How to cook okroshkaThe closer the summer recordair temperature, the more the body requires. Women switch to fruit salads dressed with yoghurts, but you can’t feed the head of the family so frivolously. There is only one, but win-win option: okroshka. It is tasty, healthy, and most importantly - fast. There are a great many variations of this dish, but there are also their own little secrets. For example, everyone knows that okroshka is unthinkable without dill and green onions. But here’s a secret: to make the dish especially juicy and aromatic, finely chopped greens must be seasoned with salt and pepper, and then thoroughly ground with a pestle or a simple metal or wooden spoon. Feel the special fragrant aroma of the village? Exactly! Let's start with the main program: wash several cucumbers, preferably fresh from the garden, but most importantly - young and crispy. Some people like to peel them: they say, sometimes it is too tough. But there is another little secret, and the housewife can implement it with the help of… Yes, yes, an ordinary grater. On a large grater, grate two or three cucumbers, do the same with the red radish, which is also quite hard. The vegetables gave their juice and aroma to the resulting crumbs - appreciate how the taste of okroshka has ultimately been enriched! (By the way, leave some radish and a couple of sprigs of dill for later, they will come in handy). Eggs - another invariable attribute of the classic Russian okroshka. It would be good to get homemade ones, fresh from under the chicken, but sometimes it takes up to a hundred kilometers to travel from the city to the nearest village. But here, too, there is a little secret: do not boil the eggs hard-boiled, but in a bag. Then the white remains tender, and the yolk will give the okroshka a subtle taste and a delicate yellowish hue. Perhaps we could stop there, but the men in my family always demand that meat be added to the okroshka. They especially love boiled veal, cooked the day before or simply cooled in advance. True, in the conditions of the age of high speeds, I, like most modern working women, can only find so much time to prepare okroshka on a day off. The situation is saved either by quickly boiled chicken breasts or boiled sausages.
But one day there was neither one nor the other at home, andIt was simply too lazy to run to the store because of the generous downpour. Thus, another secret of okroshka was born: finely chopped smoked sausage (excluding dry-cured varieties) or smoked ham in okroshka look more advantageous than ever. The only thing left is to season it. When I make okroshka for myself, I add kefir to our meat and vegetable splendor. The lack of spiciness is compensated by strong mustard, sometimes black pepper. But in a large family, this option is an eternal cause for disputes: someone cannot stand kefir, someone likes it thinner, and someone even wants kvass or mayonnaise. Therefore, now I do not mix okroshka, everyone is able to control this process themselves. The result is amazing: everyone is happy, and the banal okroshka turns into a huge number of original and incredibly tasty dishes.
