Forcemeat cutlets are loved by many. But sometimes even the most beloved dish is "boring", and you want something new, original, but no less tasty. A great alternative to cutlets can be minced nests. This dish is not only tasty, but also looks spectacular.
There are many options for cooking minced meat from minced meat, we will consider only a few of them, and culinary specialists, using their imagination and taste, will be able to create their own recipes for this dish.
For example, let's make minced meat nests with an egg. To do this, we need any (to your taste) minced meat in the amount of 500 grams. A piece of bread or a loaf, a glass of milk, which we use to soak the bread, one medium onion and one carrot, five eggs, salt and seasonings. To lubricate the form, you need a little vegetable oil or any fat.
Let's start making mince nests. Cut the onion as small as possible, and grate the carrots on the smallest grater. Soak the bread in milk, and then squeeze out the excess liquid. Put minced meat, bread, chopped vegetables in a bowl and break the egg there. Mix everything well, salt and add seasonings. You can put greens.
Divide the minced meat into three equal parts and sculpt “buns” from it. Then in the upper part we make a wide recess, forming a nest. We spread our products on a baking sheet, which we did not forget to grease beforehand. Gently break one raw egg into each nest , lightly salt and send our nests from minced meat to the oven. We bake for about forty minutes at a temperature of 180 degrees. Such nests can also be baked in the microwave.
The beauty of this dish is that you can, choosing a different filling, cook more and more new options. For example, in the previous recipe, you can replace a raw egg with a boiled egg, cut in half and laid in a nest of minced meat with the protein up. Or make a filling of chopped boiled eggs and herbs with oil. And you can cook nests of minced meat with mushrooms.
Fresh, salted or dried mushrooms can be used for this dish. When using dry mushrooms, they must first be soaked and boiled. Boiled or salted mushrooms should be cut into small pieces and fry with onions, not forgetting to salt or pepper. You can add grated cheese and sour cream to the filling. The nests themselves are cooked in the same way as in the first recipe, then they are filled with ready-made filling and baked in the oven.
And if you want to cook an exotic dish, then you can start the nests made from minced meat with slices of pineapple and kiwi. You can decorate such a dish with cranberries or cherries, having previously removed the seeds from it.
Nests with minced meat can be prepared from pasta. To do this, you should buy pasta in the store that is already formed in the form of nests. For five pieces of such "nests", we need two hundred grams of ready-made meat stuffed to taste. To prepare the sauce, we need to take two tablespoons of tomato sauce, a spoonful of mayonnaise and sour cream, one hundred and fifty milliliters of cream, fifty grams of cheese and the same amount for sprinkling and seasoning.
Mix all the ingredients for the sauce in a bowl, salt and season to taste. It is good to add dry or fresh, finely chopped basil to the sauce.
Then we take pasta nests, put them in a pan or deep frying pan. We start the holes in the nests with minced meat, sprinkle with cheese on top and pour over the cooked sauce. We cover the dishes with a lid and simmer over low heat for about twenty minutes from the beginning of boiling. Such nests can also be baked in the oven or cooked in the microwave.
If you could not buy ready- made pasta nests, you can make them yourself using spaghetti or a long vermicelli. In this case, the pasta must be boiled first, and then twisted using a fork, forming nests of the desired size. In the prepared nests, put the minced meat, sprinkle them with cheese, pour the sauce and cook for ten minutes in the oven or on the stove. Serving such nests is best with vegetable salad.