Estonian recipes: fried pork escalopes in marinade

I'm thrilled to share another wonderful Estonian dish with you - fried pork slices in marinade, served cold. It's been a popular dish on various buffét tables for many decades, and as it can be made ahead - and it keeps well in the fridge - it's a useful recipe to have in your repertoire. You can eat it alongside a traditional potato salad, or perhaps on a slice of good dark rye bread - remember, it's a cold dish.

I've used pork shoulder (kaelakarbonaad) for making this, but you could also use any other soft boneless cut.

Fried pork in marinade
(Praetud sealiha marinaadis)
Serves 10 to 12

1 kg boneless pork (blade shoulder, Boston butt, loin)
a scant cup of all-purpose flour
salt and freshly ground black pepper
3 to 4 large eggs, lightly whisked
oil, for frying

Marinade:
1.5 litres water
2 large carrots, peeled and sliced
2 onions, peeled, halved and sliced
10 black peppercorns
1 bay leaf
1.5 Tbsp sugar
1.5 Tbsp salt
2 Tbsp vinegar (30%)

Cut the pork into 1 cm slices, across the grain. Place the meat between two sheets of cling film or parchment paper. Using a mallet or a rolling pin, pound the meat on both sides until it forms a thin escalope. Cut each escalope into smaller pieces, about 4x5 cm in size.
Season the flour with salt and pepper, dip the meat pieces into flour and then into whisked egg.
Heat the oil on a frying pan over moderate heat. Fry the meat slices until golden brown on both sides and cooked through. Remove from the pan and transfer into a bowl and let cool.

Now make the marinade. Place all the ingredients - apart from the vinegar - into a small saucepan and bring into a boil. Simmer gently, until the carrot slices are al dente (crisp). Remove from the heat, add the vinegar, and let cool.

Pour the marinade over the meat slices. Cover and let stand for at least 24 hours before serving.

Estonian recipes: Barley with Smoked Pork (vastlapuder)

February 2012

It's Shrove Tuesday today, and I'm sharing a traditional Estonian Shrove Tuesday recipe with you. You'll need exactly three ingredients - pearl barley, smoked pork and water (and some salt to taste, if necessary). Cheap, simple, filling, flavoursome, and surprisingly delicious :)

You'll need a good chunk of smoked pork - ribs are perfect, though I've often used a fattier smoked cheek. This particular piece of meat is called maasuitsuribi (country-smoked ribs) in Estonian:



Note that this porridge reheats rather well - just slowly warm it until piping hot on your frying pan. I like to serve this with some sour cream.

Barley Porridge with Smoked Pork
(Vastlapuder)
Serves four to six



200 g smoked pork (rib, cheek or thickly cut bacon)
175 g pearl barley, rinsed and drained
1 l boiling water
salt, to taste

Cut the smoked pork into dice:



Fry the pork cubes in a heavy saucepan over moderately high heat, until browned and slightly crispened. (Drain off the excess oil, if necessary - various cuts of pork are rather different. Leave about a tablespoon or two of pork fat).
Add the pearl barley and sauté for about a minute, stirring.
Add the boiling water. Reduce heat, cover the pan with a lid. Simmer on a low heat for about an hour, stirring couple of times, until the barley is just ever so lightly al dente (you don't want it to go too mushy).
Taste for seasoning, add some salt, if necessary.


February 2008

MORE DELICIOUS SHROVE TUESDAY RECIPES @ NAMI-NAMI:
Yellow split pea soup with smoked pork
Traditional lenten buns
Lenten buns with raspberries and marzipan
Chocolate-y lenten buns

Cover Girl

Not sure how that happened and why, but in January I was approached by the Pere ja Kodu ("Family and Home"), the biggest family magazine published in Estonia. They asked if I'd be willing to be interviewed for the cover story of their February issue. I must admit I was pretty baffled - me? I know that my Estonian recipe site is popular (I get about 3000 unique visitors each day), that the two cookbooks have done well, that my regular monthly recipe column in Postimees, my one-week stint cooking on the breakfast show at the national television (I'll blog about that soon, promise!), and numerous radio interviews mean that many people would recognise the Nami-Nami name quite well. Still, cooking and writing about the food is something I do in the privacy and intimacy of my own home, for my close friends and dear family, so it's sometimes hard to comprehend that it's actually not so private and intimate after all.

A three-hour interview with a lovely journalist and two photo-shoots with an even lovelier photographer resulted in a nice long article and some pretty glamorous family photos :) The article doesn't talk about cooking as such. Instead it focuses on balancing family life, academic career and my cooking hobby; on my attempts to involve kids in the cooking process and developing a healthy relationship to food and eating; on baby-led weaning (a topic very close to my heart); on keeping and sustaining family harmony (of a kind that's possible with two tiny lively kids); and on my appreciation of the Estonian social welfare system that lets me stay at home for about 18 months with each kid (keeping my full salary).

So if you read Estonian, and want to learn more about all that, go to your nearest newspaper stand and get the February 2012 issue of Pere and Kodu :)