Category: recipes

>Clarissa’s Split Pea Soup with Bacon: A Recipe

~ Clarissa ~ 22 Comments

>Recently, I have been sharing with people more and more often that cooking is my hobby.  Here and here I explained why I’m wary of confessing that I cook. This is not a hobby to feel good about when one receives e-mails from our university administration, saying: “It will be nice if female faculty members cook something for our Christmas party.” Today, however, at the request of reader sarcozona, I am sharing my recipe for Canadian split pea soup with bacon (for lack of ham.) For me, cooking is a creative process and I change every recipe every single time because it’s more fun that way.

1. Take one cup of yellow split peas and one cup of green split peas. Of course, you can take just one kind, but the soup looks a lot better and somehow more festive if two kinds are used.

2. Place the peas in 8-10 cups (according to how thick you like your soup) of bouillon. Lacking that, you can always use water (salted to taste). Using water instead of bouillon means you can be more generous with herbs and spices. Bring the peas in bouillon to a gentle boil, and let them simmer. They will stay simmering for 3-3,5 hours, so you will have time to prep all the other ingredients (and blog in the meanwhile) at leisure.

3. Take several rashers of bacon. Put them on a plate between two paper towels, and leave in the microwave for 4 minutes. Some people prefer to fry their bacon, but that leaves too much fat, whcih overpowers the taste of soup.

How come photos at professional cooking sites always
look so much better than the ones I make? Well,
at least I tried hard. 🙂

Break up the cooked rashers into small pieces and add them to the simmering soup.

4. An hour into the whole process, it’s time to think about herbs and spices. This is the place where experimenting and discovering new shades of taste is the most fun. Here are the spices I chose this time:

This is a hearty dish, meant to be eaten in winter. This is why I always choose sturdier herbs and spices to go with it. Feel free to experiment as much as you want, however. Peas and bacon are very strong, taste-wise, so there is quite a bit of freedom in how many herbs one uses in this recipe.I always keep tasting the soup and adding more herbs and spices as the time goes by.
5. Somewhere at the end of the second hour, is the time to add vegetables. Here are the ones I chose this time:

I dice the carrots first, then the turnip, and after that the potato, and add them to the cooking pot in that order. Vegetable can be cut in pretty large pieces, but all chunks should be of uniform size because otherwise

the texture will be too inconsistent.
6. As a huge lover of ginger and garlic, I then prepare a ginger garlic paste. It can be bought in a store but I don’t really trust it because God knows what weird substances have been added to it. Making a ginger garlic paste is beyond easy. You just take equal amounts of gignger and garlic, add a little bit of olive oil, and throw it all into a blender. Blend until you are satisfied with the texture of the paste.
Cooking and blogging at the same time
is fun! I wonder why I never did it before.
If you are a vegetarian who left out bacon, I suggest you really consider adding ginger. Unless you hate it, of course. If making a paste is too much of a drag, it’s perfectly OK to cut the gignger into tiny pieces and adding it to the soup.
7. It’s up to you to decide when the soup has reached the desired consistency. If you like it chunkier, 2,5 hours will suffice. If you wish it smoother, leave it simmering for up to 3,5 hours. Some people, puree the soup after it’s done, but I never do that. I lke experiencing the textures of all the ingredients, but that, of course, is a matter of personal taste.
8. I serve the soup with a salad because in winter I serve everything with a salad:

Some people add sour cream to the split pea soup but I find it a bit too much. Feel free to try it, though.

Here is a close up of the end result:

It could have been less chunky if I’d let it simmer a little longer.
But I was starving and couldn’t wait to eat any longer.

I just tried it and it tastes delicious. ÂˇBuen provecho!

Clarissa’s Organic Ratatouille

~ Clarissa ~ 15 Comments

The ingredients in this ratatouille are without an exception fresh and organic (including the herbs). Here they are:

20130615-185834.jpg

Young carrots, tomatoes, rutabaga, a couple of young potatoes, a pattypan squash, English peas, a baby turnip, butternut squash, a head of Boston lettuce, a kohlrabi, basil, chervil, oregano, savory, cilantro, garlic.

Dice the vegetables and add them to a pan with some olive oil beginning with the least soft vegetable. Add some water to cover the bottom of the pan. Gradually add the shredded herbs. Salt to taste. Everything should be sautéed very slowly for about 90 minutes.

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It tastes phenomenal. And if somebody tells me this is unhealthy, I give up because I can’t do anything healthier.

My Grandmother’s Recipe Book

~ Clarissa ~ 29 Comments

The most meaningful and amazing gift I got this holiday season was this book of recipes that used to belong to my grandmother Clarissa (the one who gave her name to this blog):

recipe book

It was very hard to be a good cook in the Soviet Union because finding ingredients was a heroic feat. And even if you were lucky to find anything, you always had to stick to the same few items. People went out of their way to create inventive recipes and these recipes were treasured and passed from one person to another.

Grandmother Clarissa was a phenomenal cook and she collected all these recipes in a notebook that later passed to my mother. And now my mother gave it to me. Grandmother’s main area of cooking expertise was baking. She baked a new cake every week-end and they were invariably beautiful.

I also love to cook but one thing I never do is bake. I don’t like baked goods, and I believe that the best dessert one can have is a piece of sausage. N., on the other hand, loves desserts and is especially partial to cakes. So I told him that this year I will make a resolution to make every single recipe from Grandmother Clarissa’s recipe book. N. was so happy that he had tears in his eyes although I warned him that I can’t promise these desserts will start coming out right soon.

So here is the very first cake from Grandmother Clarissa’s book that I just baked. It’s called “A Black Man’s Kiss.” Don’t blame me, blame the Soviet people for the strange names of these desserts.

Cake1

All of the elements tasted well separately. Now the cake will stand for 12 hours, and I will tell you how it tastes.

The recipe is under the fold.

Continue reading “My Grandmother’s Recipe Book” →

Roast Chicken With Baby Potatoes and Mushrooms: A Recipe

~ Clarissa ~ 6 Comments

I haven’t posted any recipes for a while, so I decided to share with my readers a recipe that might come in handy at the beginning of the academic year. This is a dish that takes very little time to prep but that can feed you for a week after you make it. If you have a stretch of a few busy days coming up, you make the dish and then forget about cooking for a while.

Here is what you will need:

– a roasting chicken;

– a sack of baby potatoes. Make sure they are baby potatoes because if you use regular potatoes, the dish won’t work.

– mushrooms of your choice;

– the herb of your choice. I use cilantro because I adore cilantro. Basil, tarragon or rosemary can also be used. There are also herb mixes that you can get instead of fresh herbs, if you are so inclined.

– half a stick of butter (can be skipped if you are trying to be healthy.)

– a few cloves of garlic.

1. In a roasting pan (I use a cheap disposable one to cut down on cleaning time), place quartered baby potatoes and mushrooms broken into pieces. There is no need to peel the potatoes after washing them. Just quarter them as fast as you can and throw some mushrooms on top. Add salt and pepper.

I like using baby potatoes of different colors because it always makes a dish more visually appealing

2. Melt the butter, squeeze a few cloves of garlic into it, cut up the herbs and mix everything in a bowl. It’s perfectly fine to skip the butter if you are trying to be healthy. Here is what the mix will like if you decide to use the butter:

3. Wash the chicken, salt and pepper it. I chose a big chicken because I have a few busy days coming up and want it to last for a while. Rub the herb, garlic and butter mix on the chicken. Try to get some of the mix under its skin. Then, stick some remaining fresh herbs into the inside cavity. Then, place the chicken on top of the potatoes and the mushrooms.

4. Place the entire thing into a heated oven and forget about it until it’s cooked. I never use a thermometer to determine when the chicken is ready. My way of knowing that it’s done is by smell. When it starts to emit a really delicious aroma, it’s done. This is how the dish will look when it’s done:

I had to stand on a chair to take the photo. 🙂

 

Clarissa’s Frog Legs Soup: A Recipe

~ Clarissa ~ Leave a comment

I love making soups because you can be as inventive as you want and use up all the stuff you have floating around the refrigerator. Today, I decided to make a soup of frog legs and fish. Once again, a Google search didn’t offer any interesting recipes, so I decided to improvise. It turned out so good that I have already devoured two big bowls.

Here is what you will need:
3-4 pairs of frog legs
3-4 fish of any kind you like. The fish should be skinless but it is very important not to remove either the backbone or the tail. They are needed to make the broth less watery.
3 potatoes
2-3 carrots
salt, herbs, spices
some fresh sage
Here are the frog legs and the fish all ready for cooking. Separate frog leg pairs in two so that you have to separate legs. There is no need to chop them up onto smaller pieces.
You can use either fish stock or simply water if you have no stock handy. Place the chopped carrots and the frog legs into the broth (or water) and place the pan on high. You will need to bring it to the boiling point and then reduce the heat immediately.
Add a bay leaf, salt and pepper, and any herbs and spices you like. I added dry oregano, cumin seeds, several cloves, mustard seeds, and when the soup was almost ready, some fresh sage. Peel, cube and add potatoes to the soup. After 10 minutes or so, cut the fish into chunks of the same size and add them to the pot. Let the soup simmer on slow until the potatoes taste ready but not mushy. Here is how the soup ended up looking:
If you let it stand for a few hours after making it, the soup will taste even better.

Vegetarian: Clarissa’s Vegetable Ragout

~ Clarissa ~ Leave a comment

Recently, I felt a craving for a good, colorful vegetable ragout. However, a long Internet search didn’t result in a single recipe that didn’t look boring or monochromatic and didn’t include either meat or canned vegetables. So I had to invent my own recipe. Some of the ingredients of this vegetarian ragout were things that I’d never tried before, like eggplants. (Yes, I’d never eaten eggplant in any form in my life.) I really loved the result and decided to share it with my readers.

Here is what my Vegetable Ragout ended looking like:
I’m folding the detailed description of how to make it under the jump break to spare those who aren’t interested the trouble of scrolling through endless photos of diced vegetables.

These are the main ingredients I chose for my ragout but you can, of course, change any of them. I selected three kinds of baby potatoes (yellow, red and black) because it’s very important to have a colorful ragout, juicy heirloom tomatoes, zucchini, yellow squash, baby turnips, baby eggplant, young carrots, garlic, ginger, and a bunch of cilantro.

Peel several cloves of garlic and crush them. Heat some olive oil in a large pan and place the garlic in the oil. In the meanwhile, cut your baby potatoes in half and place them in the pan, too.
Every step of this recipe looks colorful
and delicious. And it smells fantastic, too
Dice the turnips and the young carrots making sure that the chunks are not too small. If you cut them too small, they might become mushy, which is something we are trying to avoid. Vegetables in a ragout should be cooked but still preserve some firmness. Otherwise, we can just make a puree and be done with it. Then, add a bay leaf and some coriander seeds, if you like them. Dice ginger in very small cubes and add them to the pan.
The white chunks are pieces of baby turnip
Cut baby eggplant and add it to the pan. You don’t have to spread it around the way I did, of course. I just did it to make sure the photo is pretty, that’s all. During this entire time, the pan has been on medium-high.
In the same manner, cut the zucchini and the squash and throw them into the pan. Now it’s time to add herbs and spices (the choice is really up to you) and start making the sauce. Put 1 tablespoon of coarse-grained Dijon mustard and 1 tablespoon of tomato paste into the pan. Mix everything up. Add as much or as little salt as you want. (I’m trying to avoid salt altogether, so I added none and the ragout still tasted heavenly.) This is how your ragout will look after you complete this step:
Dissolve a tablespoon of flour in a cup of cold water and add the mix to the ragout. This will thicken the sauce. Close the pan with a tight-fitting lid and let the ragout simmer until the vegetables are almost ready. Then, dice the tomatoes and add them to the ragout. Also, add fresh cilantro. This is how the ragout will look at this point:
Mix everything up, close the lid, and leave the ragout on slow for another 10 minutes. And here we have it:

>Clarissa’s Cabbage Leaves Stuffed with Meat and Rice (Golubtsy): A Recipe

~ Clarissa ~ 4 Comments

>

These Cabbage Leaves Stuffed with Meat and Rice  are called “golubtsy” in my country and constitute one of the favorite dishes of the Russian-speaking people. Tim, a reader from Germany, tells me that a similar dish exists there, and I have also seen something very similar at a Chinese buffet. However, I strongly believe that my recipe is one of the most delicious out there. Just compare the photo of how they look when I make them to a picture I posted yesterday from one of the most popular Russian-language website.
And these are my golubtsy:

Since not everybody is interested in cooking and there are quite a few photos that accompany this recipe, I will fold the recipe itself under the jump break. Otherwise, it will occupy the entire homepage.

What you will need:

For the cabbage pockets:
– 1 lb of ground meat
– a big head of cabbage
– a medium tomato
– a medium onion
– 5 cloves of garlic
– 1/2 bunch of cilantro
– a cup of rice
– some salt
For the sauce:
You can either just use your favorite tomato sauce and avoid the aggravation, or make my favorite tomato sauce. To make it you will need:
– a small can of tomato paste. I use Hunt’s because it’s the best, in my opinion
– 2 carrots
– a can of canned beets
– carrot juice
– 1/2 bunch of cilantro
– a cup of sour cream

1. Take a tomato, an onion, 5 peeled cloves of garlic, and 1/2 bunch of cilantro.

Put them all into a food processor and blend until all chunks disappear.

2. Add the resulting mix to the ground meat. For ground meat, I usually combine ground pork and ground beef for most of my recipes. Then add salt to taste and mix everything up. This is how the whole thing will look as a result.

3. Boil some rice until it’s just al dente (make sure you don’t overcook it!) and add it to the filling.

It is very important to make sure that the rice is quite firm and not mushy when you add it to the filling. Mix everything up, and your filling is ready.

4. Take a big head of cabbage and carefully remove the 8 or 9 of the biggest outer leaves. Try to remove them without tearing them. Don’t be afraid, though. I’m the clumsiest person on the planet, and I managed to do it without spoiling a single leaf. It helps to make a cut at the top of the leaf where you see this really thick part joining the leaf to the cabbage.

5. Boil some water in a pan and plunge the cabbage leaves into the boiling water one by one. The goal is to make the leaves soft enough to be folded but not mushy.

Five to seven seconds in the boiling water are usually enough.

6. After you get the cabbage leaf out of the boiling water and let it cool down some, you will need to cut off the thickest part of the leaf. I draw a very uneven red circle around it in the next picture. I’m insanely proud of my technological sophistication right now.

7. Put some filling into the cabbage leaf and fold it like a little envelope.

8. Then, place all the folded stuffing-filled cabbage leaves into a pan. This is what the whole thing will look like:

9. As I said, now you can either pour your favorite tomato sauce on top and let the whole thing simmer on a very slow fire for about an hour, or you can make the sauce the way I do it. Mix a cup of beet juice (from a can of canned beets), a cup of carrot juice, a small can of tomato paste, and a cup of sour-cream. Pour it on top of the cabbage pockets. Add some diced carrots and beets. Put some fresh herbs (cilantro is what I prefer) into the pan, too. Let everything simmer for 1 hour. And you are done.

10. Don’t tell me this isn’t beautiful:

>Seafood Risotto

~ Clarissa ~ Leave a comment

>

This is the seafood risotto I just made. Making risotto is extremely hard. The first time I made it, it stuck to the plate like cement and, I couldn’t get it to budge in any direction. I still ate it all just to punish myself for wasting great ingredients. Of course, I had to use a steak knife to saw through that sad plate of risotto-based Crazy Glue.

Restaurants almost never know how to make risotto either. More often than not, you just get a plate of rise smothered in cheese. Even expensive, famous restaurants frequently mess it up. There was an absolutely perfect mushroom risotto that was served at a restaurant on McGill College in Montreal. Sadly, that restaurant has closed. Even at The Modern restaurant in New York the risotto was the weakest dish of all.

The good news is that with every risotto I make, I get a little better. This seafood risotto I made today looks great and doesn’t stick to the plate at all. This particular version of risotto contains clams, scallops, shrimp and oysters. Even if the risotto itself were bad, the beautiful seafood would go a long way to redeeming it.

P.S. By huge popular demand of one reader, here is the recipe:

1. Pour some olive oil into a pan. Add some crushed garlic and fry it for not more than a couple of minutes. Add 1 cup of arborio rice. Make sure that every grain of rice is covered in olive oil. 
2. When the rice starts acquiring a slightly golden hue, slowly add one glass of dry white wine to the pan. (Feel free to skip the wine and add fish stock instead.) Keep mixing the rice the entire time. It should be prevented from sticking to the bottom of the pan.
3. When the wine reduces, add some fish stock. Keep adding the stock in little portions as it keeps reducing. Remember that you will need to stop adding liquids when the rice is al dente. Nothing is worse than a risotto whose cook didn’t stop on time.
4. In the meanwhile, peel and devein shrimp. Place clams in a pan of boiling water. In a bout two minutes, the clams will open. When that happens, take them out of the pan. If there are clams that failed to open, throw them out.
5. When the rice is about 5  minutes away from being al dente, add the shrimp, the oysters, and the scallops to the pan. (This seafood can be substituted with any other kind.) Add some grated Parmesan. I also add cilantro because I love it and add it to everything. 
6. When the risotto is about two minutes away from getting done, place the clams strategically all over the surface of the risotto. Make sure you serve it while it’s hot. Leftovers are not bad either but nothing beats freshly made risotto.

>Clarissa’s Stewed Rabbit: A Recipe

~ Clarissa ~ Leave a comment

>

If you never tried rabbit, maybe it’s time you did. Rabbit is good, lean meat and, if cooked right, it is delicious.
What you will need:
1 medium sized rabbit
1 onion
1 bay leaf
2 tablespoons of coarse-grained Dijon mustard
2 tablespoons of sour cream
1 tablespoon of flour
1 teaspoon of rosemary
half a can of green peas
herbs of your choosing
water of bouillion
salt and pepper

1. First, you’ll have to defrost your rabbit because they are usually sold frozen in this country and wash it.

2. Then, you’ll have to butcher it. So if you are at all sentimental about cute, little bunnies, then maybe this is not a recipe for you. The good news is that butchering a rabbit is extremely easy. It usually takes me about five minutes to cut it into pieces like the ones you can see in the picture:

3. Season the pieces of rabbit with salt and pepper. Then, brown them lightly on both sides in olive oil:

4. After the pieces have browned, add them to a large pan, and cover them with bouillion or water. Add an onion, some black pepper and your favorite herbs. I have added a bay leaf, rosemary (which goes really well with rabbit), some mustard seeds (because I love them) and some coriander. Bring the water or stock to a very light boil and put the pan on medium-low heat for about 30 minutes.

5. Add 1-2 tablespoons of coarse-grained Dijon mustard to the pan. However, if you only have cheap mustard of the kind that people put on hot dogs, it’s better to skip this step altogether. Bad mustard can kill this dish completely. Dissolve two tablespoons of sour cream in cold water and add it to the stew. Then, dissolve a tablespoon of flour in cold water and add it to the pan. This is how your rabbit will look after you do all this:

Add some salt to taste to the stew, cover it and leave it to simmer for another 45-60 minutes, or until the rabbit becomes tender. When the rabbit is almost done, add some green peas.
6. I serve the rabbit over mashed potatoes but any other garnish will do, of course:

Enjoy!

>Clarissa’s Sauerkraut Salad: A Recipe

~ Clarissa ~ 7 Comments

>

This is a very traditional salad that we make often in my culture. Since good sauerkraut is hard to come around in the area where I live, I make my own. It isn’t difficult at all to make it, and if people are interested, I can share how it’s done. My country isn’t rich in vegetables and vegetarian options do not abound. This is probably the closest we come to a vegetarian and healthy dish. (Here I do need to remind you that Ukrainian cuisine is probably among the most unhealthy in the world. Everything is salted, pickled, and smothered in lard. It is what it is, so I’m just trying to make the best of it.)
What you are going to need:
sauerkraut
potatoes
beets
pickles
scallions
canned green peas
olive oil
Some people also add carrots but I make my sauerkraut with carrots, I don’t add any more to the salad to avoid overpowering it with a carroty taste.
I don’t put any proportions here because it is really a matter of individual taste. Just keep adding ingredients and stop when you reach the taste profile that makes you happy.
1. Boil some potatoes but make sure they are not overdone. Nothing is worse than a mushy potato in a salad. Potatoes should still remain pleasantly firm inside after you boil them. 
2. Many people boil their beets too, but it’s always better to bake them in foil. Beets should also be taken out of the oven before they become mushy inside.

3. While things are boiling and baking, cut up some scallions and pickles and mix them in a big bowl with sauerkraut and green peas. Don’t overdo the pickles. Two medium-sized one are more than enough for the bowl of this size.

4. In the absence of a Russian food store in a close physical proximity, these are the pickles that I use for all my recipes because they come very close in taste to the real thing. I don’t suggest getting any other brand of pickles because the strong vinegary taste of most North American brands will demolish the taste of all my recipes.

5. Then, when potatoes and beets are ready, dice them and add them to the salad. The smaller you dice them, the better the quality of the salad will be. Then, add a little olive oil (I never add more than a tea spoon, unless the sauerkraut is extremely dry), mix everything, and enjoy.