The gastronomic side of the January holidays is usually associated with heavy fatty foods: we go to visit dumplings, pies, lay out another portion of jellied meat on plates – well, and if vegetables are presented on the table, then only pickled cucumbers and sauerkraut. Products after a feast often remain, but you cannot eat such food for a long time. “MK” offers several recipes for dishes that can be easily and quickly prepared during the New Year holidays.
New Year’s holidays often turn into a single continuous “holiday of the belly”. However, as Tatyana Ushakova, a nutritionist, noted in an interview with MK correspondent, it is important not to forget about the sense of proportion.
– The classic Russian New Year’s feast is most easily given to those who, in ordinary life, eat in moderation and without excesses. If a person has long switched to a completely dietary diet, then the liver and pancreas can give an acute and unpredictable reaction even to a small amount of mayonnaise in a serving of salad, explains Ushakova. – Even if on the morning of January 1, you feel great and do not suffer from stomach pain, it is important to continue to adhere to the golden mean. Pies, dumplings and other heavy dishes of Russian cuisine should not be eaten for more than 1-2 days in a row.
Try to intersperse them with vegetables and high-fiber foods. The doctor added that kefir, yogurt and other fermented milk products will help to cope with the consequences of the New Year’s feast – they can be drunk both in the morning and in the evening: they normalize the digestive tract. In addition, if possible, it is worth adding as many fresh vegetables as possible to the diet.
Meanwhile, at the beginning of January, almost every home is asking the question: how to dispose of the remnants of New Year’s food before it deteriorates? “MK” has collected several convenient recipes for dishes “from scraps”.
Home-style fondue
A cheese plate in one form or another appeared on the New Year’s table for many. Someone, following the advice of the cheese sommelier, laid out an odd number of varieties of cheese with nuts and grapes clockwise, and someone simply served slices for sandwiches.
The result is the same: at least half of such a plate always remains unclaimed, and on January 1 begins to dry and cry with amber tears … A universal way is to create a new, moreover, delicious dish out of it: home-style fondue.
The current Swiss delicacy – fondue made from melted Gruyere cheese – was once invented as a dish for poor shepherds who put everything that came to hand into a pot. It’s nice to follow their example. How to do it?
– Find a heavy-bottomed saucepan or stewpan (otherwise the cheese will burn).
– Put any remaining cheese found in the refrigerator into a saucepan. Hard, soft, melted, with white mold or blue – it doesn’t matter. Everything will be used. It is advisable to grate the cheese in advance or cut into small pieces so that it melts faster.
– Pour in half a glass of white wine or exhausted champagne, which remained in the bottle after New Year’s Eve (left?). You can add a little heavy cream to add a creamy texture to the sauce.
– Heat the mixture over low heat, stirring constantly, until the cheese melts (make sure it does not burn).
Cut food into small pieces – fresh carrot sticks and celery stalks, leftover New Year’s boiled pork, boiled potatoes and simple white bread croutons. You will need to eat the fondue while it’s hot. Gather all families or a group of friends around the table, open a bottle of wine and dip food in cheese sauce – who’s to say that you are not in Switzerland?
From sausage scraps: Polish bigos
The eternal neighbor of a cheese platter on a festive table is a platter with cold cuts. Fashionable culinary bloggers can persuade Russians as much as they want that raw sausage and balyk have long ceased to be in short supply, as in Soviet times, so the need to put them on the table has disappeared, but the habit is second nature. So in many families, cold cuts appear on the tables, and then migrate to morning sandwiches on January 1, 2, 3 (and until it ends).
A traditional dish of leftovers for the New Year holidays is considered to be a prefabricated meat hodgepodge (by the way, it helps a lot with a hangover), but there is a nuance – again, there are not enough vegetables! It is worth trying an alternative – the home interpretation of the Polish bigos. This dish will require:
– Fresh cabbage (about half a cabbage). If on New Year’s Eve you opened a jar of sauerkraut, feel free to add that too.
– All the bored sausage scraps in your fridge: salami, ham, bacon, meatloafs – anything will do! You can also add the chopped holiday duck, goose, or piglet if you haven’t finished eating them yet.
– A few salty mushrooms that remained at the bottom of the jar after New Year’s Eve.
Chop the cabbage finely and put it in a deep frying pan, lightly oiled. Simmer the cabbage until it shrinks and softens. Then add the rest of the ingredients – cold cuts and mushrooms. Mix thoroughly, you can season with spices to your liking. If you have a little bit of exhausted champagne left in an open bottle (and you didn’t spend it on the fondue from the previous recipe), you can safely pour it into the stewed cabbage.
By the way, this is how choucrut is prepared – an interpretation of this dish adopted in the French region of Alsace. Cover and simmer together for 15-20 minutes. Cabbage perfectly neutralizes fat from sausage and bacon and still contains a lot of vitamins and fiber, which the body needs to cope with the effects of the holidays.
Healthy beet salad
According to the nutritionist, the ideal option would be to make January 3-4 fasting days to give the body time to recover after the holidays, but this is unlikely to work – we continue to visit and receive guests … The optimal decision is to choose lighter dishes. To prepare the traditional New Year’s herring under a fur coat, everyone bought beets, and probably a few of them remained unclaimed.
It is they who are needed immediately after the festive plentiful feast! Beets are a real brush for the body, which helps to quickly cope with the effects of overeating (of course, if it is not poured with fatty mayonnaise!). The only caveat: it contains quite a lot of sugar, so diabetics and people with similar problems need to be on the lookout.
In the early days of the new year, you can prepare a trendy and popular, but very simple salad based on beets and fresh herbs. A shock dose of fiber is provided to you! For the salad you will need:
– 2-3 beets,
– Arugula, fresh spinach or any other green salad,
– Avocado,
– A little young cheese or feta cheese,
– Walnuts,
– Lemon juice, olive oil.
It is recommended not to boil the beets, but to bake them in the oven, after wrapping them in foil. Firstly, so excess liquid will evaporate from it, a brighter saturated taste will be obtained. Secondly, this way all the nutrients will remain inside the beets, and will not dissolve in boiling water. Cool the baked beets and cut into medium cubes. Cut the avocado into cubes of the same size.
If this fruit is not at your disposal, you can easily refuse it. Mix vegetables with fresh herbs, sprinkle with chopped walnuts and grated cheese on top. The dressing can be varied by adding, for example, a little balsamic vinegar, narsharab pomegranate sauce or Dijon mustard. The main thing is that the dressing should be light, without sauces based on creamy or mayonnaise.
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