Ukrainian cuisine has an appetising variety of dishes. It combines different products, recipes and ways of preparing them. The popular Ukrainian borsch has 20 ingredients. They are boiled as well stewed.
Many meat and fish dished are fried, stewed and so on, to give them an original taste.
Many dishes in Ukrainian cuisine are stuffed or larded. Especially tasty are dishes with meat and vegetables; beef and mushrooms stewed in casseroles, homemade Ukrainian sausage with onion, cabbage rolls with meat and rice.
Ukrainian dishes made from poultry are very popular, for instance Cutlets "a Kiev".
The most popular dishes made from flour are vareniki, mlintzi, buckwheat bread.
Ukrainian cuisine is also rich in fruit and berry desserts and drinks, for example, homemade nalivkas, brandies, varenukhas, tertukhas, kvass and uzvarets.
Despite the development of the food industry and the use of new products, the national essay of Ukrainian dishes has been preserved.
Ukrainian cuisine has dishes from all over the world. And many Ukrainian dishes are popular abroad.
Television has become an essential part of our daily life. It gives us much useful and interesting information. It makes a great opportunity for education and entertaining. Television keeps us informed about the current events in the world. Nowadays it offers a wide variety of channels and all kinds of programmes and films which are able to satisfy any taste and any age. Besides, thanks to satellite TV, we can watch channels from different countries.
According to the statistics data, the most regular TV viewers are housewives, pensioners and children. My grandmother, for instance, is very fond of Russian long-running sagas and Brazilian soap-operas which always have a happy end. She finds them quite relaxing. As for me, the story lines in those soap-operas seem unreal and too dramatic. My grandfather loves all news programmes and documentaries devoted to our history. When my mum stays at home she prefers watching different women’s talk-shows, concerts, quiz-shows or reality-shows.
Actually I was also a real fan of a reality show “Last Hero”. I saw all 7 seasons of it but, alas, it finished in 2009. As far as I know this show was the Russian version of an American “Survivor”. The contestants of the show were sent to a desert island and then split up into tribes. I liked the idea of putting them in extraordinary and sometimes even dangerous circumstances. I always tried to figure out what I would have done if I had been sent to that island and had lived in a tribe too. The participants of this dynamic reality show had to fight hard because the winner’s prize was rather substantial.
And now I really enjoy a fantastic vocal talent show “Voice” presented by Dmitriy Nagiev. It started in 2012 and is broadcast every weekend. The format of “Voice” differs from other traditional music contests because the participants are already professional singers with fabulous vocal capabilities. The judges (Alexander Gradskiy, Dima Bilan, Pelageya and Leonid Agutin) evaluate the contestant’s voices and make decisions without looking at the singers, through a blind audition process. As soon as the judges have formed their teams they start competing with each other. Eventually only one singer will be honoured the grand prize and become “The vest voice”.
Luckily I am not a TV addict and I don’t spend all my leisure time in front of the so called “one-eyed living-room monster”. However I do my best not to miss my favourite programmes.