I couldn’t imagine my life without cereals, porridge, and this mousse. I love it for its almost Barbie-pink colour, its airy texture and mild flavour. I love it because it’s another reason to have some milk for lunch or dessert, which is so healthy. Cranberry Semolina Mousse is especially good with baked milk. It’s a type of milk with a sweeter, creamier taste and a warmer colour, yet the same fat percentage as plain milk. “In rural areas, baked milk has been produced by leaving a jug of boiled milk in an oven for a day or for a night until it is coated with a brown crust” (Wikipedia), but nowadays it can be found in any large supermarket - in this part of the world, at least.

Semolina mousse can be as well made with fresh black or red currants, sour cherries, or any other berries or fruits that have a strong sharp taste. Latvians call this dessert Debesmanna, which means Manna from Heaven. I’ve also seen Latvian recipes for Debesmanna made with fresh pureed apples.

With no connection to this mousse, I’m posting a couple of shots of wilting tulips. They were so beautiful as they were dying that I couldn’t resist photographing this transformation of humble tulips into strange and exotic paper-like flowers!

Ingredients

¾ cup fresh cranberries
½ cup sugar
½ cup semolina
750 ml water
Milk to your taste

Serves 4-6

Wash and crash/puree cranberries. In a saucepan, combine cranberries, sugar, and boiling water, and boil for 1-2 minutes. Put the hot cranberry juice through a fine sieve to get rid of berry skins. Return juice into saucepan, bring to boil and gradually yet quickly add semolina, while stirring. Keep the mix boiling until it thickens (this should take about 3 to 5 minutes). Leave to cool (room temperature or colder). Your mousse will be of dark pink colour at this point:

Beat the cooled mousse with a mixer until pale and fluffy. Serve with milk.

This is the recipe for those exclusive Tsar blinis that I promised you a week ago :) We had never made them before, but, since it was my Mum who kept things under control, the pancakes came out perfect from the very first attempt. (Compare to my miserable first-time experience with homemade tortillas!)

Of course these are not everday or every weekend pancakes. They are meant for special occasions only (unless you’re a Tsar or a Tsarina *cough*). To begin with, despite all myths, Russians do not eat red caviar every day. I’d rather say, being a Russian myself, I wouldn’t discuss recipes involving caviar with most of my friends, just as I wouldn’t parade a shampoo I bought for 30 EUR or anything else that costs above average. I haven’t bought 30 EUR shampoos ever since I got my first job and wanted to try what it feels like to spend money, but I still do like caviar… I’m a foodie after all! Besides, it’s more about the „public image” of caviar as a luxury product, rather than the price (at least here in Latvia). Anyway, with these pancakes we had one small can of red caviar (about 140g net I believe) plus other fillings, such as jam and sour cream. And nobody complained :)

Another important thing about Russian blinis (and I think myths say the truth here), is that nobody would bother to make 2 blinis per person. On Maslenitsa, you eat as much as you like/can, not to mention that pancakes look best when stacked in tall towers ;-) This recipe made with 1 litre milk and 600g flour is given for 6 persons. I think you can easily reduce the ingredients by half and it still will be enough for a normal meal. In both cases, it’s wise to bake the blinis on two skillets. Or else you might never meet your guests as you’ll be stuck in the kitchen until the end of the day. It’s a common problem with pancakes – you need to be paaatieeent - yet I would like to note that these pancakes are slow to prepare, but extremely quick to cook – maybe that’s because they’re so airy. Why wouldn’t they be airy – with whipped cream and whipped egg whites in the batter?!

Ingredients
1l lukewarm milk
600g top quality wheat flour
25g yeast
5 eggs, yolks and whites separated, whites chilled
150g butter
200g cream
1 tsp sugar
1 tsp salt
Refined vegetable oil

1 small can red caviar, raspberry jam, sour cream/creme fraiche, or anything else you like for filling

Combine 1/2l milk, 400g flour, and yeast. Mix well, cover and leave the batter in a warm place (warm like, say, kitchen, not like a baking oven) for about an hour to rise.

When the batter has risen, add in remaining flour and milk (still slightly warm), salt, sugar, and egg yolks blended with butter until light. Blend thoroughly and leave in a warm place for 45 minutes.

Meanwhile,whisk chilled egg whites until stiff. In a separate bowl, whisk cream.

When the batter has risen for the second time, gently stir in whipped cream and egg whites. Let the batter rest for 10-15 minutes and start cooking the pancakes on medium-sized skillets sprinkled with vegetable oil. Add some oil every time you flip a pancake or place a new one. Be careful as you flip the pancakes - they are very fragile.

Serve with red caviar, raspberry jam, sour cream, or any other type of topping you like. But of course it’s caviar that makes these blinis really royal.

We didn’t really mean this banana milk shake as a Valentine’s Day treat. The idea was born because we had read that one should enter the Year of White Tiger with something made of milk on the table. So we thought of this sweet, lip-smacking banana milk shake with egg liqueur flavour, decorated with whipped cream and chocolate shavings. This looked pretty much like a Valentine’s Day cocktail too!

But, that’s not all. I mean, not all special occasions for today. This year, the great holiday of Russian Maslenitsa falls on February 14th as well!! Maslenitsa symbolizes the end of winter (*cough*… it’s still snowing here) or at least it gives you some hope that winter is coming to its end! - and it opens the long Lent which precedes the Orthodox Easter. On Maslenitsa, you eat loads of pancakes (blinis)! My Mum made a huge stack of Tsar blinis, which I’ve taken photos of and which I’ll be talking about in my next post. So, we had those exclusive Tsar blinis with red caviar and a selection of home-made jams, and crowned the dinner with a milk shake that should help us gain the White Tiger’s favour.

Let’s see what the Tiger brings us!

Ingredients
3 ripe bananas
1/2 l milk, chilled
80 g egg liqueur sauce
100 ml cream, chilled
3 tsp sugar + more sugar to taste
Chocolate shavings

Serves 4

Peel the bananas and crash them with a fork. Add milk, egg liqueur sauce and blend the cocktail using a blender. Check is you need to add any sugar: your liqueur sauce might be very sweet so you wouldn’t need to sweeten the mix. Ours was sweet, but we still added a couple of teaspoons sugar. Leave the milk shake to chill.
Beat the cream with 3 tablespoons sugar until firm.
Serve the milk shake in tall glasses, topped with whipped cream and decorated with chocolate shavings.

In case you were wondering, I am still alive :) I’ve had no Internet at home for over a week however (no it’s not global crisis or heavy snowfalls, it’s just… the situation). That’s the main reason why I haven’t written anything for so long again. As a kind of compensation for being offline on evenings, I’ve received my first Bon Appetit issue!! Yay! I couldn’t imagine they’d ship it to Latvia, but they did! The magazine arrived via Switzerland. I can’t wait to read every article in it!

My 26th birthday was nice. First I celebrated it at home, with family, and then we had a small birthday party with friends, also at home. I did make those Italian cookies with white wine, as well as quesadillas with sweet corn, red beans and garlic (I’m afraid I overcooked the tortillas though) for my friends, but I was stupid enough to forget my camera at my parents’ so I never took any photos. The cookies were extremely easy to make – all you have to do is combine the ingredients and form little rings of pastry. Tortillas were a little more of a challenge. The main problem was that the tortillas came out a little bit too chewy; I kept them under a wet towel as recommended, but I still had to sprinkle some water on them before baking the folded quesadillas. So this was my first experience with home-made tortillas!

And this apple cake is yet another easy recipe from our family. All you need is some patience while you chop the chilled margarine mixed with flour, turning it into tender creamy crumbles. A great alternative to apple filling is good cottage cheese blended with sugar and vanilla. This is my favourite variation of the cake. Cottage cheese slightly melts while baking, which makes the crust extremely moist, I would even say juicy.

Store the cake in a cool place, covered with a towel or baking paper, and it will be just as good even three days later.

Ingredients

400g wheat flour
250g margarine, chilled
8 sweet apples
150g sour cream
3 tsp+6 tsp sugar
Cinnamon to taste

Roughly chop margarine and add flour. Keep on chopping margarine with a knife, rolling the pieces of margarine in flour. When you feel like the pieces are too small to cut them with a knife, continue crumbling them with your hands, so that every crumb is covered with flour. Put the mix into refrigerator for a couple of minutes if the margarine starts to melt. Stop when you have a whole bowl of fine dry crumbs that don’t stick to your hands.

Peel the apples and grate them coarsely. Drain off any excess juice.

In a separate small bowl, combine sour cream and 6 teaspoons sugar. Add cinnamon (I skip this step as I’m not a big fan of cinnamon lately).

Place a layer of crumbs into your baking pan (use a little bit more than ½ of the crumbs) and spread grated apples over them. Sprinkle the apples with 3 teaspoons sugar (or more if your apples are sour). Pour the sweetened sour cream over the apples and top with remaining crumbs. Sprinkle some cinnamon on top of your cake (optionally).

Bake on a medium heat for approximately 30 minutes.

I haven’t written anything for ages - in fact we haven’t cooked any new dishes either, because I’ve been swamped with work and minor (yet annoying) troubles. Sometimes I feel like I’m a type of person who-does-everything-in-the-wrong-time. I mean, one and the same thing can be considered good or bad, depending on the time when it happened. Say, you recieved a gift - a piece of jewellery you’d been dreaming of. That’s good. But if you received it the next day after you finally bought it yourself… that’s bad! So I feel like I need to synchronize my chaotic activities with the flow of time. And then I’ll be back to my Tao :)

Anyways, I’ll be certainly cooking this weekend. In the meantime, I’m excited to tell you about the Honest Scrap Award I received from Spicie Foodie! Nancy is Mexican, currently living in Europe - I guess somewhere in the Eastern part of it, as she wrote a perfect recipe for Czech Knedliky, and recently she posted a wonderful recipe for Beef Pepper and Mushroom Barley. Thank you so much for the award Nancy! And I enjoyed reading your 10 honest things - I actually share your 1st one! ;-)

According to the award rules, I now have to tell you 10 honest things about myself and pass on the award to 10 fellow food bloggers who are honest in their approach to blogging.
So,

10 honest things about myself

1) I work as a Press Officer, and Mum is a graphic artist.
2) I am the only person in the family who does a 10 to 18 job. Everyone else is self-employed or has a flexible schedule. Well, my schedule is not that strict anyway ;-)
3) I’ve always brought foods from all my overseas trips, instead of “normal souvenirs”.
4) When I read a book and a book character eats an apple, I rush to the kitchen and grab myself an apple too.
5) My favourite sweets are Italian. I love them all!
6) Coffee means absolutely nothing to me.
7) I strongly prefer milk chocolate to dark (which is probably mauvais ton?)
8) I have eaten fermented shark in Iceland. The trick is to eat it outdoors, in the frost, and wash it down with Icelandic vodka.
9) Mum and me like to hum to ourselves while cooking.
10) I’m always worried about my English, so Cambridge Dictionaries Online is one of my Top-10 resources.

And I would like to pass on this award to bloggers behind the following blogs:

Sunny-Side Up Recipes
Cooking With Thas
Vegetable Matter
Newly Nutritional Britt
The Colors of Indian Cooking
P.Tsaldari
J. Christina Huh
My Fabulous Recipes

Of course I understand if, for some reasons, you cannot accept the award. But I really do think you deserve it!

Update: Okay I found out some of the bloggers I mentioned have already received this award, and some don’t participate in awards, so I listed 8 bloggers instead of 10!

Doesn’t this salad look like a work of abstract art?

The name Mimosa (wattle) comes from the colour and texture of this salad. Bright orange carrots and egg whites with mayonnaise are topped with small yellow grains of egg yolk, which look exactly like fluffy mimosa flowers. Yes, yes, I know mayo would put off many of you. But, there are solutions. Use light mayonnaise that is low in fat, or make your own! I haven’t tried preparing my own mayonnaise yet, but I’ve seen the process of making it and that didn’t look like anything too complicated!

We also like our Mimosa salad with canned saury fish instead of tuna. It’s not as fancy as tuna, but it has a richer, smoky flavour and it’s more salty.

Oh and I am already thinking of a menu for my birthday, which is at the end of the month (I wonder how many Aquarians are reading me by the way?!). I’ve found these Italian White Wine cookies which I might try – they look very simple and light and airy. I don’t feel like baking any great pies or cakes (like we did for New Year’s), rather something petite and feminine. But I really don’t know what… I mean I can’t choose. I have so many bookmarks of fantastic recipes I’ve found online, that I guess I’ll have to close my eyes and click on two or three random recipes!

Speaking about bookmarking recipes, how do you manage your online culinary archives/discoveries? Do you use your RSS reader, or your browser bookmarking system, or an external social bookmarking service? I’m curious as it’s been only half a year and I’m already desperate to keep my favourites in order…

Ingredients

2 onions
4 carrots
4 hard-boiled eggs
250g canned tuna fish
200g Provencal mayonnaise
Vegetable oil

Serves 6

Boil unpeeled carrots in plain water until ready.

Slice the onions in half-rings and fry them with vegetable oil and salt until golden-brown. Set to cool when ready.

When the carrots are ready, remove the skins and grate them coarsely. Set to cool.

Grate egg whites on a medium grater. Crumble the yolks.

Put fried onions on bottom of your salad bowl. Spread about a tablespoon mayonnaise over them.

Using a fork, divide the tuna fish into bite size pieces (or smaller) and put them onto onions and mayonnaise.
Cover the fish with a thin layer of mayonnaise.

The next layer is the boiled carrots, which you also cover with some mayo.

Next, make a layer of boiled egg whites. Personally I don’t like egg whites so if I make this salad for myself, I keep this layer as thin as possible and use only 2 egg whites or so (yes I throw away the rest, leaving only the yolks!). Spread some mayonnaise over the egg whites and top the salad with crumbled egg yolks.

Leave the Mimosa salad in the fridge for an hour or two before serving.

I’ve always loved burnt sugar. I love the simplicity and rusticity of those hard, translucent lollipops that you can make by chilling burnt sugar syrup; they’re golden-brown like amber and smooth like ice. We found this recipe of burnt sugar sauce in our old Rumanian cookbook (I’ve mentioned it before). I’m used to trusting their recipes, but the first attempt with the sauce resulted in a very runny, thin substance, so we had to considerably reduce the amount of water and milk. Also, I found out that the sauce needed to be cooled well before serving: it’s still too runny when warm. The sauce tasted of milky caramel with a hint of bitterness – that mild kind of bitterness that you find in, say, coffee.

I’ve always loved apples as well. Tart or honey-sweet, green or red, almost any kind, as long they are hard (can’t stand those mushy sorts) and as long as they smell like apples. Not like apple candy, apple shampoo or apple bubble gum, but like real, organic apples! The smell of fresh apples is charming and modest, it’s delicate like silk and melancholic like autumn; it’s one of Nature’s greatest, basic perfumes.

These pancakes are made with local apples that smell of rainy days, and kefir* – sour fermented milk drink. That’s why the pancakes are pleasantly sour-ish.
*If you cannot find kefir, try using buttermilk or a sour thin yogurt instead!

Ingredients
- For pancakes
2 ½ cup wheat flour
2 eggs
½ l kefir/buttermilk/sour yogurt
10 tsp sugar
1 tsp vanilla sugar
2 apples, peeled
Vegetable oil

- For sauce
6 tbsp sugar
90ml boiling water
100ml milk
1 tsp starch

Serves 4 as standalone dish, 6 as dessert

Make batter of eggs, sugar, vanilla sugar, flour, and kefir, adding flour and kefir gradually. Stir until well-blended.

Grate apples on a medium grater and add to the batter. Stir well.

Cook pancakes on a low to medium heat with vegetable oil.

The sauce:

Take a small saucepan of stainless steel or any other material resistant to burning sugar :)

Heat the sugar until medium brown (or light brown if you don’t like it strong). Add boiling water and keep boiling gently until all lumps have melted.

Dissolve starch in approximately a tablespoon cold water and pour it into the burnt sugar syrup while stirring vigorously.

Finally, add milk and simmer for a 5 minutes.

Chill the sauce before serving.

And, just some  pictures of winter in Old Riga, taken on Friday (the hoar frost is gone by now):

…can there be anything more soothing and comforting than a bowl of warm soup? For me, those creamy blended vegetable soups are the best; but if you like poultry – what about some translucent chicken broth with petite dumplings and tender carrots? To make the broth as clear and healthy as possible, we quickly boiled chicken in some water first and poured off that water.

Make this soup immediately before meals and do not leave it overnight: flour from dumplings would diffuse into broth and make it cloudy.

(Below you will also find some more winter pictures that Mom took from the window today. We always feed sparrows in wintertime, and only when it gets really cold, the cautious blackbirds visit us too).

Ingredients

-for the dumplings
1 egg
1 cup wheat flour
½ tsp salt
3 tbsp water

-for the broth
2 whole chicken legs
1 small onion, peeled
1 small carrot, peeled
Fresh dill, finely chopped
1 ½ l water + approx.800ml for pre-boiling
Salt to taste

Serves 4

Place the chicken into some boiling plain water to cover. Bring to a boil and pour off water. We also rinsed the chicken one more time.

Add new boiling water (1 ½ l) to the saucepan. Add chicken, carrot, and whole onion. Season with salt and keep boiling gently until ready (40 minutes or so), removing any scum that rises to the top.

While the soup is cooking, prepare the dumplings.

Combine all dumpling ingredients and knead stiff dough. Place the dough onto a flour-sprinkled surface, form one thick loaf and cut it into slices. Roll the slices into long snakes (1-1 ½ cm in diameter) and cut them into small cubes/cylinders/whatever you’d call them. Brush off any excess flour (remember, we want a very clear soup).

When the broth is ready, take out all ingredients.

You can throw away the onion now.

Remove skin from the chicken and separate meat from bones. Set aside.

In a separate small bowl, crash the cooked carrot with a fork. Set aside.

Place the dumplings into boiling broth and cook for 5 minutes, until all dumplings float to the top.

The soup is now ready! Return crashed carrot and pieces of chicken meat into the soup, and serve hot with fresh dill.

That’s amazing how quickly I’ve turned into a true, obsessive foodie. It’s also interesting how I manage to turn almost every conversation to food. For a lot of people, cooking and eating is just a part of daily routine, so I try not to be annoying, but somehow I always find myself discussing a new recipe, or a rare kind of spice, or a favourite dish.

Today as I visited my Granny, I managed to restrain my „foodie bug” for exactly 2 hours but then I finally asked Granny to show me her recipe notebook :) I borrowed the notebook from her for a couple of weeks. It’s packed with proven, time-tested recipes. I’m especially drooling over those potato recipes, like home-made potato chips.
I can’t wait for the next weekend when I’ll be able to try some of Granny’s best recipes. I won’t be cooking next Friday night though, because we’re going to see The Nutcracker. It’s a beautiful show, an absolute must-see for anyone who is new to ballet and classical music. I can’t wait!

And here’s a recipe for mushroom and rice balls that we made this weekend. They pair nicely with a sour cream sauce that we adapted from an old Polish cookbook. The sour and milky flavour blends perfectly with the freshness of dill leaves, and the creamy texture is just what we wanted.

Ingredients

- For mushroom&rice balls
500g mushrooms (champignons)
2 ½ cups boiled rice (approx. 160g raw)
1 onion
1 egg
Wheat flour
Vegetable oil
Salt to taste

- For sauce
3 tbsp fresh dill leaves, finely chopped
40g butter
40g wheat flour
120ml thick sour cream
150-200ml hot boiled water (depending on how thick you want your sauce to be)
Salt to taste

Serves 4 (3 pieces per person)

Dice mushrooms into small cubes, add salt to taste, and sautee with vegetable oil until ready.

Dice the onion, season with salt and fry in a small separate skillet.

Combine sauteed mushrooms, boiled rice, fried onions, and egg. Stir well.

Make 12 balls and roll them in flour. Flatten them just a tiny bit.

Heat some oil in a skillet and cook the mushroom&rice balls on a low heat for about 20 minutes, until both sides are golden-brown.

Making the sauce

In a small saucepan, melt the butter. Add flour and stir well.

When the mix begins to boil, add hot water. Bring to boil again, season with salt. Add sour cream and dill. Simmer for 2-3 minutes.

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Russian Vinegret is a type of salad made with beets, potatoes, carrots, pickles and onions. The word derives from the French vinaigrette. This might be because a typical Russian salad dressing is made with sour cream, while for Vinegret you use vegetable oil (which relates to vinaigrette). This is just my guess, however.

Like anything containing beets and root vegetables in general, Vinegret is a healthy salad. It’s also very easy to prepare, but of course you’ll have to be patient about boiling beets. Or, you can find packaged boiled beets in the supermarket.

Vinegret goes along perfectly with salted or smoked salmon.

An important note is to combine the vegetables right before you serve your Vinegret, and toss the beets with oil first. This will prevent beets from staining the other veggies. Potatoes turn red almost immediately anyway, but at least carrots, onions, and pickles will be saved. So be sure to cool your vegetables well before you dice and mix them together.

Ingredients

2 medium-sized carrots
2 medium-sized waxy potatoes
2 pickled cucumbers (we used 1 Russian salted cucumber instead)
1 beetroot (about 10cm in diameter)
½ small onion
3 tbsp vegetable oil
1 tbsp olive oil
Salt to taste

Serves 4

Boil the beetroot, unpeeled, in plain water for 30 to 45 minutes or until ready.

Boil the carrots and potatoes (all unpeeled) in plain water until ready. You can take out the carrots sooner if you feel like they’re ready.

Leave all vegetables to cool well.

Peel the boiled vegetables and dice them into small cubes. Dice the cucumbers and onions.

In your salad bowl, toss the beets with oil (use more olive oil instead of vegetable oil if you prefer). Add all remaining ingredients, season with salt, and gently stir.

Like our blog?
Please vote for our recipes to get published in The Foodista Best of Food Blogs Cookbook!
Super Healthy Root Vegetable Cream Soup
Fluffy Vanilla Custard Floating In Cranberry Kisel
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