Many housewives from year to year prepare the same salads for the holiday. No matter how tasty they are, they can pall, especially as cooks do the same snacks on weekdays. But there is a dish that would be appropriate on the holiday table, and by preparing it on weekdays, you will turn the family dinner into a special event. This salad is “Fairy Tale”, the preparation of which requires not only compliance with the recipe, but also a special design.
Cooking Features
The composition of the salad "Fairy Tale" almost necessarily includes the gifts of the forest. Most often it is mushrooms, less often - nuts. Sometimes both ingredients are included in the recipe. The basis, as a rule, are meat products: beef, poultry. It is difficult to spoil a snack with such products, but there are several things that will make it more tasty and beautiful, which in this case plays an important role.
- Salad “Fairy Tale” refers to the category of puff snacks. It is necessary to prepare it at least 2 hours before the celebration. Then the products will have time to soak in the sauce. Yes, and to decorate the dish can take a long time.
- The most common salad recipe includes mushrooms or oyster mushrooms, as these mushrooms are available fresh all year round. If you replace them with boletus mushrooms, the taste and aroma of snacks will only benefit.
- Salad will be more useful if boiled or stewed mushrooms for it, but with fried mushrooms it turns out to be more tasty, especially if butter is used for frying. With this in mind, the technology of cooking salad can be amended.
- Do not digest eggs: in order to cook them completely, 10 minutes is enough. If they cook longer, the yolk will become covered with a grayish bloom, which will damage the appearance of the dish, especially if the egg yolks are used to decorate the snack.
- Be sure to cool the products before using them to form a salad, otherwise it will quickly deteriorate and will not keep its shape well.
- If you use walnuts, make sure that they are not moldy: this product will spoil rather quickly. In addition, kernels of nuts can be lightly roasted in a dry frying pan, from which they will become more aromatic and tastier, they will be easier to grind. Walnuts can be replaced by any other, giving the taste of snacks new notes.
When preparing a salad, set aside some products to decorate it. To know what products and in what quantity to postpone, it is necessary to choose in advance the design option snack.
Fairy Tale Salad with Chicken, Mushrooms and Walnuts
Composition:
- chicken breast - 0, 5 kg;
- fresh champignons - 0, 5 kg;
- walnut kernels - 100 g;
- onions - 0, 2 kg;
- chicken egg - 6 pcs .;
- salt, pepper - to taste;
- mayonnaise - as required.
Method of preparation:
- Wash chicken breast, cover with water. When it boils, add salt to taste and cook the breast until tender. Leave to cool in broth so that the poultry meat remains juicy.
- Cook hard boiled eggs, hold them under a stream of cold water so that they cool down faster and then clean well.
- Wash champignons, cover with water, boil for 10-15 minutes, drain in a colander. Crushed cooled mushrooms with a knife.
- Onion cut into small cubes, combine with mushrooms. Stew in a small amount of broth in a frying pan until the liquid from the pan evaporates. Mushrooms with onions can not stew, and fry in oil, then boil the mushrooms first do not need.
- Fry the nuts lightly in a dry frying pan and grind to a crumb. For grinding nuts, you can use a blender or coffee grinder.
- Take the chicken breast out of the broth, peel off the skins. Separate the meat from the bones and disassemble into fibers. Divide the meat into two equal parts.
- Peel the eggs, chop them on a coarse grater, and also divide them in half.
- Put a cooking hoop on a dish, inside it distribute the first part of chicken meat, brush it with mayonnaise.
- Top with half the mushrooms, salt them, pepper, cover with a thin layer of sauce.
- Put the first part of the eggs on the mushrooms, brush them with mayonnaise.
- In the same order, remembering to lubricate the layers with mayonnaise, lay out the remaining products.
- Put the salad in the fridge for half an hour, then remove the hoop. Sprinkle with nut crumb.
It remains to decorate the salad to your liking, hold in the refrigerator for 1, 5-2 hours, so that the products are soaked with sauce, and can be served. According to the same recipe, you can make a salad of smoked chicken, but it will not be so tender.
Salad “Fairy Tale” with beef
Composition:
- boiled veal - 0.5 kg;
- fresh champignons - 0, 4 kg;
- onions - 150 g;
- green onions - 100 g;
- carrots - 0, 2 kg;
- chicken egg - 4 pcs .;
- pomegranate seeds - 100 g;
- fresh dill - 50 g;
- butter - 50 g;
- salt, pepper - to taste;
- mayonnaise - as needed.
Method of preparation:
- Boil the veal in salted water with spices, cool, cut into small cubes, place on a dish, giving the shape of a circle, grease with sauce.
- Finely chop the green onions, sprinkle it on the meat.
- Cool hard-boiled eggs, free from husks, squirrels and yolks separately. Put squirrels on top of green onions, generously mix with mayonnaise.
- Peel the onion, chop finely.
- Wash, dice mushrooms.
- Melt the butter, fry the mushrooms in it along with the onions, until the liquid released from the mushrooms evaporates. Cool the mushrooms, put the next layer, cover with mayonnaise.
- Boil carrots without peeling. When it cools down, peel, chop on a grater, put on mushrooms, grease with sauce.
- Sprinkle with grated yolks.
- Finely chop the dill, cover the edges of the salad with it.
- In the center of the salad, over the yolks, using mayonnaise, draw a grid. Fill its cells with pomegranate seeds.
This version of the “Fairy Tale” salad provides for a strictly specific type of design;
Salad “Fairy Tale” with smoked carb, oyster mushrooms and beans
Composition:
- carbonate - 0, 25 kg;
- oyster mushrooms - 0, 25 kg;
- canned beans - 0, 4 kg;
- vegetable oil - 50 ml;
- mayonnaise - to taste;
- lettuce leaves - 5 pcs .;
- fresh greens - 100 g;
- canned mushrooms, cherry tomatoes, quail eggs (optional) - for decoration.
Method of preparation:
- Cut the carbonate into small pieces.
- Grind oyster mushrooms, fry in oil.
- Open the beans, drain the liquid. Divide into 2 parts.
- Put the salad leaves, carbonate mixed with a spoon of mayonnaise on a dish or salad bowl, bedding on the bottom.
- Add mayonnaise to beans, stir. Put the first part of the product on the carbonate.
- In the next layer put oyster mushrooms. Water them with a small amount of mayonnaise.
- Place the remaining beans on the oyster mushrooms, sprinkle them with chopped greens.
- Spread canned mushrooms or mushrooms made from quail eggs and cherry tomatoes around the salad.
This salad can be made layered. Then, for dressing, they use not mayonnaise, but lemon juice, in this case they serve a snack only in a salad bowl.
How to decorate a salad
Salad “Fairy Tale” spread like a cake, sprinkled with finely grated cheese, crushed nuts or other heavily chopped products, then decorated as a confectionery, using fabulous forest themes. The culinary imagination is not limited to anything else.
- To make the cake form a salad, you can use a culinary baking dish that has a split construction. After removing the hoop, the salad is coated with mayonnaise on the edges, sometimes sprinkled with nuts, grated proteins, cheese. If these ingredients are not enough, try replacing them with breadcrumbs - they will not spoil the taste of the salad, and the similarity to the cake will give the snack more.
- Salad can be laid out in the form of a mushroom, a ladybug, a hedgehog, making it look like a chosen character with the help of products having a suitable color and shape.
- Often the “Fairy Tale” salad is decorated with mushrooms made from eggs, which represent legs, and halves of tomatoes, which replace caps. This mushroom may be one, it flaunts in the center of the snack, or there may be several of them. It is advisable to make small mushrooms from quail eggs and cherry tomatoes.
- Cherry tomatoes are also used to make ladybirds. The spots on them are made with the help of mayonnaise, the muzzle and paws are made from pieces of olives.
- From carrots, beets, cucumbers, you can cut out figures, which also decorate the salad, becoming the details of the picture conceived by the cook.
- Salad cake can be divided in half, sprinkling one part with grated yolks, the other part with grated whites. One part is turned into a chamomile field with the help of flowers from eggs, on the other they depict a branch of mountain ash from greens and half of cherry tomatoes.
- A simple idea to make is to make acorns from olives and olives. Oak leaves will replace celery greens. You can cut oak leaves from lettuce leaves.
Making a salad “Fairy Tale” is beautifully simple, it is only important to know in which direction to act.
Salad "Fairy Tale" - one of the most delicious and elegant-looking snacks. It will decorate the table, for whatever reason it was covered.
