Category Archives: side dish
Peanut Sweet Corn Rice Salad
It feels good to wake up in the morning during the spring, summer or autumn, pick up some goodies in your small garden or take a bike ride for a quick stop to your local market and few minutes later, while whistling your favorite song (in my case a few repetitive notes from enchanting My Sister by Tindersticks these days) and make a huge, colorful and refreshing vegan salad, which will substitute your whole meal. During the winter, though, it’s kind of a challenge to come up with a perfect salad recipe. But I love challenges, so a few years back I started to improve my winter salad selection and …
Russian Salad Olivier
I always liked stories about dishes I prepare, because most of them are simple, warm and can lift up the atmosphere at your dining table. However, this Russian salad Olivier is a delicious treat, not only for its ingredients, but also for the affairs and intrigue that follows it. The story has twists and turns, like in some mini crime novel, and it initially took place in the nineteenth century in Russia. Prior to the 19th century, salad was not a common dish in Russia; people ate vegetables in soups and side dishes until few nobles from Moscow began to hire French chefs to cook for them. One of those …
Corn Cabbage Salad
I make this light salad when in a hurry; when no inspiration – corn cabbage salad, even when something sometimes aches I turn to this salad, but most frequently when I feel like I should eat something nutritious and healthy, I take out a head of cabbage, sharp knife and start chopping. So, you guessed it, this cabbage corn salad is my favorite dish – well, one of many, but I do make it quite often. I make it so frequently that I don’t need measuring spoons anymore, and over the years I even developed a few versions of this salad. Three, more precisely. They are all nice, and they all have the same basic ingredients, and depending on the …
Baked Celery Fries
Celery is an amazing vegetable that is whole eatable. It can be consumed raw, cooked or dried and many wise ancient nations knew that. Ayurwedic medicine recommended celery seeds for colds and indigestion and since ancient times Chinese people took celery as a treatment for high blood pressure. Greeks made celery wine which athletes drank before some important competition; elixir made from celery was considered an aphrodisiac and stalk with leaves represented symbol of fertility. And imagine this – modern scientists found out that celery contains androsterone, a pheromone released by sweat to attract opposite sex. Modern medicine uses celery seeds for its oil powerful effects which fight a number …
Green Bean Dill Side Dish
Let’s face it, a majority of people – and especially kids, simply do not like green beans. I guess the main reason is their bland sort of humble taste. So, even when various nutritional studies proved that these small green pods with their tender seeds are very healthy, mainly because of its fiber and high dosage of vitamin K, A and C (and so many more good nutrients), people simply do not use them on regular basis in their diet. Well, this wasn’t the case with me. Simply because of one reason – our neighbors (an older couple Jan and Katja) had a garden, and in that garden somehow their …