A perfect quick breakfast, it gives your day an energetic start. I used to make fresh beet salad once in a while, but real love to fresh beets came to me when I stumbled upon Mini Beet Protocol among many readings on natural healing methods. Taken regularly and persistently, fresh beets and beet juice can rid you of many ailments.

Tonight I cooked dinner for the first time in my blissfully empty Swiss kitchen. As the name of this post suggests, the kitchen is inside my new and almost entirely empty apartment, just about a 15 minute walk away from Zurich's local mountain Uetliberg. The apartment is empty, because I only brought a suitcase with me from New York, but in the suitcase I brought a loyal stainless steel pan!

Cooking breakfast on Sunday is a great pleasure, and eating it is an even greater pleasure, especially if you have a good company. You have some time to to mix and fry and fill the house with those homey aromas. Basic omelet made of quality eggs being my favorite, I also like to experiment and add things to it.

When you are not inclined to spend hours mixing, grating, and baking, but still crave a homemade dessert, this improvised creation could come handy. The Muse of Improvisation visited me and pushed some buttons of my imagination. I rushed to my fridge where I had a cup of leftover sweet crumbs, the rest was done on magical impulse.

Red lentil soup is one of the fastest soups to make! And it is good for you because lentil is one of the healthiest world foods. You come home tired and hungry, you certainly don't want to spend hours cooking, not even one hour, not even 45 minutes...

Shrimp are a delight of a lazy cook, and this recipe is no exception. Spicy, zesty and quick, these shrimp call for second helpings. The recipe was born on our last night on Kauai, when we decided to be frugal and use up everything left over in the fridge.

An advocate of minimalism in life, which unfortunately is possible mostly theoretically in our world of consumerism, I adore simple dishes that do not involve many ingredients. Some of those dishes come from my childhood in Russia, where minimalism was dictated by permanent deficit. Our memory carries on all our life impressions including food, and these simple things we experienced in early years are remembered as good.

Just buy some simple vanilla ice-cream, and arrange it in a bowl with generous amount of currants and a splash of black currant liqueur (or jam mixed with brandy). Sit back and indulge in it! Notes: An even more simple way to eat black currants is to whip 1/2 cup sour cream with 1 tbsp sugar and mix it with berries.

Do not panic - this fish will not eat you. Just kidding...:) But you will definitely eat it with great pleasure, nibbling on crunchy tails and fins, savoring the tender meat drizzled with lemon juice, and following all this by a couple of cherry tomatoes and a sip of chilled white wine...

This recipe has been brewing in my mind for awhile  - a smoothie and a cold soup in one. The best part - it is almost no-boil, where most of ingredients are fresh vegetables. And the best best part is - the proportions are quite arbitrary, just flow with your desires and you will be good.

Well, something simple with minimum cooking. I happened to have a package of farmers cheese in the fridge, and something lazy came to mind. I have omitted the most time-consuming and boring part of making ravioli, that is making them per se.

Okroshka is a traditional cold Russian summer soup that doesn't need to be boiled. It is usually made on hot days when nobody wants to move, let alone cook something serious in the kitchen. This soup contains mostly raw vegetables, boiled eggs, and fermented drink kvas.

This recipe is another experiment with fiddlehead fern salad. The first one was a complete fiasco. This time it was dashed off intuitively, with Asian cuisine in mind.

Today the sun is shining again in Brooklyn. My local wine store put out a sign: "Weather, make up your damn mind! " Indeed, yesterday was windy, menacing and wet, and today Beatles' "Octopus's Garden" comes to mind: We would be warm below the storm In our little hideaway beneath the waves Perhaps due to this association, I suddenly craved some octopus amid a green paradise of green cauliflower, canned peas, pickles, celery, parsley, capers and a few other things.

This is a Russian favorite (pronounced Shar-lot-ka ), and also probably the easiest cake you will ever bake. It requires hardly any preparation and only the most basic ingredients. And yet...

When shopping at my favorite Russian market, I glanced at a shelf with plain Russian cookies, cookies that I remember since my nursery school days. Indeed, there are some products that live decade after decade, and their popularity doesn't wither... Looking at these cookies, I remembered a simple recipe of a desert that I offer to your attention today.

 Once they served us with hors d'oeuvre: fresh peppers stuffed with canned salmon paste. It was spicy, but refreshing and unexpected.  Today I tried to reproduce it and did something similar, but used freshly salted salmon instead.

Am I not right?   Quick pickled cucumbers are one of my summer cravings. The smell of freshly pickled cucumbers reminds me of a Siberian village, with roosters diligently crowing at dawn, with cows mooing on their way to pasture, with kind babushkas and their endless hooked rugs.

Out of the Russian gastronomic stereotypes (apart from cabbage, which is also German, and vodka, which is really quite popular around the globe) beets is one of the most persistent. And yes, we are truly beet-eaters. Beets are a proud ingredient of many traditional Russian dishes.

Hence, for some of us lazy bums, this is a perfect way to create a custom flavor of any ice cream. The green tea ice cream is made with matcha green tea powder. The green tea leaves harvested for matcha are grown in the shade, and have a more intense green color and sweeter flavor than other green tea varieties.