Talk about side dishes. The word "side dish" comes from the French language. Literally, it translates as "decorate, fill." The side dish is designed to complement the main course, both in taste and volume. The main course is meat, fish, poultry or game. Garnish should correspond to the main dish to taste, complement and enrich its aroma.
As a simple side dish, you can cook various cereals, vegetables, potatoes, pasta, and legumes. There are also complex compound side dishes: these are, as a rule, representatives of national cuisines.
How to cook a side dish for cutlets?
Garnish for cutlets can be almost anything. Cutlets are delicious with potatoes, and pasta, and with cereals. Also, a garnish for cutlets, you can cook a dish of legumes, for example, pea puree. Most of these recipes have been familiar to many since childhood. If you want to cook something light and dietary as a side dish, try braised string beans.
Garnish for cutlet beans
Take a package of green beans (400 or 500 grams), a teaspoon of sesame seeds, 50 gr. cashew nuts, a little red hot pepper, salt, olive oil.
Fry sesame seeds and chopped nuts in olive oil. Add pepper. Then add the beans. Salt, add some water, cover the pan with a lid and simmer for 5-7 minutes. The dish is ready.
Buckwheat side dish
Buckwheat can be cooked in different ways. It can be boiled, or can be steamed with water or milk. Buckwheat can be cooked in a saucepan on fire, in the microwave, in a double boiler, and it can also be cooked in a clay pot in the oven. It is best, of course, to cook buckwheat in a Russian oven, but few people have such an opportunity.
Cooking buckwheat on the stove
Sort the grits before cooking. Small pebbles or extraneous grains may appear in it. Light buckwheat can be calcined in a pan. Dark buckwheat does not need to be calcined. Rinse the groats, pour into a saucepan. Pour the cereal with cold water in a volume 2 times larger than the volume of the cereal. Bring the water to a boil, then reduce the heat and keep the pan on low heat under a closed lid for 20 minutes. Buckwheat is ready. Salt the porridge if you did not do this at the beginning. Add butter. You can’t spare the butter, you won’t spoil the porridge with butter. The side dish is ready.
Garnish for the liver
When cooking, the liver quickly loses moisture, so the finished dish from the liver is often dry. To prevent this from happening, it is best to stew the liver in sour cream. But even in this case, the liver will not be juicy, so the side dish to the liver should be soft and tender. And the best you can think of is mashed potatoes.
Cooking mashed potatoes
Take half a kilogram of potatoes, half a glass of milk or cream, 30 g. butter, 1 egg, a little salt.
First, cook the potatoes. We put a pot of water on the fire. When the water boils, throw the peeled and chopped potatoes into it, salt and reduce the heat to low. After 20-25 minutes, the potatoes are ready.
In a separate ladle, boil milk or cream
Drain the water from the boiled potatoes, add the crushed butter, then milk or cream. Knead the potatoes with a crush. You can also use a blender. Then add the egg yolk or beaten egg and mix the potatoes again. It is very important to add an egg to a hot potato to kill bacteria. Or use a quail egg, there is no salmonellosis in quail eggs.
Garnish for meatballs
The meatballs in composition and method of preparation are similar to cutlets. What is the difference between meatballs and meatballs? A small amount of additives is added to the cutlets: a little onion, a little soaked bread. In meatballs, the amount of additives is greater. As additives, rice or vegetables are used. Therefore, meatballs turn out airy and light. Almost any side dish can be served with such a dish. Buckwheat porridge, mashed potatoes, pasta, rice are usually prepared for garnish for meatballs.