I am bad, very bad. I haven’t finished writing my own post and now I have coerced someone else to write for me again. In my defence, it was worth it! Read on and see for yourself.
"I really like Russian food.Russians eat alot of dairy, sour milk,
unsweetened yogurt, butter, tvorog, like cottage cheese) and it's
all good. Perhaps after six months in China,I 've forgotten what really
good dairy tastes like. The only yogurt you can get here in Jinzhou is sweetened yogurt. No cream, no sour cream, no cream cheese. I guess it was pretty understandable that I gorged myself while I had the chance. Tvorog is something that apparently all Russians eat, because it is cheap and nutritious. It doesn't have a ton of flavour by itself, and the texture is somewhat similar to a rubbery feta cheese, but when combined with honey, it tasted oh so good. Russian sour milk is called kaffir and I had a glass of it each morning with my breakfast. It's basically sourcream, with less fat content I guess, it's certainly not as thick as the sour cream we get in NZ. Grains are a huge part of Russian cuisine. I had rye bread with almost every meal, thick and dense with a fairly hard crust. I think you can get all types but this was just the particular loaf that Lera prefers. Kasha is the russian word for porridge and it comes in many different varieties. By far my favourite is gretchka, or roasted buckwheat porridge. It's crumbly like cous-cous and has got a great natural flavour which is enhanced with olive oil or melted butter. I guess I also put more salt on it than I should. I also tried cornmeal kasha, which I didn't like so much, it was cooked with milk and tasted more like a dessert to me. But yeah, kasha can be made out of pretty much any grain. I cooked some rice last night and added too much water to the rice-cooker, thus failing to make decent rice but successfully creating some rice kasha. Russian's have speck. It's not as good as the stuff we get from Heck's but it is okay. Heck's speck has a smokey flavour and greater depth of flavour all around. The russian speck, I tried (to fair, I only tried three types, and one of them was hungarian speck) just tasted like mildly salty pork fat. The texture of the Russian speck wasn't quite as good either, it was more slimey rather than buttery. Once again, I have to say that it was supermarket bought speck and I'm sure there is much better quality stuff around somewhere. The sausage that I ate in Russia was really good. Actually, I had some stuff that looked pretty nasty, like the sizzler pre-cooked mushy inside variety. However, it was actually really good, apparently it was the most popular type of sausage during Soviet times. I also had sausage/salami which was very tasty, however the texture was a bit tougher than I prefer. Actually, I'd previously eaten that kind of sausage when Lera brought some back from a trip to Moscow. The Moscow version was tasty and had a nice texture, one of the best salami-type sausages I've ever had. I had smoked salmon a couple of times. My god it was good. Once again I must qualify this by saying that cold smoked salmon is probably my favourite food in the whole world, and that it does not exist here in Jinzhou. I hadn't tasted this wonderful, wonderful delicacy in nearly six months. After my first bite of smoked salmon, I just sat there and sighed. I felt like weeping, my mind was already dreading going back to the smoked salmon-less culinary desert that is Jinzhou. But yeah, I couldn't stop eating it, like seriously, even when I was full, if there was smoked salmon on the table I would eat it. I also tried some caviar, and yeah, it's not as salty when it is fresh and not from a tin. However, I'm not a big fan of fish eggs so yeah... I'm sure caviar lovers would have enjoyed it. You know when you cook too many boiled potatoes for dinner the night before, and then fry the leftovers the next day for breakfast? That's a classic russian dish. Go figure. There are a couple of other traditional dishes that are pretty much identical to what we make at home. Blini are basically just pancakes, maybe I'm not a pancake but they tasted just like normal pancakes. Leras mum's recipe produced thin crepe-like pancakes, but each family had their own recipe. I also had some meat patties, that tasted exactly like the kind I make sans a ton of garlic. Speaking of classic russian dishes, I had some borsch. This wasn't the heavy meat laden winter version, it was actually a vegetarian summer version. The overwhelming taste for me was of dill, I don't feel particularly strongly about the herb either way. The soup was refreshing, but I didn't love it. I went down to the riverside with Lera and her parent's on a sunday and we sunbathed, swam and ate shaslik. These are meat kebabs marinated with vinegar and onions and then cooked over a woodfire. They were pretty good, I asked about the recipe and was slightly disappointed when I was informed that it was a bottle of store bought stuff. After the all the meat was cooked and the coals were dying down, some potatoes were thrown in to cook. They weren't too bad either, although I do have some reservations about carcinogens in the charred skin that you can never fully remove. Getting potato ash on your skin after a barbeque is a traditional thing as well. . We pretty much had raw vegetables with every meal, tomatoes, cucumber and capsicum. I don't know how much of that was a russian thing and how much of it was a Lera's family thing. Apparently they don't normally eat red meat, just vegetables, dairy and grains. I tried some vegetable caviar that Lera's grandfather made. I think it is like 99% eggplant, well, maybe not but there is alot of eggplant in it. It had a faint taste of burnt onions, which I liked, but which Lera told me is not supposed to be there. I liked vegetable caviar more than the regular stuff anyway. I also got to sample a spread that he made out of fish livers. Unfortunately I failed to see Lera's warning gestures in the background and bit into a piece of bread with this foul mixture on it. You would intuitively assume that fish liver spread would be disgusting and indeed it was. I managed a good job of not gagging and offending the poor guy. But yeah, food was had to come by when grandpa was a kid and so he cooks and pickles just about everything. Apparently he makes pickled watermelon flesh with aspirin, that no one actually likes or eats. I guess it would come in handy during World War 3, when there is no other food and all the weeds and cockroaches have been eaten. That's about it really. I went to a couple of Italian restaurants while I was in Blagoveschensk but they were nothing to write home about. But all in all, I'd say that the food I had in Russia was really good. "
