Avocado Grilled with Goat Cheese--Easy and Delicious

There is always a right moment to share a good recipe and today's is one of my favorite.

This dish, with avocado in the main role, became one of my most popular dinner starters, when I have friends over. It is easy and can be prepared all year long as avocados are one of the most common vegetables, available in any season.

So I always have avocados in my kitchen since my whole family loves them. They are very nutritious; rich in healthy monounsaturated fats, proteins, as well as vitamins A, E, C, and B.

The only trick with avocados is to catch them at the right moment. I buy them still hard and let them ripen at home. It is said that if you put avocados among apples it speeds up the process. When they get to the right point of softness they can be refrigerated for a couple of days to preserve that perfect point.

In one of the French magazines a saw a recipe for a grilled avocado and goat cheese. Right away this combination seemed to me very interesting. I could imagine how a salted, well defined goat cheese can complement a rather mild and oily avocado. And the idea of grilling it seems very intriguing.

But instead serving it plain just with salad I also prepared a fresh tomato sauce to serve with the avocado and lighten a bit the whole dish. With a little bit of mache or arugula it became instantly a huge culinary hit among my guests. So today, I finally share this recipe.

Avocados Grilled with Goat Cheese
(Serves four>

Ingredients:
2 medium avocados (have at least extra one in case they are not perfectly greenish inside)
about 4 oz log (four 1/2-inch thick slices) of goat cheese,
2 medium tomatoes, blanched, peeled off, and chopped,
1 small shallot,
1 tbsp olive oil,
1 tbsp balsamic vinegar,
a few grape or cocktail tomatoes,
arugula or mache leaves to decorate,
2 tbsp chopped chives,
salt and pepper to taste

Preparation:
1. Cut avocados in half and remove gently the stone without destroying the flesh.
2. Place chopped tomatoes in a high wall container, add shallot, olive oil, and vinegar and, using a hand blender, make a smooth pure.
3. Prepare serving plates and divide the tomato sauce among the plates.
4. Preheat boiler to 400 F. Place avocados on a small baking form. On each half put a slice of goat cheese and put the form close to the broiler. Grill for about three minutes until the cheese melts and turns slightly gold.
5. Take the avocados from the oven and place on top of the tomato sauce. Season generously with salt and pepper, and sprinkle with chives. Decorate with grape tomato halves and salad leaves.
Serve with baguette.

Polish Pierogi--with Potato and Porcini Stuffing

Whenever foreign friends ask me what they should try while in Poland, I always recommend pierogi, and I do it without a second of hesitation. There is a huge variety of savory and sweet pierogi, with many different fillings, meat and vegetarian so anyone can discover one's favorite version.

My most favorite are vegetarian and savory pierogi, but if you want to try them, I would have to invite you over to my house, as I am not sure if they are available anywhere else. So I decided to popularize my favorite pierogi recipe on this blog.

The recipe for these particular pierogi was invented by my mother. It is based on a very popular version, the so-called "Russian", pierogi stuffed with potatoes and farmers' cheese. However, somehow these pierogi have never been very popular in my family. So my mother came up with an idea of making them with potatoes and dried porcini, instead of cheese. And we absolutely loved them in that version.

Pierogi are a wonderful dish but unfortunately they are quite labor-intensive. Over the years, I managed to find only two shortcuts in the whole rather complicated process. I make the dough in my Kitchen Aid Mixer and sometimes I use a pierogi maker form to cut and close them. But recently, I returned to the old method of rolling the dough on a larger surface with a rolling pin, cutting each piece with a cookie cutter, and gluing them with hands. I usually make a big batch of pierogi and freeze part of them for future uses.

There are also different dough recipes. My grandmother always made it with egg yolks but I have been using a recipe calling only for flour and water, or milk. The dough is not yellow (like in Italian ravioli) but it is also softer.

These pierogi can be served like some other versions with fried bacon on top but we have always made them in a vegetarian version with fried onion and freshly ground pepper.

Please try my favorite Polish dish.

Potato and Porcini Pierogi
(Makes about 60 mid-size pierogi)

Ingredients:

For the dough:
4 cups of all purpose flour,
1 and 1/2 cup hot milk,
1 tbsp salt,
extra flour for dusting the surface.

For the filling:
3 large potatoes,
1 cup dried porcini,
2 onion, chopped,
3 tbsp olive oil,
salt and freshly ground pepper.
1/4 tsp nutmeg,
1/2 tsp ground coriander,
1/2 tsp red paprika,
1/2 tsp ground caraway.

Preparation:

Filling:
1. Soak dried porcini for about an hour in 2 cups of cold water. Cook them in the same water for about 10 minutes. Cool, drain, and chop finely. Save the remaining water--it can be added to any sauces and soups to enhance the taste.

2. Heat the oil in a frying pan and fry chopped onion until transparent. Let it cool.

3. Peel off potatoes and cook until soft. Drain them and cool down. Purée them using a potato musher. Transfer the potato purée into a large bowl, add the chopped porcini, half of the fried onion (the rest will be used for garnish), and all the spices.

4. Mix the filling well with a fork and set aside while preparing the dough.

Dough:
1. Place flour and salt in a bowl of a stand up mixer. Mix with a spatula.
2. Heat milk until almost to the point of boiling and add to the flour. With a hook attachment run a mixer on a slowest speed. When the flour is incorporated, run a mixer on a fast speed for about 5 minutes until the dough is smooth and shiny.

3. The dough also can be made manually. Put a flour mixed with salt on a working surface. Make a well in the middle and pour the milk in it. Working with hands incorporate the milk into the flour, then knead the dough for about 5 minutes until smooth.
4. Put a dough on a wooden cutting board dusted with flour and cover with a bowl.
5. Sift a little bit of flour on a working surface. I use my special wooden board or do that directly on the granite counter top.
6. Cut half of the dough and roll out with a rolling pin until very thin. Using a cookie cutter or a glass cup cut circles as closed to each other as possible. Remove the rest of the dough so only the cut out circles stay on the board. (The remaining dough can be cut into smaller pieces and cooked at the end as pasta.)

7. Meanwhile, boil about a gallon of water in a large pot with a tbsp salt.
8. On each of the dough circle place about a tbsp of filling. Wet the edges of the circle with water, fold in half, and close with fingers pressing down both sides of the half circle

9. Toss the pierogi into the boiling water. When they appear on the surface of the pot turn down the heat to medium and cook them for about 3-5 minutes. Drain on a colander.
10. Make the same way a second batch of pierogi with the remaining other half of the dough.
11. Serve pierogi with fried onion and red or white sour cabbage salads.

Tarragon Chicken Soup--with a Potato Surprise

Maybe because it is again so cold, this winter soup came to my mind today. I ate it more than twenty years ago in London.

When I was working in London in an interior designer studio, sometimes my boss Alexandra prepared this soup for lunch. At that time it was not my most favorite meal from all she made, as I am not particularly a soup person. But today, thinking how much good style and how many useful rules I have learned from her at that time, this soup stays in my memory as a souvenir of the good and exciting times.

She cooked it during winter months. She usually put a whole chicken in a huge pot and as many whole potatoes as the people the soup would be served for. I do not remember any other vegetables being added to it, which seems a bit odd. If any, they must have been only leeks and celery, as the soup was dark green in color. But I certainly remember that there was plenty of dried tarragon which made the whole taste of that chicken soup. She cooked it very slowly for a long time until the chicken and potatoes became soft. The soup looked a bit like a bouillon and was served with whole potatoes and pieces of the chicken meat on the plate. And it was surprisingly very tasty. A kind of eintopf.

These days I do not even ever buy a whole chicken, so I made a version of it with a very lean breast meat. I also added leeks and celery. When the soup was ready it tasted nice and delicate but it was very aromatic thanks to the tarragon, almost exactly as the soup I had in Alexandra's Chiswick studio many years ago.

Tarragon Chicken Soup
(Serves four)

Ingredients:
4 chicken breasts (or any other parts you like), preferably organic,
4 large potatoes, peeled,
1 medium leek, washed well and sliced,
4 celery sticks, sliced,
2 tbsp dried tarragon leaves,
1 bay leaf,
3 all spice grains,
salt and pepper to taste.

Preparation:
1. In a large pot put a gallon of water with a half a tbsp of salt, bay leaf, and all spice. Bring it to boil and add whole potatoes and let it simmer for about 20 minutes.
2. Add to the pot sliced chicken meat (or whole other pieces) leek, celery and tarragon. Bring to boil and cook for about 30-40 minutes, until potatoes are soft and vegetables turn dark green color.
3. Season with pepper and serve in bowls with a whole potato in the middle.