Making Belarus cuisine is like returning back home from a long trip. Overall, it looks familiar, but you discover forgotten details all over again. Anyway, for the Belarus meal, I selected three dishes — Paparats Kvetka (“Fern Flower”, which is actually meat patties stuffed with butter and cheese), Draniki (Potato Pancakes), and Kulaga (a sort of fruit sauce).
| Paparats Kvetka |
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This is the dish I was referring to when I compared Belarusian cuisine to returning home after some absence. The dish itself is very familiar to anyone from the former USSR but some details are surprising. It is basically a meat patty fried in sunflower oil. However, this particular patty is stuffed with a mixture of cheese and butter. Yumm! … but not kosher 😉
Alex and Matthew loved the result and were even fighting for who gets a bigger size patty (well, Matthew was the winner, of course). Eugene tried a piece but wasn’t impressed (no surprise here). Anyway, here is the recipe I found on one of the Russian language sites and translated myself. Ingredients
In a small bowl, combine butter and cheese. With wet hands form small sticks half an inch in diameter (they should look kind of like a string cheese). Set in refrigerator to harden. Blend onion and bread in a food processor until smooth. In a large bowl combine ground meat, egg and onion and bread mixture. Add salt and black pepper to taste. Mix well. With wet hands, form a small oval patty and place a butter and cheese stick on it. Cover with another small patty. Now you should have a patty stuffed with butter and cheese mixture so it is time to cover it in breadcrumbs and fry in sunflower oil on medium heat until done. |
| Draniki — Potato Pancakes |
| Hello, my old friends — draniki! I didn’t even have to look for the recipe. I know it. It is one of the simplest yet tastiest dishes I know. The whole family loves them including Eugene. Here is my simple recipe.
Ingredients
Place shredded potato in a colander and get rid of the excess liquid. Mix all ingredients. Heat a nonstick skillet on medium high heat and add oil. Using a tablespoon place potato mix to a hot skillet and press it down to make a nice oval or round shape. Fry pancakes on both sides until crispy and golden brown. Serve hot with sour cream.
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| Kulaga — Fruit Sauce |
| This sauce is so simple that even my 5 year old could make it. And he did! Eugene wanted to help so I let him make it (with some supervision, of course 🙂 ).
It is pretty simple. Take a bag of frozen berries (we had cherries, blueberries, strawberries, sour cherries, raspberries and blackberries). Put the berries in a stainless steel pot and heat on medium high heat. When they start to release juices, add about 2 tbsp of honey or sugar. Mix. Let it come to a gentle boil. In the meantime, combine in a small bowl about 1 tsp of flour with 3 tsp water. Make sure the mixture is smooth. Carefully add the flour mix to berries and stir. Let boil for about 1 minute until it thickens. Done! Enjoy with ice cream or crépes or simply as is.
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