Kurnik (by G)

I was idly flipping through the internet the other day looking for a suitable Russian dish to cook when I came across Kurnik - a pie of chicken and rice with boiled eggs in the pie. Adding eggs to things is one of my favourite pastimes so I decided to make this Russian pie with eggs in it.

I can tell you, this dish was quite the dick-around - from making the cream cheese pastry (basically masses of cream cheese and butter with a little flour added) to cooking the chicken and mushroom filling, along with boiling rice and eggs and making a white sauce.

I won't go into any great detail about the labour intensive job of constructing the pie - it's basically just a crust with layers of rice and chicken mixture topped with eggs and then baked.

Here are my pros and cons about the resulting pie:

Pro: The pastry did not dissolve into a buttery puddle (I couldn't envisage it doing anything else but. I still don't know how a pastry holds together with that much cream cheese and butter in it).

Pro: It did have boiled eggs in it.

Con: It was a terrible pie.

I was very deflated when tasting the end result of all my labours - especially as I know how delicious the chicken and mushroom filling was. I have no idea why you would add rice to this pie (unless it has something to do with making a little filling go a long way in times of financial hardship - in which case 'fine' but don't tell me it's delicious).

Anyway, I made a pie, it was average. I didn't know what to have with it so I just boiled some potatoes, carrots and snow peas.