Recipes: Culinaria: Russia by Marian Trutter
Nachyneny Perets (Stuffed Bell Peppers)
4 good sized Bell Peppers (I used red, orange, and yellow)
2 carrots, shredded
1 large onion, finely chopped
8 oz white cabbage (leftover from the stuffed cabbage we made earlier), finely chopped
2 tbsp oil
1 cup cooked rice
Dill, salt and pepper to taste
1 cup vegetable stock
Carefully cut the tops off the peppers and scrape out the insides. Saute all the vegetables until they are tender. Mix together with the rice (I suggest cooking your rice in vegetable broth for added flavor, it took a lot of salt to avoid being bland) and fill the peppers, replacing the tops. Pour the stock into a casserole dish, arrange the peppers so that they are standing up and covered with their tops, cover the dish and bake at 350 degrees for 30 minutes.
Kurka po Kyivske (Chicken Kiev)
4 thinly sliced chicken breast fillets
Salt and pepper
3 tbsp of flour
1 cup breadcrumbs
2 eggs
Oil for frying
It is most important that you shape your butter into elongated balls and re-chill it before attempting this recipe. We just put the butter in the freezer and cut it into cubes, I think this made wrapping the chicken around it much harder. That said, lay out the fillets and pound them into an even thickness, try to ensure that they are as wide as they are long, this will also help to keep the butter in the chicken when you fry it. Fold the sides of the chicken around the butter, then roll from the long end, tucking in the sides as you go. Some people use toothpick to keep it in place, we resorted to the ever useful kitchen twine after a few mishaps. Dip the chicken rolls in flour, then in egg, then in breadcrumbs. Through some oversight, the ingredients list in the cookbook did not include the breadcrumbs. We omitted them by accident. I rather think that extra thick batter would have also done a better job of keeping the butter in the fillets. Chill for 2 hours (another step we skipped, as it was already getting late).
Fry your rolled chicken in superhot oil for about 3 minutes. This will bubble and pop as all good fried food does, but if, about halfway through, you hear the bubbling and popping increase dramatically, it means that all your butter has leaked out of your chicken. Don't worry, you will still have tasty fried chicken, it just won't be Chicken Kiev. We had about a 50% success rate.
Those chicken rolls which retained their butter were purely delicious. Cutting into the roll was exciting, because you could sort of hear the butter squishing around and then it turned into a delicious lake on your plate. All that butter complemented the peppers nicely as well. Many variations to this recipe add parsley and garlic or other tasty additions to the butter. I contemplated this, but honestly, the more authentic recipes just call for butter and while it might be nice to experiment, things remain traditions for a reason; it might not have been healthy, but it was darn good.
Special thanks to kitchen helper Jay for being in charge of the frying after I splashed my finger into the hot oil! Thankfully, my hands were more or less covered in flour and egg, so I wasn't damaged badly, just battered.
About the book:
Our friend Pierre is still roaming around Moscow (which has started to burn!) and he is having grand fantasies about assassinating Napoleon. I'm not really sure how he thinks he will accomplish this, but he has a knife and a loaded pistol. We shall see what the future brings to him.
