Collection
Childhood food: school canteen and grandmother's kitchen
Forty-nine dishes everyone who grew up here remembers: pasta bake, milk soup with vermicelli, cutlet with mash from the school canteen, sour cream twists, courgette caviar, hedgehog meatballs, semolina without lumps. Each with a price per serving.
- 49recipes
- $0.11–$4.16per portion
- 5 min – 4 h 40 minto cook
- 147–833kcal per portion
Half of these dishes you ate without knowing their names: the grey pasta bake in the school canteen, milk soup with vermicelli at nursery, a cutlet with mash under gravy, cocoa with skin on top. The other half were made at home: sour cream twists, fried pies with jam, courgette caviar in a three-litre jar, hedgehog meatballs with rice sticking out like quills. Forty-nine of them are here, each with a price per serving worked out for your store, and most of them are among the cheapest things on the site.
The recipes are written the way these dishes were actually made, not the way cafés reinterpret them. Bread in the cutlet mince is there for juiciness, not economy, and the recipe says so. Semolina goes into boiling milk in a thin stream or it lumps. The lid over dumplings stays shut. Below are six ready sets of five dishes: the canteen, a weekday dinner, sweets, a table of starters, mince and liver, and the cheapest five. The button opens the quiz and builds a week from these dishes.
Ready menus
Salads 4
Starters 6
Soup 5
Mains 15
Dessert 19
How to use it
Press “Build a week from this collection”: the planner spreads these dishes across breakfasts, lunches and dinners according to your answers. The shopping list counts whole packs, so flour, milk and mince are bought once for several dishes. Any dish in the plan can be swapped for another from the collection.
Much of this tastes better the next day: borscht, stewed cabbage, courgette caviar and pâté keep for up to three days in the fridge. The fried things do not — twists, doughnuts and pies go soft overnight and are eaten the day they are made. Dough for the pies and twists can be mixed the evening before and kept cold.
Plan a week from this collectionQuestions
Why did canteen cutlets contain bread?
Bread soaked in milk holds moisture inside the mince, so the cutlet comes out juicy instead of a dry lump of meat. It is not a way to save money: the same mince fried the same way is noticeably tougher without it.
How do you cook semolina without lumps?
Bring the milk to the boil, lower the heat and pour the semolina in a thin stream while stirring without stopping. Lumps form when the grain goes in all at once: the outer layer sets and seals a dry middle.
What is cheapest in this collection?
Kefir doughnuts, sour cream twists, thin pancakes and buckwheat with milk sit at the bottom of the price range — all of them cost less per serving than a cup of coffee out.
Why are these meatballs called hedgehogs?
The rice goes into the mince raw, not boiled. As the meatballs stew in the sauce the rice swells and pushes out like quills. Cooked rice stays inside and there is no hedgehog.
Can a whole week be built from this?
Yes: there are breakfasts, lunches and dinners here — porridges and pancakes for the morning, soups and bakes for midday, potatoes with meat and cabbage rolls for the evening. Desserts and starters are not placed in an ordinary week automatically, but can be added by hand.
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