Читать книгу Fresh and Wild Cookbook: A Real Food Adventure - Ysanne Spevack - Страница 35

Coral is my mum and kasha is traditional eastern European roasted buckwheat. They’re a great combination. Buckwheat originally came from China, spreading across Asia and the Middle East into Eastern Europe with the Crusaders a thousand years ago. It’s now a staple part of Russian and Polish cuisine.

Buckwheat tastes a bit nutty and is cute, with little triangular grains. It’s a rich, starchy whole grain that is high in the B vitamin group that’s so good for memory and general brain power. Buckwheat is also a gentle mood tonic, as it contains a compound called rutin that helps the body deal with stress. It’s handy to keep you hardy during the colder months of our Northern European island home, as it tones up the tiniest capillaries to become more resistant to frostbite and keeps broken veins at bay later in life.

You can sprout buckwheat grain really successfully at home to use as part of a salad sandwich filling, or mill the grain into flour for traditional Russian Blintzes (see page 12). You can buy buckwheat either plain or roasted. The roasted grain is labelled in the UK by its Polish name, kasha, or simply as roasted buckwheat.

In this recipe, the whole roasted grains are cooked up simply, to make a lovely warm winter lunch, or a cold summer grain salad. You can also serve it as a side dish with your dinner, instead of rice or potatoes.