Where I can, I try to dilute recipes for sweet desserts with something spicy and filling. Today you can learn to make a not very well known but still fairly popular Mexican dish – a quesadilla with avocado and a spicy cheese and chilli sauce. The main difference from a burrito is that the quesadilla tortilla is folded in half rather than wrapped around the filling, and it sticks together thanks to the layer of cheese. Details under the cut.

Cooking time ≈ 1.5 hours.
Ingredients (for four servings):

• 4 corn tortillas
• 4 tbsp refried tinned beans
• avocado
• a bunch of rocket
• olive oil

for the sauce:

• 250 g cream cheese
• 250 g Cheddar
• 1 chilli pepper
• 2 tsp chilli powder
• 200 ml 20% cream
• 2 sweet peppers

First let's make the sauce: mix the chopped chilli (without seeds) and the sweet pepper.

Over low heat, cook the cream and the cream cheese for about six minutes, stirring constantly (the cheese should melt completely).

Take it off the heat, add the chopped peppers and set the finished creamy chilli sauce aside.

Now cut the avocado into cubes.

Chop the rocket.

You can start assembling the quesadilla: cover the bottom of a tortilla, heated in olive oil, with the beans.

Put the avocado and the rocket on top.

Pour the creamy chilli sauce over the nearly finished quesadilla. Excellent — time to serve!

Bon appétit!

In the summer heat, when you don't feel like tiring yourself out making complicated hot dishes, you can treat yourself to simple but very timely desserts. Today I'm sharing the recipe for shortcrust baskets with fresh berries; photos and the step-by-step method are under the cut.

Cooking time ≈ 40 minutes.
Ingredients (for 20 small baskets):

• 2 glasses of flour
• 2 eggs
• 150 g margarine
• 3/4 glass of sugar
• 1 tsp vanilla sugar
• 2 packets (10 g each) of powdered jelly (I used a forest berry one)
• fresh berries (pitted cherries, currants, raspberries)
• fruit preserve or jam

First make ordinary shortcrust pastry from the flour, eggs, margarine and sugar.

Shape the pastry into baskets in greased moulds and bake them in an oven preheated to 180–200° for 10–12 minutes.

Brush the bottom and sides of the baskets with fruit preserve or jam.

Fill them with the assorted fruit.

Pour over the jelly you prepared earlier and leave in the fridge for a couple of hours. Serve the finished fruit baskets with fresh cherries, currants and raspberries.

Bon appétit!

If you're bored with rare steaks and Thai cooking, it's high time to make something sweet. I've already posted recipes for small cakes and muffins, but today I'm publishing the authentic way to make one more quick dessert — a chocolate brownie with walnuts. It's something between a biscuit and a cake. Under the cut are photos and the recipe.

Cooking time ≈ 40 minutes.
Ingredients:

• 100 g dark chocolate
• 180 g butter
• 200 g cane sugar
• 4 eggs
• 100 g wheat flour
• 100 g chopped walnuts
• icing sugar to decorate

Melt the butter in a bain-marie.

Whisk the eggs.

Carefully fold the cane sugar into the eggs.

Melt the dark chocolate in a bain-marie, add the butter and the egg and sugar mixture to it. Mix thoroughly, gently pouring in the flour. Add the chopped walnuts. Pour the mixture you get into a tin and put it in an oven preheated to 200°C for 30 minutes (the batter should be soft in the middle and firm closer to the edges). Serve the brownie dusted with icing sugar.

Bon appétit!

I've already made an authentic Thai soup, but curry is a category of its own, closer to meat or vegetables in a sauce. The base of green curry paste is a wet mixture of spices ground in a stone mortar which underlies a great many recipes dearly loved both by the locals and by pale-faced farangs. The details of making this spicy dish, and photos, are under the cut.

Cooking time ≈ 40 minutes.
Ingredients:

• 70 g curry paste base (you can buy it or make it yourself by grinding chilli, coriander with its roots, galangal, lemongrass, shallot, cumin and basil)
• 70 g aubergines or cherry tomatoes (I used cherry tomatoes)
• 4 kaffir lime leaves
• 400 ml coconut milk
• 600 g chicken fillet
• 100 g water
• 2 tsp fish sauce
• 3 tsp sugar
• 4 tbsp olive oil
• chilli, basil (to taste)

Grind the base for the green curry paste. If you bought it ready-made, there's nothing to do.

Heat the olive oil in a deep pan. Add the paste base and half the coconut milk.

Bring to the boil, stirring quickly.

Add the rest of the coconut milk and the water. Leave it over medium heat.

While the mixture comes to the boil, cut up the cherry tomatoes.

Add the sliced chicken fillet, the kaffir lime leaves and the cherry tomatoes to the green curry paste. Mix thoroughly, then pour in the fish sauce and the sugar.

While the chicken isn't done yet, cut up the chilli.

Decorate the finished green curry paste with the pepper and fresh basil. Serve with boiled rice.

Bon appétit!

P.S
Many recipes suggest putting shrimp paste in the curry paste instead of fish sauce. Very much a matter of taste.

I've already cooked pork or lamb ribs; now it's the turn of beef tenderloin. Below you'll find not only the classic recipe for marbled beef steak, but also a number of tips that make cooking this seemingly straightforward dish easier. Photos and the recipe are under the cut.

Cooking time ≈ 15 minutes
Servings: 2
Ingredients:

• salt, pepper
• olive oil
• beef tenderloin (more about it below)

Steaks are made only from fresh beef. And the taste of a steak changes with the thickness of the piece and the part of the carcass it was cut from. There are several main kinds of steak:

• Rib steak — cut from the sub-scapular part of the carcass, it has a lot of veins of fat.
• Club steak — cut from the back, from the thick edge of the longest muscle of the back; it has a small rib bone.
• T-bone steak (a steak on a T-shaped bone) — cut from the part of the carcass on the border between the back and the loin, in the area of the thin edge of the longest muscle of the back and the thin edge of the tenderloin, so it consists of two kinds of steak meat at once — filet mignon on one side and the bone on the other.
• Porterhouse steak — cut from the loin, in the area of the thick edge of the tenderloin.
• Striploin steak — cut from the loin, in the area of the head of the tenderloin.
• Round rump steak — cut from the top piece of the hip.
• Filet mignon — a thin cross-cut of the central part of the tenderloin, the most tender and lean meat; it is never served "rare".
• Chateaubriand — the thick edge of the central part of the beef tenderloin (it can be fried whole or portioned, most often for two). Essentially the same as a large filet mignon, but this steak is served lying lengthways on the plate rather than standing.
• Tournedos — small pieces from the thin edge of the central part of the tenderloin (used for making medallions).
• Skirt steak — not the most tender, but a very tasty piece of meat from the flank.

A properly cooked steak will be tasty in any case, so choose the meat according to your own preferences. I, for instance, am going to make a classic striploin steak.

To start with, the meat needs to be rinsed, brought to room temperature and wiped dry. If water is left on the surface of the tenderloin, it will evaporate during cooking, cool the surface of the steak, and the meat will end up braised rather than fried.

Then the steak is rubbed with coarse sea salt and pepper. If you like you can add herbs or marinate it in lemon juice beforehand, but that's a matter of taste — the original steak recipe has nothing of the kind. It's worth brushing the meat with olive oil straight away rather than heating the oil in the pan — that way there won't be too much of it.

The time you fry the steak for also depends on your taste. There are seven degrees of doneness, but if you leave out the most extreme ones (blue and too well done), these remain:

• Rare – seared on the outside, red inside (meat temperature 39°–43°)
• Medium rare – a steak with blood, red-pink inside (meat temperature 42°–47°)
• Medium – a medium-cooked steak, pink inside (meat temperature 47°–50°)
• Medium well – an almost fully cooked steak, light pink inside (meat temperature 55°–57°)
• Well done – a fully cooked steak (meat temperature > 60°)

I prefer Medium, and for it I fry the meat for three minutes on each side in a very hot pan. Note that the meat has to be turned very carefully — so the juices don't run out.

Once the meat has been fried, it's worth covering it with foil and letting it "rest" for 3–4 minutes (for Medium). The temperature inside is still high, so only this way will the whole piece become warm, juicy and tender. Here's what the thermometer read at the moment it went into the foil.

Steaks should be served straight away and on warmed plates.

Bon appétit!

Cooking time ≈ 45 minutes.

Ingredients:

• 600 g minced meat
• 2 large onions
• Vinegar
• Ground cumin, khmeli-suneli, ground black pepper, parsley, ginger, nutmeg, salt, paprika and dill to taste

The mince needs to be salted, kneaded and mixed with the spices (but don't overdo it — people usually manage with a minimum of spices and add more salt and pepper). The mince has to be kneaded very thoroughly, so that the protein comes out of the pieces of meat and the mince becomes sticky and dense.

Shape the mince into sausages 10–20 cm long.

If you're going to cook the lyulya-kebab over coals, you need to thread the meat onto skewers; if in a frying pan, roll it lightly in flour.

Fry in vegetable oil until done (about 7 minutes).

While the lyulya-kebab itself is cooking, let's pickle the onion. Cut it into thin rings and scald it with boiling water (to take the bitterness away). Cover it with vinegar, add pepper and leave it in a covered dish for half an hour.

Lyulya-kebab is traditionally served with herbs, pickled onion and lavash (which is why adding herbs to the mince itself makes little sense). You can also serve narsharab as a sauce — pomegranate juice boiled down to 1/3 of its original volume.

Bon appétit!

• 500 g pork
• 300 g champignons
• 200 g cheese
• salt, pepper, vegetable oil — to taste

Cut the champignons into small pieces.

Fry them in vegetable oil until done.

Cut the pork into pieces and beat them out.

Fry the pork chops until golden.

Grate the cheese coarsely.

Put the chops in a dish and cover them evenly with a layer of mushrooms.

Sprinkle with grated cheese and bake in the oven until a cheese crust forms.

The pork with mushrooms and cheese is ready.

Bon appétit!

"Barbacoa" (that's what barbecue is called in Spanish) is the shashlik everyone knows, steeped in Mediterranean aroma. Continuing the theme of Spanish recipes, I made a dish built around rosemary — one of the best-loved herbs in Catalan cooking, which together with garlic and lemon will fill the meat with the delicious flavours of the summer just gone. Photos and the recipe are under the cut.
Cooking time ≈ 3 hours.
Ingredients:

• 500 g pork neck
• 3 cloves of garlic
• 3 tbsp olive oil
• 1 lemon
• 2 tbsp lemon juice
• 20 stalks of fresh rosemary (≈ 20 g)
• herbs, oregano, coarse salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste

First the meat needs to be marinated. You can do this an hour before cooking, but seven or eight hours would be ideal. Cut the beaten meat into small pieces.

Grate the lemon — we need the zest.

Make the marinade: mix the olive oil, the cloves of garlic crushed with the flat of a knife, the lemon zest, the chopped herbs, the lemon juice, salt and pepper.

Mix the marinade and the meat, cover with cling film and leave to marinate.

Thread the pieces of meat onto the rosemary sprigs.

Cook them however you like — either over prepared coals or under the grill in the oven, turning them from time to time. Over coals it will take you around 15 minutes, in the oven about forty. That's it — the pork on rosemary skewers is ready.

Bon appétit!

P.S
So the rosemary sprigs don't burn too badly, soak them in water before threading the meat on. You can also add bacon to the meat when making barbacoa, and if you like you can replace the pork with boneless lamb.

• 600 g potatoes
• 200 g flour
• 2 eggs
• 50 g butter
• 500 g minced meat
• 2 sweet peppers
• 2 tomatoes
• 2 onions
• 150 ml milk
• 2 tbsp tomato paste
• 150 g cheese
• salt, pepper and basil to taste

Mash the potatoes, boiled with salt, together with the butter.

Put the egg and the flour into the potatoes. Stir.

Cut the onion into cubes.

Chop the tomatoes.

Cut the sweet pepper into strips or cubes.

Put the minced meat in a hot frying pan and fry it.

Then add the onion and the sweet pepper to the meat, and put the tomatoes in last of all.

Season with salt, pepper and herbs.

Grease a deep-sided baking dish with butter. Spread the potato dough in the dish. The dough should be about 1 cm thick.

Spread the filling on it.

Now for the custard. Whisk an egg, add the tomato paste and stir. Pour in the milk. Cream works here too, but not a very fatty one.

Pour the custard over the pie.

Sprinkle grated cheese over the top and put it in an oven preheated to 200°C. I recommend covering it with foil so the bottom crust cooks through.

Take the tasty, golden rustic pie out of the oven.

Bon appétit!

Ingredients:

• 6 tortillas
• 600 g chicken fillet
• 250 g rice
• 4 tomatoes
• 2 onions
• 3 sweet peppers
• 100 g herbs
• 200 g cheese
• 100 g tomato sauce
• Tabasco sauce, cayenne pepper extract, salt — to taste
• olive oil

Cut the pepper into small cubes.

Boil the rice.

Cut up the tomatoes.

Rinse the chicken fillet and cut it into small pieces too.

Heat olive oil in a frying pan, add the Tabasco sauce to it and fry the chicken fillet until golden (about ten minutes).

While the chicken fries, chop the onion finely.

Mix the tomato sauce, the cayenne pepper extract and the Tabasco sauce.

Grate the cheese on a fine grater.

Pepper and salt the chicken fillet.

Add the chopped tomatoes, onion and sweet pepper to the fillet. Pour the sauce mixture over it and braise for 5 minutes over low heat. Mix the filling you get with the rice and the grated cheese. Add the chopped herbs.

Spread the mixture on the tortillas.

Roll them up and pin them with cocktail sticks.

The spicy burritos are ready ;).

Bon appétit!

P.S
Instead of tomato paste you can take beans in sauce, which will give the burrito more character.