Chicken jellied meat

Ingredients: 1 chicken, 3 medium carrots, 1 large onion, 3-5 bay leaves, 10 allspice peas, 4-5 (or more) cloves of garlic, salt and black pepper to taste.

Cut the chicken into pieces and soak, the broth will then be clear. Place the chicken parts and other ingredients in a large saucepan and add enough water to cover the contents. When the water starts to boil, be on your guard: it is important to remove the foam before the broth boils. Again, in order to obtain a clear broth.

Chicken jellied meat, of course, cooks much faster than, for example, beef. And if you suddenly have homemade chicken, then chicken legs go into jellied meat. But we simmer everything over low heat for four hours, because it is important for us to get a rich and sticky broth. If the chicken is fatty, you need to remove not only the foam, but also the fat floating on the surface. When everything is finally ready, put the chicken with onions and carrots in a separate bowl. And add crushed garlic to the broth - it should infuse in the broth and give the dish flavor. And add salt, and if you like, white or black pepper.

While the broth is infusing, we separate the chicken into pulp, removing the bones. Strain the broth through cheesecloth, and it is better to do this twice. And pour either into flat, low dishes or into silicone molds, which is preferable. First of all, it's beautiful. Secondly, if you take small molds, you will have ready-made portions, and you won’t have to cut the jellied meat into pieces.

So, put the pieces of meat into the molds and fill them with strained broth. Let it harden. And we serve it on the table - with horseradish, mustard... Whatever God sends with.

On an open fire

There is no nation whose cuisine does not include grilled meat. For immigrants from Moldova and Romania, these are mititei - the closest relatives of Turkish kebabs. But if Moldovans prepare them with the addition of pork, then Jewish mititei are made only with beef.

Mititei

Ingredients: 1 kg of beef, 200 beef fat, 1.5 l. potato starch, 1 tsp. baking powder, 2 eggs, 5-6 cloves of garlic, 1 glass of broth or water, salt, black pepper to taste.

It is better to take beef as for kebabs - the neck part. Its structure is ideal for kebabs, and to make the minced meat juicy, we have beef fat and broth. Therefore, we turn the meat and fat through a meat grinder with garlic and mix with the rest of the ingredients - everything except the broth.

A very important moment is whipping the minced meat. The taste depends on the success of this operation. The meat is mixed by weight, pouring in the broth. And periodically hitting the minced meat, molded into a ball, on a board moistened with water. This trick is repeated at least 30 times - the minced meat is thus perfectly beaten, becoming a homogeneous mass.

Like dough, meat needs to rest. And then they form small (the word “mititei” translates as “small”) sausages from it, which are fried on the grill or in a frying pan. The ideal side dish for mititei is green peas and onions with vinegar.

In batter and butter

For a long time I could not understand what dish the old Jewish woman with whom I talked about the secrets of Jewish Moldavian cuisine told me about. Conopida and conopida - what a word, go figure. It turned out that translated from Moldavian konopida means cauliflower.

Conopida

Ingredients: 1 small head of cauliflower, 1 large lemon, 3-4 cloves of garlic, 2 chicken eggs, 2 tbsp. l. flour, salt and pepper to taste, vegetable oil for frying.

Having disassembled the cauliflower into inflorescences, cook it in boiling water, but so as not to overcook it, for about five minutes. Squeeze lemon juice into a deep bowl and mix it with crushed garlic. Dip the cooked inflorescences into this mixture and mix with lemon juice. To make the batter, mix the eggs with flour and add a little water to make a fairly thick batter. Dip the cabbage into it and fry in oil until golden brown.

Goulash from Bucharest

In the country, wine and meat are cooked with wine. In Romania, goulash is prepared with wine. Romanian Jews also cook it with white wine, and their goulash is not like Polish or Hungarian goulash.

Goulash

Ingredients: 1 kg of beef, 1 glass of dry white wine, 2 heads of garlic, 2 medium-sized onions, 4 tbsp. l. vegetable oil, spices - ground black pepper, coriander, thyme, bay leaf, ground red pepper, salt to taste.

Pour oil into a cauldron, wait for it to get hot, and fry the meat cut into pieces of approximately 4 x 4 cm, stirring constantly.

At the same time, add three or four cloves of garlic, cut into slices. As soon as the meat is browned, pour in half a glass of wine and add the chopped garlic. After the garlic, add finely diced onions and add spices. Reduce the heat, cover with a lid and let the meat simmer. After 25 minutes, pour in the remaining wine. Mix and add salt again. Simmer the meat over low heat for another half hour.

Peel the second head of garlic and crush the garlic (or chop it with a knife). Pour the garlic into the meat, mix thoroughly and turn off the heat. Let it brew for a quarter of an hour.

The aroma will tell you that you have not made a mistake in choosing a dish, and the hominy prepared for it will complete the feast of taste.

Hominy

Ingredients: for 1 liter of water - about 400 g of corn flour, 50 g of butter, salt to taste.

We take a cauldron, not a saucepan, pour water and put it on the fire. As soon as it boils, add salt to the water and begin to add flour, stirring constantly so that there are no lumps. Reduce heat to medium. Leave the cauldron alone for 3-4 minutes so that the porridge begins to boil and thicken. And mix again. Add butter. While stirring - preferably with a wooden spoon - we observe how the thick mass curls up around the wooden spoon and lags behind the walls of the cauldron.

Advice for those who are cooking hominy for the first time: if it seems that it is too thick and you can’t mix it, add a little boiling water. And if it’s too liquid, add a little flour. And mix again and again until the mass completely lags behind the walls. Cook for another 5-7 minutes, smoothing the top of the porridge with a wet spoon. After removing from the heat, after a minute we turn the hominy onto a plate or wooden board. We remove the cauldron and get hominy frozen in the shape of a dome.