Smoked chicken layered salad - easy option for any occasion

One very good friend of mine recently watched 'Julie and Julia' (if you haven't seen it and you love good food and Meryl Streep you should do so) and inspired her mum to start a blog, which i think is absolutely amazing! We all know that there is nothing better than your mum's cooking - and these brave ladies decided to share their secret family recipes with the whole (Russian speaking) world. I will link it here in case you are interested to check out a mixture of Jewish and Eastern European cuisine recipes - Inna's blog. Recently I was doing some cooking and I decided why not to share this one with you too. This one is quite an easy salad (despite the fact that there is a lot of chopping to do) that my mum does sometimes when we have guests around or something like that. So here it is: You will need following:

Smoked chicken - about 400g
Chinese leaf or sweet lettuce
Colorful peppers - you can choose one colour it just adds some brightness to the salad
Cucumber
Tomatoes
Sliced tinned mushrooms- or you can fry them yourself
Pineapple chunks and
Mayo and sour cream for the sauce between the layers

To make it easier I prefer to chop all the ingredients first and then just create the layers of the salad. Also it looks nice if you have a glass form for the salad. However, it is all about the taste at the end of the day :) For the first layer I chop the lettuce and put it in the glass form

next is chicken

after that we want to add some colour by adding peppers and coating it with mayo and sour cream. I usually mix 2 table spoons of sour cream and 2 tbs of mayo in a separate bowl.

after, a new section of our salad begins with pineapple chunks and mushrooms

add on your chopped tomatoes and cucumber

finally add on everything what is left from chicken and lettuce and coat it with the mayo layer.

Sorry, don't have the photo of the final result. But I promise it was tasty. 

Try it out and let me know what you think.

Bon appetite!

A healthy living attempt

So here I am back in Leicester all on my own and all piled up with my books and articles for Dissertation. However, I have to say spring has finally come here and there are even some crocus in Victoria Park and this is the positive thing.
I have decided that it is about the time when I need to think of coming summer and get all my curves shaped :D So, I am attempting a healthy living, which for now includes of healthy eating. I know it is very stressful time for students (And 100 times more stressfull if you are a final year one, who I am..) and there is often no time for a proper meal or hot food, BUT! it is worth giving it a try. 
So when I came back and I went to Asda do my food shopping I totally avoided the department of snack and crisps. I do LOVE Doritos and I have a habbit to lie with a pack of them in my bed watching my 90210 or MadMen or Youtube tutorials, funny videos.. or whatever else. I sad NO! (not to all the episodes obvs) but to crisps, jellies and fast food.. at least for a little while.. we'll see how long I can survive. Don't think that I've become one of those crazy people who is counting calories and not eating anything but salads, no way, but just healthy cut down on unnessecary stuff that I can live without. Instead of crisps I have bought loads of fruits,vegetables, cheese and olives - these are the foods I love and all together they can replace Doritos :D . One thing I have left in my food cupboard is of course chocolat. There are number of reasons for that - 1. It is good for your brain (This argument is impossible to omit!) 2. It makes me happy (well, you know.. useless to argue) 3. Chocolat normally does not consist of all these artificial components and unhealthy things that other sweets have. So chocolat is an all time winner (in reasonable amounts of course).

So here is what I am eating. I try to cook for more than one day, so I don't have to do it all the time, but here is one of my day routine eating habbits:

I often see that online:

I can't say that I follow that, but I do try to have a good breakfast, so I don't feel hungry as soon as I get to the library :)

Here it is my breakfast cereal. Well, I need to tell here a story Peter (my boyfriend, so you know, as you will probably meet this name often throughout my blog) introduced me to these, and OMG with this first bowl he gave me I fell in love. It is so crispy as I love (btw I have to eat my cereal as soon as I add milk, as I hate when they become soft.. euuuh ) and it has some real strawberries and note this 'Absolutely nothing artificial'. It really tasty, a bit pricey, but it worth it! 

Here are some options for lunch:

 

On the top picture the salad I made today: it has some lettuce, fried chicken with some spices, fried onion and mushrooms, some tomatoes and of course olives!! It is quite easy to make, it is healthy and also filling.
Now on the bottom picture is actually the original salad, made by Peter and where I took my ideas from :D 2nd plate is the same concept but instead it has some fried prawns. It is delicious! You can experiment with vegetables and other ingredients

Finally, some dinner ideas. Again on the left my version, on the right Peter's cooking.
So my version is something what at home we call plov - it is dish with rice, some vegetables, spices and meat. As I don't eat pork I do it with chicken or turkey. My granny also adds some raisins to it. It is quite easy - as I boil rice and separately prepare vegetables and meat then mix it add some spices and sometimes soy sauce and here it is.
Peter's version is more advanced as you could guess from the picture. Again similar idea, but instead of rice some pasta and more ingredients to it. He put some tomatoes, courgette and some blue cheese.  And it is very tasty. Again it is simple and leaves some space for your creativity

Yeah also I love teas.. but there will be a separate post on it sometime later.

*******************

Here is my attempt to healthy living - healthy eating.
Next step and my aim - jogging. I will let you know how it goes ;)

Bye bye 

Making Olivie - Traditional Russian Salad

So here it is the most traditional salad in Russian cuisine, which is present on every celebration, which usually made in enormous amounts. It is the main dish on New Years Celebration, but when I come home I always ask my mum or granny to make with me.

Our recipe is modified and is different from the original one, but still it is Olivie. It is very tasty, but if you are counting calories better stay away from it as it has almost a full jar of mayonnaise..

So lets get started. What will you need:
4-5 big potatoes
3-4 eggs
5-6 small/medium pickled cucumbers
One big boiled sausage (Doktorskaja/Detskaja kolbasa)
Mayonnaise
Salt and black pepper
In traditional recipe you have to add one can of sweet peas
We add some crab sticks

and of course you need a big bowl

1. Boil potatoes and eggs. You can do this in the evening and just let it cool down for the night and you can start doing the salad next morning.
Useful tip: when boiling eggs (prepare hard boiled ones) straight after taking the pot off the hob and put them under the tap of very cold water, it will peel off easily then.

2. Peel potatoes and dice them into small cubes (I like when the pieces are very small) and put it into the bowl:

3. Dice sausage and add it to the bowl

4. Dice pickled cucumbers (it is better to use the ones that are pickled with salt, not with vinegar)

5. Dice the eggs, and add them as well, try to make all the pieces the same size
6. We also add some crab sticks also dice them into small cubes (in traditional version you can add green peas)

7. Add some mayo, salt and pepper by taste

8. Mix it all well, you can add some greenery like dill and put it all into nice bowl you want it to be served in. And here it is Salad Olivie is ready

Holidays, Home and Passover

As it is the time of Easter Holidays, I went back home to Tallinn. Surprisingly, it is warmer than in Leicester (geographical note - Estonia has much colder climate, BUT against stereotypes it DOES NOT snow all year round :D) and I enjoy the sunshine of spring that is fighting with this forever-lasting winter. I came back yesterday and just in time for the Celebration of Passover.

As you see I got to eat some delicious traditional Jewish food as gefilte fish - it such fish (as you could guess) dish, made of mixture of the poached fish.

I have mixed feelings about this celebration. It is quite of a BIG DEAL one as it commemorates the liberation of Jewish people from the ancient Egyptian slavery. I am assuming that this story is quite of a well-know for every one as most of the people are familiar with Moses and 10 plagues of Egypt. The moment when Bruce Almighty splits the soup is an echo of the events when Moses freed his people from the slavery in Egypt by splitting the Red sea. Bad comparison, however quite descriptive.

So here is what I like about this celebrations:
- It is a family Celebration, so everyone gathers together around the table and it always feels great

- It has a special order. This Passover (Pesah) meal is called in Hebrew Pesah Seder and it means order. Therefore there are special steps of the process of meal. This makes you even hungrier and everyone wait till the last step when you can eat everything. 

- Food lies on the plate also in a special order,and every product symbolises specific thing -  and I love to put it nicely :)

- Me and my mum always sing some traditional songs

However there are some not that pleasant parts of it:

- It lasts for 7 days, and all these days NO BREAD is allowed, to be more precise no wheat or flour. And i Love all the pastries and cookies, and... oh, it makes my belly cry. On the plus side - it is a good and not too strict diet. Why is that? - you will ask, apparently when Jewish people left the Egypt, they had no time to wait for the dough to rise and left with no bread at all, they were eating what now is called Matza - flat unleavened bread. 

So now you have some general picture of this celebration. To describe the whole order would take me good few pages, so i guess that this one will just give you an overview.

Happy Passover, everyone!

PS: For some entertainment click here