The Christmas bustle in the kitchen causes a headache for millions of people every year. Not only do we run out of recipe ideas, but we also prepare many things at the last minute, so we sit down to the Christmas Eve dinner tired and frustrated. We present recipes that can be successfully prepared and frozen before we get absorbed in Christmas cleaning, decorating the tree, and checking which bulb out of a thousand in the set isn't working ;)
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
- Red borscht with uszka (mini dumplings)
- Christmas Eve Ardennes-style pâté.
red borscht with uszka
There are certain dishes without which Christmas Eve in a Polish home could not take place. And we don't mean carp here, but red borscht with uszka! Preparing this dish has become incredibly simple, because our red borscht is a ready-to-eat soup—all you need to do is heat it up and add pepper and marjoram to taste. All that’s left is to focus on making the uszka :)
INGREDIENTS:
- Red borscht in a bottle
- Marjoram
- Ground black pepper
- Kurpiowska flour
- Turmeric
- Water
- Unrefined rapeseed oil
- Dried mushrooms
- White buckwheat groats
- Fresh onion
- Dried onion
- Salt
- Old Polish herbal pepper
- Vigora vegetable seasoning
PREPARATION:
Rinse the dried mushrooms and cook until soft. The stems especially require long cooking, so they should be checked before removing.
Remove the mushrooms from the pot with a slotted spoon, and add the white, unroasted buckwheat groats to the resulting broth. Cook briefly, for about 12 minutes, making sure the groats don't overcook but remain al dente. Then strain the groats in a sieve and put them back into the heated pot. Cover and set aside in a warm place.
Slice one onion into feathers and throw it into a pan with heated rapeseed oil. Sauté for a while, and at the end add two generous handfuls of dried onion. This will save us a lot of tears :) Turn off the heat and cover the pan so the dried onion absorbs the oil.
Next, pass the onion and mushrooms through a meat grinder. It's worth investing in a grinder that will last a lifetime even with daily use and can be used by future generations.
Combine the ground mushrooms with the cooked groats, salt to taste, add herbal pepper and vegetable seasoning. The filling is ready; we can proceed to preparing the dough.
Pour 600 g of flour onto a pastry board or into a bowl, depending on how you prefer to knead the dough. Add a pinch of turmeric to give the dough a golden color, then add about 1.5 cups of water and a tablespoon of rapeseed oil. Mix the ingredients thoroughly and knead the dough. If the consistency is too thin, sprinkle with a bit of flour; if too thick, slowly add water. When the dough becomes soft and elastic, you can roll it out into thin sheets. Using a small glass, cut out small circles to form the uszka.
Then throw them in batches into boiling salted water and wait a moment until they float to the surface. Remove the uszka to a platter using a slotted spoon.
Before serving the Christmas Eve uszka, pour the red borscht into a pot, add pepper and marjoram to taste, cook for a while, and it's ready.
Uszka are suitable for freezing, so we can prepare them before we get absorbed by other duties like cleaning and decorating the Christmas tree.
Christmas Eve Old Polish Pâté
Fasting on Christmas Eve is a debatable issue in our culture. It turns out that not eating meat on this day was never mandated by canon law but resulted from Polish tradition. Catholics decided to make this a fasting day to emphasize its uniqueness. However, if you don't stick strictly to tradition, there is nothing stopping a traditional pâté from appearing on the Christmas Eve table.
INGREDIENTS:
- Fat chicken (preferably a free-range hen)
- Pork jowl
- Optional: turkey, rabbit, or duck meat
- Chicken liver (optional)
- Butter (optional)
- Carrots
- Parsley root
- Celery root
- Dried Onion
- Marjoram
- Vigora vegetable seasoning
- Oat flakes
- Eggs
- Dried prunes
- Whiskey
- Frozen forest mushrooms or button mushrooms
- Ardennes pâté spice mix or the following spices:
- Kłodawska salt or fine Himalayan salt
- Ground black pepper
- Ginger
- Whole nutmeg
- Herbal pepper
- Fruit preserves for serving to taste
PREPARATION:
About 5 hours before preparing the pâté, soak 6 dried prunes in a bowl with good whiskey and set aside, waiting for the fruit to absorb all the liquid. The alcohol will add character and make the fruit soft and aromatic.
Place the whole chicken in a pot. Add 2 carrots, parsley root, celery root, cover with water to the top, and cook until tender. When the hen is ready, separate the meat from the bones while still warm.
Heat a small amount of rapeseed oil in a large pan. Just enough to make the pan slightly shiny. Add about 1.5 kg of pork jowl and sauté until tender. A good pâté must contain a fair amount of fat, which acts as a flavor carrier. At the end, add a large amount of dried onion (at least 4 large tablespoons) and wait a moment for the vegetable to absorb the fat and soften. Then season with a tablespoon of marjoram and add 2 tablespoons of Vigora vegetable seasoning.
Optional: sauté 3 chicken livers (or others to taste) in a small amount of rapeseed oil with dried onion just like the pork jowl.
If you have frozen mushrooms from autumn, fry them with onion in rapeseed oil just like the meat. If not, you can sauté ½ kg of button mushrooms in butter. The mushrooms will lighten the consistency and add moisture to the pâté. Pour water over half a cup of oat flakes and wait until they soften.
Pass all ingredients together with the vegetables the hen was cooked in through a meat grinder at least twice using a fine plate (Ø6).
Add 5 eggs to the ground mixture along with the Ardennes pâté spice mix at a rate of 10 g per 1 kg of mass.
Instead of the ready-made seasoning, you can add about 3 tablespoons of chosen salt, a large amount of black pepper, a large pinch of ginger, a tablespoon of herbal pepper, and finely grated nutmeg—at least one whole nut.
Mix everything for a long time and patiently, constantly tasting and seasoning to taste if you feel the pâté is bland. We want the dish to have a distinct character, but be careful with adding salt, as the intensity of flavor will increase after baking and water evaporation.
Transfer the pâté mass into disposable aluminum tins up to 4/5 of the height and pat it down.
Preheat the oven to 180°C, place the filled tins inside, and reduce the temperature to 165-170°C, depending on the oven. Bake partly with fan and bottom heat, and partly with just top heat, for roughly an hour in total. Keep an eye on it to ensure the pâté doesn't dry out but gains a beautiful tanned, slightly brown color. You can then freeze it and take it out whenever you have a craving, not just for holidays :)
On the Christmas Eve table, Ardennes-style pâté pairs best with cranberry jam or blueberry preserves. We also recommend trying less obvious preserves and choosing your favorite: pear with cranberry, chokeberry with flaxseed, raspberry jam, blueberry with pear, or blueberry and bilberry jam.
We have saved our favorite Christmas Eve dishes, whose taste and aroma we cannot replace with anything else throughout the year, for the end. So, we invite you to check our culinary tastes in the final part of our proposed Christmas Eve dishes.
