Kutia

Traditional Polish and Ukrainian food. Kutia is one of the 12 dishes in the traditional 12-dishes Christmas Eve Supper. While it is very popular for Christmas, it's rarely served at other times of year.

Traditionally it was made of wheat, poppy seeds, honey (or sugar), various nuts and sometimes raisins. In many recipes milk or cream is also used.

Nowadays other ingredients (which were unavailable or just too expensive hundred years ago) like almonds and pieces of orangess are added.

General recipe

Take equal amount of wheat and poppy seeds, or slightly more wheat. Let's say 0.5 kg of each. Wheat should be cooked in hot water on small fire for 3-4 hours. Poppy seeds should be cooked in hot water until they can be crushed in fingers. Then they should be ground three times in meat grinder.

You can avoid all this work with seeds by buying prepared seeds if they are available.

Then you should strain out water from seeds and from wheat and cool them.

When they are cool, mix them, then add some liquid honey (you may need to add a little hot water to dissolve it) or dissolved sugar (0.1-0.2 kg by our sample measures) and some or all of: nuts, raisins, almonds, pieces of oranges or others (amount of them vary a lot between recipes, suggested is 0.3-0.5 kg total).