Sergey Kalinin, gastronomy observer at Forbes Ukraine, calls himself a professional amateur. Through his culinary community iCook, he urges people to cook healthy, tasty food at home.
I'm 40 years old. I'm not a chef but a professional amateur, which is what my friends call me for fun. In any case, I'm a culinary journalist, and my everyday life is closely tied to the media.
I work to develop food culture. My motto is to cook for yourself, meaning that people should stop buying bland ready-made food and cook healthy, tasty food at home instead. It doesn't cost much, and my culinary community iCook is devoted to this idea.
For a professional amateur, experience and track record add up to a whole life. But if you look for a more or less exact date when my culinary path began, it was when I was six and started getting in my grandmother's way in the kitchen. As a memento of that time, I even have two notebooks of culinary notes and recipes written in my uneven childish handwriting.
My first serious achievement was deciding to take a cooking course at the Work Training Center when I was in ninth grade. If you remember, schools used to have such courses for senior students, with one school day devoted to a profession that could be useful to Soviet youth. Everyone chose the courses for fitters and motor mechanics. I chose the one for cooks and have never regretted it.
Later I even managed to train as a cook's helper in the kitchen of a young pioneer camp. Those were real cook's shifts from 6 a.m. to 8 p.m., and I will never forget them. Cooking never became my profession, but the passion has stayed, so I keep cooking for my friends and family.
I like Thai, Italian and contemporary American cuisine. I think both the Italians and the Thais have managed to create tasty dishes and to cook ordinary products in new and interesting ways. They have developed their cuisines and given a lot to the culinary world. As for contemporary American cuisine, I like it in the realm of haute gastronomy.
Cooking is one of my hobbies. I'm also fond of music, journalism and kitesurfing.
The base of our dish is Eastern greens: mustard spinach, or tatsoi, and sugar pea pods. They give the dish an interesting texture and a very fresh taste. From Europe come cherry tomatoes, air-dried capicola and quail eggs, whose yolks stay runny and add a little viscosity and a soft flavor.
But the main flavor comes from the Thai dressing made with soy and fish sauces, ginger, peanut oil, lime juice and citron. The dressing gives the greens a rich taste, while the eggs and meat add depth and flavor. A little black sesame serves as decoration, and its light nutty flavor goes well with the sauce.
This salad can be served at any time of the year, since the ingredients can be found almost all year round. Why did I choose this dish, Thai-Italian Friendship? We are shooting in the country and are short on time, and what could be better than a tasty, crunchy, fresh salad?
