Are you sick of the banal salads that you have to cook for every holiday table? Do you want something new, originally designed and certainly very tasty? Then pay attention to the dish with the unusual name of Georgian beet phali. This dish is prepared quickly enough and will be a good decoration on the table for a holiday or a family feast.
Ingredients
- Beets - two pieces weighing 200-250 grams each.
- Cabbage - one small head of cabbage.
- Walnuts - one hundred grams.
- One large onion is red, sweet.
- A pair of garlic cloves.
- Two hundred grams of spinach (you can take frozen).
- Half a teaspoon of saffron.
- Seasonings: hops-suneli, coriander, a couple of spoons of acute adjika.
- Salt, ground black or red pepper (to taste).
- Greens - cilantro, parsley.
Cooking Beets
First you need to cook the vegetables in the oven. The main ingredient in the recipe for phali from beets, of course, is the red beauty, which we will bake. To do this, you need to peel the beets, you can cut them into small slices, or you can bake them whole (depending on how much time you have to cook, because the whole beets will be baked a little longer). Each piece of beets must be wrapped in foil and put on a baking sheet. We put in a preheated oven and cook for forty-forty-five minutes.
Cooking cabbage
Phali from beets in Georgian does not do without boiled cabbage. To many, such an ingredient will seem tasteless, but do not rush to judge. First you should wash the cabbage and take it apart into petals. We put a pot of water on the fire, slightly add salt to it and lower the cabbage leaves carefully there. Cabbage will cook until tender. As a rule, it is 15-20 minutes.
Cooking Spinach
Georgian beetroot spinach in Georgian, the recipe of which we offer, will also be boiled, like cabbage. Remember, if you did not find it fresh (most likely, it will), then you can use frozen packets from the store. Before cooking it should be slightly thawed. While you are working on cabbage and beets, let the spinach lie a little at room temperature. After that, it can be dipped in salted boiling water and cook until tender.
We use a meat grinder
Further, in order to cook delicious phali from beets, we need a kitchen assistant - a meat grinder. Also stock up on several separate plates. We will mix and combine the ingredients later. In a separate bowl, chop walnuts. Onions, garlic and herbs will go to another plate. Here you can immediately add spices - hops-suneli and ground coriander.
After the cabbage and beets are ready, they should be slightly cooled. This can be done simply by waiting a while. Or you can just place the vegetables for several seconds under cold water. Now grind them like all other ingredients with a meat grinder. Remember, each ingredient should be in its plate for now.
We form balls
Now it remains only to collect all the crushed products together. Beetroot Phali are small balls that look like cutlets. This is the form we need to achieve. Although you can experiment and create your own cutlets of the original form.
Of all our ingredients, two types of phali are obtained. Beetroot recipe: mix together chopped beets, walnuts and a little greens with garlic and onions. Spinach recipe: mix balls of boiled cabbage, herbs with garlic and onions, boiled spinach. As a result, we get two types of balls: green and red. Top they can be decorated with large leaves of cilantro or sprigs of dill. In the original Georgian recipes you can find phali from beets, which are decorated with pomegranate seeds. This decoration will look especially impressive on green phali.
Varieties of Phali
Such a dish will be a very unusual table decoration. I must say that the phali from beets are great as a vegetable side dish for meat and goulash, barbecue and barbecue. However, the residents of Georgia themselves believe that phali is a special type of food. If Europeans serve a vegetable appetizer to a meat dish, then the Georgians will eat phali just like that. Fatty and vitamin-rich walnuts give a particular satiety to this dish, so it's quite possible to eat such a dish.
To decorate the dish (if you decide to serve it as an independent one), you can use fried onions. Finely chop two small onions, fry them in a skillet with chopped garlic, and serve in the phali.
There are several varieties of phali. Form cutlets can be made from different products:
- Boiled white beans, garlic, herbs.
- Cabbage, greens, onions and garlic.
- Boiled chopped eggplant, herbs, garlic and onions.
- Green beans, greens, onions and minced garlic.
- Even poultry mixed with boiled chopped vegetables is sometimes cooked by Phali, but this is just a flight of imagination of the authors and has nothing to do with Georgia.