Herrings under a fur coat aka salad "pod shuboy"

I remember eating this salad for the first time in St Petersburg. It was in the same building that Pushkin had his last glass of water - or it could have been a lemonade, no one is sure - before he went off to his fateful duel. It's remarkable to think that, until relatively recently, that was a perfectly acceptable way to handle certain disputes. Especially those of the heart, it would seem. It' very... Russian, isn't it? So romantic, so elegantly blasé, even in the face of death. So incredibly glamorous.
And St. Petersburg is incredibly glamorous. And eating this salad, in an elegant cafe on Nevsky Prospect, I felt incredibly glamorous too. I hope that if you make it, it will do the same for you

The salad itself is supposed to look like a cake, colourful and layered. The beetroot, apple, potato, carrot, egg and herring are a fantastic combination, complementing one another at every opportunity. Once you've made this salad a few times, you will probably have your own way with it - some people grate, others chop, the layers vary. I do a layer of herrings at the bottom, then onion, then potato, then the sauce, the beetroot, carrot, apple, eggs, another layer of sauce and dill on top

Ingredients

Herrings in oil - the simplest you can get
Red onion, finely sliced, or if you bought herrings with onion then use that
Potatoes, cooked and grated or sliced
Beetroot, cooked and grated
Carrots, grated
Granny Smith apple, grated
Eggs (4-5), hard boiled and chopped
Dill

Sauce

1/2 Mayo
1/2 Sour cream
Salt
White pepper

Black potato and golden beetroot salad with rainbow chard

...and a side-serving of heartbreak. I'm just kidding - on the side we had 2 delicious, unpasteurized, vegetarian cheeses from The Deli Downstairs: Ardrahan and Triclemore. That's not to say that I'm not heartbroken right now, but I'm not serving that up for lunch. For once in my life, I'm actually dealing with it incredibly well. Everything is much easier when you stop trying to get away from the suffering that is a natural part of life. You know that happiness is just around the corner and it will taste so much sweeter, once you've had a bite of bitter disappointment. It's a bit like this salad come to think of it - sweet beetroot offsetting the bitter chard

 

In preparation for this salad, you need to cook and cool both the potatoes and the beetroot. The beets we peel, the Shetland blacks we leave in their stylish little coats. For the dressing, we grate the horseradish root and mix in a jar with the lemon juice, mayo, olive oil, garlic salt and pepper. I used just an inch of horseradish, which made it pretty mild. Mix the potatoes, beets and leek with the dressing, and place on top of the chard. Eat with slices of cheese on the side, a glass of white wine and pleasant company

Ingredients

Golden beetroot, cooked, peeled and chopped

Shetland black potatoes, cooked and chopped (depending on size)

Leek, chopped

Rainbow chard

Mayonnaise

Lemon juice

Horseradish root

Garlic salt

Olive oil

Black pepper

A couple of beetroot salads

One of the few good things about working in the arse-end of nowhere, is that you are close to the countryside. In our case, that means Osterley Park and a great farm shop selling fruit and vegetables grown on the grounds. I always get tempted into buying something. I mean, look - massive local beetroot at 20p each. And they look so autumnal sitting there, nestling among the chestnut leaves

Since I'm all about being healthy and pure right now (last two weekends excluded), I decided to make a couple of salads - one more Mediterranean, one Eastern European in flavour. The beetroots need to be cooked for about 40min, cooled, then peeled first

Mediterranean Beetroot Salad

Rocket

Beetroot

Sunflower seeds, toasted

Hallumi cheese, fried in olive oil until crispy

Squeeze of lemon juice

Olive oil

Black pepper

East European Beetroot Salad

Tiny potatoes, cooked, cooled and halved

Beetroot

Dill

Creme fraiche/yoghurt
Salt

Beetroot and goat's cheese salad

This is a salad inspired by my friend Lou Lou and a sandwich that we ate together last weekend in Oxford. I had no idea that beetroot and goat's cheese went together so well. You also need something nutty in this salad - I used toasted sunflower seeds, Lou Lou says she used walnuts in her version. You can replace the baby salad leaves with rocket for a more peppery flavour. I bought all my ingredients at Rectory Farm near Oxford, which is where I always stock up before going back to London. You can pick your own here, so this time we braved the thorny gooseberry bushes, as they won't be around for long and I hadn't eaten gooseberries in years. I cooked them for a few minutes before blending them with cinnamon, honey and natural yoghurt

Ingredients

Beetroot, cooked and peeled

Baby salad leaves

Crumbly goat's cheese

Toasted sunflower seeds

Good quality olive oil and balsamic vinegar

Garlic salt

Pepper

The perfect Friday-night-in with friends, a kitty and mezze

Is it weird that I didn't notice that my fridge wasn't working until a week after I got it? That, in fact, it had never worked... I was so happy to have one, and it was so lovely and shiny that I completely disregarded the fact that all my food was going off and that it wasn't even vaguely cold in there. There's a life lesson in that somewhere... or perhaps it's just my usual life lesson. As a wise man that I met briefly at a party once told me (we had clearly got on to the meaning of life) "a lesson is repeated until it is learnt". I guess that I need to learn to look a bit deeper.

Anyway, I still don't have any furniture, and only a couple of plates, so I decided to have a few friends over for an indoor picnic last Friday. J and Anja came, as did Mariana and Coco/Kiki/Mimi (the kitten with many names), and we ate lots of mezze. I bought things like dips and crudites, because you've got to be realistic about time limitations and stress levels, and made three salads (slightly adapting some of them) from my bible (that's Claudia Rodin's Book of Middle Eastern Cooking), as well as the feta cheese and spinach pastries I often make when friends come round. The salads were chosen for their simplicity as well as their ingredients, because I only had about 40min to prepare everything

Lentil and tomato salad

2 tins of lentils, drained

1 large onion, chopped

4 tblsp olive oil

4 tomatoes, chopped

Small bunch of flat leaf parsley, chopped

Juice of 1 lemon

Fry the onion in the oil for a couple of minutes,  before adding the tomatoes and parsley. Cook these all together for about 10min. Add the lentils and salt and pepper, as well as the lemon juice. Cook this until the juices have more-or-less evaporated, then pour into a serving bowl and leave to cool. Rodin's recipe uses dried, brown lentils, vinegar instead of lemon juice, fewer tomatoes, and normal parsley. It is a small miracle that I am now adding any parsley at all as I have always hated it, but I have realized that it is, in fact, essential to Middle-Eastern cooking. And that flat leaf parsley actually tastes OK

Beetroot salad

500g cooked, peeled, diced beetroot

2tblsp lemon juice

2tblsp olive oil

300ml yoghurt

2tblsp flat leaf parsley

salt

Mix the lemon juice with the oil and yoghurt and beat well. Add the beetroot bits and half the parsley. Finally, pour into a serving dish and garnish with more parsley. This is a really pretty, pink salad

Cucumber and mint salad

Cucumber, diced or sliced

Fresh mint, chopped

Olive oil

Lemon juice

Salt

Rodin advices that you sprinkle the peeled cucumber with salt and let it drain for half an hour, however, I neither peeled it nor let it drain, and the salad still turned out tasty, so you can skip those bits out. Apart from that, you just pretty much combine all the ingredients in whatever quantities you choose

So that was my pretty lazy picnic dinner. I am loving staying in on Fridays at the moment, and that night I ended up kitten-sitting while her mum went out to party, which was even more amazing. It's unbelievable how much joy and entertainment such a little creature can bring. I am desperate to get one, but feel like I need to wait until my life is a little more settled before I do. Otherwise, it's not really fair on the cat

Chlodnik recipe - summery Polish food

"Chlodnik" is the Polish "gazpacho". Instead of tomatoes we use beetroot, however, as well as plenty of yoghurt. It's perfect for hot days, and once you make it, you can keep it in the fridge for days. We ate it with boiled eggs, but it is equally good with refried potatoes

That's my two lovely grandmas preparing the beetroot. You need to use young beetroot for this, therefore it's a very seasonal soup. We use both the beetroot themselves, peeled before boiling, as well as the leaves and stalks. If you can't get the stalks, however, then, my grandma assured me, you can leave them out of the recipe without causing too much damage. I'm afraid that I can't give you the exact quantities we used. The amount of beets we used, up there, and the other vegetables, below, made about fifty servings, at a guess. I'd say just use any quantities you want and experiment, until you get the texture and flavour you are happy with

Ingredients

Young beetroot (with stalks and leaves)

Celeriac

Carrot

Parsnip

Leek

Radishes

Cucumber

Dill

Chives

Lemon juice

Sour cream

Natural yoghurt

Salt, pepper, sugar

Boiled eggs or refried potatoes to serve

You make a vegetable stock out of the carrot, parsnip, leek, celeriac, and chopped beets. After about half an hour of cooking time you remove everything from the boiling water, and throw it all away except the beetroot (you can use the cooked veg in a russian salad if you don't want to waste them). Now, you add the finely chopped stalks and leaves and cook for a further 20 min. Once cooked, you let the soup cool - it could take up to two hours. Finally, you add all the other ingredients which have been finely chopped beforehand, as well as the sour cream and yoghurt, which have been blended together. Put this mixture in the fridge for another hour or so before serving. This soup is incredibly refreshing and even though this was the first time I had made it on my own, everyone who stopped by the house and had a bowlful, praised it wholeheartedly. I don't think this is because my chlodnik was better than anyone else's, it's just a soup that you can't fail to appreciate in the 40 degree heat

Chilli and beetroot red velvet cakes

I am discovering that there are certain advantages to being single: you are no longer ruled by your mobile phone; you don't have to rush, or even look at the time; you can watch anything you want on TV; and you have the freedom to eat red velvet cakes for dinner, if you so please. Tonight, I so pleased. As you have probably realized due to the lack of cakes on this blog, I do not bake often. I dislike measuring ingredients and being precise. With cakes, you need to measure, as I have learnt through many bad experiences

I first ate red velvet cakes a few months ago, when my friend from work brought them in. As she is now on a diet, I can't rely on her to make them anymore, and this is why I have had to venture into cake making territory myself. I have adapted two recipes for this - the cake itself is from the Green'n'Blacks chocolate cookbook, whereas the icing is from the Hummingbird bakery. I wanted to use the beetroot to colour the cakes in order to make them healthier, but they turned out less red and more brown. My own tweek to this recipe is using chilli chocolate, as well as adding a pinch of chilli powder, which gives it a bit of a kick. You start off by preheating the oven to gas mark 180/ gas mark 4. Sift together the drinking chocolate and flour, mixing in the sugar. Melt the chocolate and butter together and puree the beets. Whisk the eggs, then add the beets. Add the chocolate and beet mixture into the dry ingredients and keep whisking/blending. Now, all the recipes say to bake this for 50 minutes, but mine were ready after 40min. For the icing, mix the butter in with the icing thoroughly, then add the cream cheese and blend. I used the whisk for this. Once the cakes had cooled, I used a spatula to cover them in icing, putting the the mini marshmallows on top, as decoration. You will need to use either quite strong cups or double up, so they don't get too out of shape. I doubled up, but as you can see they still got slightly deformed. Next time, I will definitely use hardcore, strong cups, so that they look even prettier. I may even get a special tray...

Ingredients

100g drinking chocolate

230g self raising flour

200g caster sugar

100g dark chocolate (with chilli is possible)

125g slightly salted butter

250g cooked beetroot

3 large eggs

Pinch of chilli powder

Icing:

300g icing sugar

50g butter

150g cream cheese

Mini marshmallows

By the way, this recipe makes about a million cakes. Well, that's a slight exaggeration, but more than 24 anyhow, so you may want to halve it if you do not want that many...

Ukrainian borscht with oxtail

I woke up this morning to find I have finally grown some balls. Not literally, thank god, but I woke up with a strong feeling that enough is enough. I will own my suffering now, so that I never have to feel like this in the future. I will never let a man mess me around, or be disrespectful towards me, or lie to me, ever again. Then I got up, and made the most amazing Ukranian borscht ever. My parents ate 3 bowls each and were amazed at how tasty it was, and they have eaten a lot of borscht in their lifetimes. I have to warn you, the recipe sounds more complicated than it actually is, there's a lot of ingredients, but you have made this once, it will be part of your repertoire forever. And remember, you do not need to follow what I did exactly, every household throughout Poland, Russia and the Ukraine has their own way of cooking beetroot soup and everyone thinks their way is best... but they are all wrong

Ingredients (6-8 servings)

400 grams oxtail

2 litres water

2 carrots

1 parsnip

1/4 celeriac (celery root)

1/2 leek

1/4 cabbage

300 grams potatoes

6 beetroot

Small tin tomato puree

1/2 lemon

200 grams single cream

1 tbl spoon flour

4 garlic cloves

2 tins of butter beans (670 grams drained)

2 tbl spoons dill

Sugar

Salt and pepper

There are three recipes for borscht in the old Polish cookbook I am studying right now. I didn't follow any of them to the letter, as I had to include elements which come from my family's experience (i.e. butter beans). Using oxtail was also my mum's idea, and it has never been done before, but it turned out so amazingly well that I have to recommend it. So start off by cooking the oxtail and peeled beetroot for half an hour. Remove the beetroot and let them cool on the side. Add the finely chopped  (or grated) carrots, parsnip, celeriac and leek, as well as the potatoes, which have been chopped into bitesize chunks. Cook for another fifteen minutes, before adding the chopped cabbage, and carry on cooking on a low heat for the same amount of time. I then had to go to the gym with my mum (as part of my "therapy"), so I turned the heat off and let the soup cool. When I came back from the gym, I removed the oxtail from the pot and took the meat off the bone, chucking any fatty bits away, and sticking the lovely meaty bits back in. I put the heat back on. I chopped the beetroot into chunks (my mum always cuts it into fine strips, and the book tells you to grate it, but I prefer chunks), added the tomato puree, and squeezed half a lemon in. I also crushed the garlic cloves into a separate bowl and mashed them with 2 tablespoons of salt, adding that into the mix. After another half an hour, I sieved the flour into it, mixing thoroughly. I then turned the heat off again, and let the borscht cool, as I still had a couple of hours before my parents came home

Once the borscht had cooled I added the cream. You need to do this when it is cool so that it doesn't curdle. At the same time, I added the fresh, chopped dill and drained butter beans, sugar and more salt and pepper, according to taste. This cooked for another half an hour before we sat down to dinner, eating it with fresh bread. This soup is like life force - I can see why the whole of Eastern and Central Europe is obsessed