buy, but I think silken would work great)

1 tablespoon soy creamer

2 tablespoons sugar

juice from half lemon

vanilla extract

Just blend it together till creamy. It should hold together well and be rolled into balls easily. Make 4 balls, flatten them a bit and place in holes you made in the rolls.

CRUMBLES

1/3 cup sugar

1/3 cup flour

1/3 cup vegan butter, chilled

My mom (who gave me the recipe) always makes crumbles in the same bowl she used for rising yeast dough, unwashed: the rest of the yeast find their way into crumbles and make them lighter and less eager to sink in cake while baking. Anyway, form big crumbles from these ingredients and sprinkle generously over our almost made cakes. Let them sit in a warm place while you preheat oven to 200C (400 F) and bake for 30 minutes, until golden. Mine are slightly overbaked.

I hope you enjoy this too sweet and honestly not healthy breakfast treat:)

Fancy a little touch of spring?

First, I'd like to apologize for the lack of posts; I promised myself to write one entry per week, but so far it didn't work. I was very busy at work, then I went to Spain and the vision of wonderful Spanish food limited my culinary horizon :) But now I'm back with a fresh spring soup I made last week and I hope you'll enjoy it.

Usually the winter weather in Poland is oscillating between lots of snow and a complete lack of it, and the temperature is between +5 and -15 Celsius degrees. Last week it was -20 in my city. There were spots of dirty snow around, but generally the world was gray and sad with no sun and no hope. I went shopping and all the fresh veggies were so expensive it was hard to believe somebody buys it at this price; I went for canned tomatoes, frozen peas and then I saw a jar of salted sorrel.

(If you're curious, it took me so long to write the post cause I couldn't find the name of that herb :P )

As wikipedia can tell you, sorrel is a tiny herb that grows in the garden (rather grows itself than is cultivated), or in meadows, rather in places that are shadowy and have a lot of water. It looks kinda like spinach, but the taste is completely different: sorrel is sour, a bit lemony, with a slight taste of chives and something else, maybe spinach too.

Sorrel is commonly used in Poland to make a spring, green, refreshing soup and actually just for that; I don't think I've ever seen it in salads or used as a stuffing. The original recipe uses 1 egg per portion, to boil it hard, cut in half and put the peeled halves in the soup where they turn green and look suspicious. We just won't use it and that's all.

We're gonna need a big handful of fresh sorrel for 4 portions of soup; if you can't find it fresh or frozen, look for pureed sorrel in a jar - you'll need 1 overfilled cup of it. If you have fresh sorrel, sautée the leaves on sunflower oil (the basic oil for polish kitchen) - it will reduce visibly - and then mash/blend it to a puree


Sorrel soup

200 ml (1 overfilled cup) of sorrel puree
1,5 l (8 cups) of vegetable stock
1 garlic clove
some onion if you like it
3 potatoes if you like the potatoes
100 g (1/4 pound) of regular firm natural tofu (the more solid your tofu is, the better for the aesthetic of your soup)
salt & pepper % some chopped fresh dill if you like it
some egg salt for the tofu

maybe some soy cream (I don't like it that way, maybe you will)


If you're using the potatoes first you have to take care of them: peel, cut in cubes and boil them, then leave apart.

Chop and sautée the onion and the garlic on sunflower oil, then pour in the stock and make it boil. Add sorrel puree and stir well; make it boil, then reduce the heat to minimum, cover leaving some uncovered space for the steam and let it simmer for half an hour.

Break the tofu in chunks and dry it well. Boil some water and pour the tofu chunks in the boiling water; wait till tofu starts to emerge on the surface, then reduce the heat and let it boil for 2-3 minutes. Then take it off the heat, get rid of the water and sprinkle the chunks while hot and steaming with egg salt if you use it.

Now get back to the soup; add the salt and pepper and taste it; if the soup doesn't taste like water or broth and you can clearly distinguish the sorrel taste - which means sour - the soup is ready.

Portion the soup and add tofu chink and potatoes (if using) to each bowl; sprinkle with fresh dill and decorate with soy creamer if you fancy so.

Here you can see my version, with tofu chunks only:


It wasn't as good as made with fresh herb, but still gave me a little hope in this wintery, people-unfriendly weather.

Kutia - a welcome post :)

Hi everyone :)

I wanted to start this blog for a very long time and I started thinking about it seriously about a month ago, hoping I start it before Christmas. It didn't work. This way my first recipes will be post-christmas christmas dishes, but nobody says you can't try it for New Year's Eve :)

I'm a big food blog fan and my goal - as well as my friend's Kassandra - is to promote polish kitchen among vegans and others sympathizing :) Our kitchen has lots of recipes that even don't need veganizing, as well as some amazing food that require just few modifications. I hope you'll find here some inspirations; we'll be posting traditional recipes as well as some not-so-original ones that are popular in Poland (like tomato soup; I can't imagine how is it possible to cannot make a tomato soup, but it seems there are some people unaware of it's existence).


The first recipe is a classic Christmas sweet treat: kutia. It's originated in eastern part of Poland and for so I didn't know it for a very long time (I'm from the western part) till I started my studies and my flatmates taught me make it. From then on, it's my favourite and I always make lots of kutia and eat for breakfast for a week :D

What do we need: the base is cooked wheat, the whole grains, not flour or bran. Other basic ingredients are poppy seeds, soaked in hot water and crushed, then some nuts and dried fruits of your choice - my recipe calls for dried fruits traditionally used in Poland, but don't let it stop you from adding your favourites (my kutia always contain some papaya cubes). The last traditional ingredient is honey; I substitute it with artificial honey, a communist-times mercancy that had survived till our times to my vegan joy. If you can't buy it, which is very probable, you can mix half maple syrup and half agave nectar - that will give you a similar flavour - or just forget it and use any liquid sweetener you have.


The Recipe:

1 cup dry wheat grains
1/2 cup dry poppy seeds
1/2 to 1 cup of nuts of your choice - traditionally we use wallnuts and hazelnuts
1/2 to one cup of dried fruits - prunes, apples, pears, peaches, raisins, orange zest and apricots
2 to 5 T of artificial honey ar any liquid sweetener
optional: 2-3 cups of soymilk

First you soak the wheat overnight in a large bowl. Next day you cook it till it's edible - the grains shouldn't be soft in the outside nor sticky, but while chewing they shouldn't taste like flour. Drain the wheat and pour some cold water to prevent it from sticking; let it cool.

Take 2 cups of water/soymilk and make it boil; take off the oven and pour the poppy seeds into, cover and let it sit for one hour, it will make them softer. After and hour drain it well and blend. There will surely be a problem with blending, but it actually depends of you, how crushed you want the seeds. I like it almost uncrushed, so I never care about blending; just try some and tell if you like the feeling of poppy seeds scratching between your teeth or not :)

Chop the nuts and cut the fruits into tiny pieces, like in a fruit cake.

Mix everything altogether: the wheat, poppy seeds, nuts & fruits and add half of the honey; cover everything with it and try. If you want your kutia sweeter or there's not enough honey to cover everything, add the rest of your sweetener. Done!



You can eat it right away or store in a cool place (a fridge is the best option, just cover it well, if you don't want it to smell of other food); keeps a week to 10 days. Kutia is a great and quite cheap party food; also easy to turn raw, if you're sure that the wheat can be eaten uncooked (poppy seeds surely are).