Passport & Plate - The Crab Salad
Kyrgyzstan | Friday, March 14, 2014 | 5 photos
Ingredients
- crab sticks (400 g)
- middle size potatoes (x5)
- eggs (x5)
- one can of corn
- middle size pickled cucumbers (x2)
- one small onion
- mayo (400 ml)
- salt to one's own taste
How to prepare this recipe
Today I'd like to share one of the most delicious things in this world with you, food cravers. There's usually a popular thing peculiar to enthusiastic cooks known as secret recipes, but I am happy to announce - mine are not. It is always a pleasure for me to share my family's recipes with those appreciating the diverse and intercultural art of good eating. So now brace yourselves, and please welcome the Crab Salad!
We are going to start with boiling the peeled potatoes and the eggs. It's always good to cut the potatoes in case you want them to be done fast. The eggs, respectively, need to be boiled for about 15-20 minutes, because we will need them hard-boiled. Whoa, seems like we have got a lot of steam in here!
So we are done with the boiling, and now we can move on to the most important part - dicing all the goods. Everything should be cut in pretty much the same small size, but potatoes can be diced a bit bigger. Crab sticks, cucumbers, eggs, and potatoes should all make it to a mass of the same kind. An onion, meanwhile, needs to be cut into really small pieces, too. An important note here - if the onion is bitter, it's better to put it into warm water for 5-10 minutes, because the water will release it from bitterness, and at the end the salad is going to taste better.
So we have corn left, and good news - it doesn't even need to be cut! The only thing we have to do with corn is to pour out the liquid from the can, because it shouldn't end up being in the salad.
Now we only need a big pot where we are going to mix everything we have prepared. We mix the crab sticks, potatoes, eggs, pickles, the onion, add about 400 ml of mayo so that our salad is not dry, and some salt to one's own taste. The salad should be salty because of the pickled cucumbers, but those are not always enough. Just make sure it is not too salty, because too much of salt is usually worse! That's about it, the salad is ready to be tasted and eaten up!
The story behind this recipe
I live in Kyrgyzstan, a Central Asian country, but I am an ethnic Russian. The prevailing cuisines in my family are therefore Russian and Central Asian, though within last 5-6 years my mom and I have been experimenting with Western, Middle Eastern, and East Asian cuisines. This exact recipe is coming from Russia though, and here's the story behind it.
When I was 6,we went to Russia to visit my grandma. This crab salad was one of the things I remembered the most from what my grandma cooked for us,especially because I have never tried it before. This kind of salads (full of mayo, potatoes etc.) are usually cooked for New Year celebrations, and some of you might have heard of Olivier salad, a traditional dish in Russian cuisine. But I guess because my family couldn't gather together for New Year's, they decided to have a new-year-like celebration full of food in the middle of summer!After trying the crab salad at grandma's, my mom decided to keep the tradition and cook it back home as well.Just like any other family in CIS countries, we used to make Olivier salad, which is a symbol of New Year,but the crab salad became a great substitution for it, and won the hearts and stomachs of ours very fast!
My friends from abroad would always ask me how Russians can call a dish like this crab salad "a salad" at all. Well, cold weather and severe winter in the most territory of Russia may be one of the reasons, so people came up with recipes of very nutritious and tasty salads like the one I've provided above. And this is also what I like about this salad the most! It doesn't require any superficial culinary skills - everyone can easily cook it at home, and it always turns out to be delicious and extremely nourishing. I've tried to make it in countries abroad, USA and South Korea for instance, and it tasted as if I cooked in the kitchen of my family's house - isn't it great when just a plate of a salad can take you to a place you miss so much? I personally think it's fascinating.
