Russian food-recipes this time

After not visiting my blog for a while I was a little embarrassed that people were visiting it to look for Russian Food because that was the title of one of the posts, probably because they were looking for recipes. To kind of make amends I have acquired another guest writer and who has kindly provided some recipes. Thanks Lera and Lera’s mum!

Borsch

Borsch is a signature dish of Ukranian and Russia cuisines, but generally speaking Ukranians prefer a very hearty version – they use speck, which is ground down with onions and added to soup just minutes before removing it from the stove. My mum’s version is light, particularly because she doesn’t fry the vegetables before adding them to soup (as a doctor she thinks it’s healthier and preserves more vitamins), and this version can even be vegetarian. Get a big pot (5L) and and a piece of veal brisket, pour cold water to fill the pot, place meat and bring to boil. After the first boil, the meat should be rinsed with running water and the stock goes down the drain – the first stock extracts pesticides and other harmful substances from meat. Fill the pot again and cook for 1-1.5 hours. After the stock is ready add some salt. Borsch can now be cooked. (For vegetarian borsch skip this part). The order in which you add different ingredients is crucial, as for example adding tomatoes before potatoes adds acid which doesn’t allow potatoes to get cooked. Take one medium to large size beet root (depending on the desired sweetness of borsch, usually after cooking it a few times you know the amount of ingredients, everyone I know measures with eyes), clean, peel and cut into straws, add to the stock, let simmer for 7-10 minutes (until beet root gives part of its color to the stock) and add 1-2 small chopped onions (if you are making vegetarian borsch at this point add 1 tbsp of extra virgin olive oil), let simmer for another 5-7 minutes. After that add shredded fresh carrots (2-3 medium size ones) and cubed potatoes (3-4 big ones would be good, potatoes are good in borsch), leave simmering for another 5-7 minutes while you are peeling 3-4 big tomatoes. Shred, mush or roughly chop tomatoes and add them to borsch, leave simmering for another 3-5 minutes (tomatoes add acidity so it’s important to add enough fresh tomatoes, if after tasting borsch seems too sweet still, some people add tomato paste, all to taste). After tomatoes have been simmering for 3-5 minutes, add chopped capsicum, or even several small ones, simmer for another 3-5 minutes, taste the salt and sweetness/acidity, make adjustments by adding more salt or tomatoes if needed and then add a good portion of fresh thinly chopped cabbage and some fresh chopped parsley or dill (or both). After the cabbage is added, turn off the heat, cover the pot with a lid and let stand for another 5 minutes – don’t simmer borsh with cabbage as it will turn soggy; cabbage should stay crispy. Pour borsh into a deep bowl and put sour cream on the table – a tablespoon of sour cream makes it tastier. Store pot with borsh in the fridge and it’s believed that borsh is best the second day.

Eggplant/Aubergine

Homestyle eggplant: slice big eggplants into 1cm-thick circles, fry with a bit of olive oil, arrange each slice on an equal circle of ripe sweet tomato and top with crushed garlic and thin layer of mayonnaise, sprinkle with chopped fresh dill. For a healthy version put the eggplant slices on an oiled baking sheet and bake until soft, then arrange eggplant on top of tomato slices, top with garlic and 1:1 mix of sour cream/yogurt and mayonnaise, sprinkle with chopped fresh dill. Also adding crushed garlic to mayo helps to save some time.

Potatoes

Best summer dish: new potatoes! Boil the potatoes, drain the water, add plenty of butter and let it melt under the lid, transfer to a plate and sprinkle with lots of chopped fresh dill. For a herbier taste add the dill together with butter in a pot with hot potatoes and let stand with lid on for several minutes. Sour cream on top will make it truly Russian.

Russian pancakes

Russian pancakes: every household has it’s own recipe, but I prefer crepe-like paper-think yeast-free pancakes, and my mum’s recipe is the best in the world for this. They can be stuffed with all kinds of things, but also can be served plain, accompanied by caviar, smoked salmon, sour cream, condensed milk, homemade jam, honey, melted butter for dipping. You will need 1L of fresh milk, 5-6 eggs, 2-2.1/5 cups of plain flour (depending on flour, you will need less or more of it), a pinch of salt, some white sugar (lets say 1 tbsp) and 1 tbsp of extra virgin olive oil (or other vegetable oil), melted butter for covering the pancakes. Pour 500-600 ml of milk into a mixer bowl, crack eggs, add half of flour, salt and sugar, combine on low speed until there are no more lumps of flour visible, add the rest of flour and mix again. The batter at this point should be thick and a bit stretchy. Start adding milk and mixing everything together until you have no milk left. At this point the batter should be the consistency of liquid sour cream (that’s the comparison we use in Russia, and liquid sour cream may sound like an oxymoron, but the Soviet sour-cream was 10% fat at best and very liquid). Add 1tbsp of oil and mix again – oil in batter prevents pancakes from sticking to the surface of a pan. Heat the flat non-stick pan (the best pancakes come from a thick cast-iron pan, but it requires extra oiling between the pancakes, for which traditionally a piece of pork fat was used, but I recommend wrapping some clean cotton cloth around a fork, in Russia we use drug-store bandage, and dip it into olive oil, shake off the excess and use it to lightly oil the pan). Oil the pan using your hand-made kitchenware and pour a ladle of batter in the middle, turning the pan to swirl the batter around and allow it to cover the pan. You will see how the surface bakes through and at this point use a wooden spatula to lift the edge of a pancake, then use spatula and your fingers (caution!) to grab it quickly and flip. Wait until cooked and then put on a plate, wait until it’s cool and taste before you make another pancake. If you are making pancakes to stuff with meat, fish, cheese-ham, mushrooms or other savory stuffings, you will probably not need to any any more sugar. Taste saltiness, sweetness and thickness, make adjustments by adding more salt/sugar and check if you need to ladle out less batter to make thinner pancakes. Keep baking on a pan and cover each pancake with a thin layer of melted butter (pour 1/3 or less of a tsp on the edge and rub around, the middle tends to stay soft and moist even without butter) before putting another one on top of a pile. The ones that are not finished can be kept in a fridge for 2-3 days and reheated in a microwave.

For stuffed pancakes you can skip buttering, or use less butter. Generally after stuffing you need to turn them back to the pan to just heat through and let the flavours blend, but this doesn’t work with smoked fish, caviar and fruit stuffings. Stuffings can be: ground meat+rice, cooked through and seasoned to taste; mushrooms and cheese with parsley, dill or other fresh herb of choice – cook the mushrooms, add shredded cheese, mix together, stuff the pancakes. If you fry them again or reheat in a microwave, the cheese will melt and the taste will be amazing. Hard-boiled eggs, mixed with fresh chopped spring onions (also makes a traditional stuffing for pies) fish and rice, cooked and seasoned fresh fruit, with a bit of sugar sprinkled on top (apples with raisins and a dash of cinnamon are good, some fresh strawberries and sugar, too.

Forgot to say about pancakes – the pan should be big! about 24-26 cm in diameter – that’s how we eat pancakes, smaller ones are Olad’yi.

Russian food

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. "

More food

There were more pictures, so there is more food (descriptions of food, that is).

I have probably mentioned Rare Fare but it deserves much more than a passing reference. It is the source of all things good and natural and nutricious (apart from fruit and vegetables) and definitely makes meat shopping easier and ethically satisfying.

Rare Fare has Akaroa Salmon, soft buttery fresh fillets and whole sides. This can be marinated in soy, mirin, garlic, ginger and brown sugar and baked in foil. On Monday night this was served with rice and spinach steamed with garlic. Last week it was crusted with pecan and brazil nuts. Rare Fare also has hot smoked and cold smoked salmon. Perfect as snack meat (if you know Mikey you are already familiar with the concept of snack meat) or as a croissant filling with dill mayo.

Next is Highland cattle beef. We usually go for the ribeye because it has more fat and fat is good. Last night it was marinaded in crushed garlic, fresh rosemary, salt (of course) and olive oil, grilled, and served with baked potato and stir-fried orange and green capsicum and onion. Mikey topped his steak with Hollandaise sauce and loaded the potato with sour cream and grated cheese.

Pork is the reason I made the effort to make my first visit to Rare Fare. I love pigs only a little less than I do pork so I desperately needed to find a reliable source of ethical pork from happy pigs. Havoc Pork makes me happy anyway. It truly does taste better as well. I can choose from Rolled pork roasts (to be stuffed with apple and sage ), butterflied chops and loin fillets.

Food (light reading but not light eating)

It has been such a good morning for visual treats that I shall repay the travellers by describing some home comforts.

These days I have to do almost all the cooking myself so I have had to lift my game. Living with a lapsed gourmet cook is definitely a challenge but I think that I am starting to cope with it.

Last night I made Chicken Kiev…free-range cornfed chicken breasts, gluten-free crumbed, with lemon and garlic butter; Dauphinois potatoes… baked in cream and parmesan cheese; salad; apricot pie with a golden flaky pastry lattice top served with… more cream. This morning I am off to the gym and pool for two hours to work off come of the cream that I have already stored as fat while Mikey sleeps and hopefully converts some of the cream to fat.

The last few weeks’ highlights have included: Akaroa salmon crusted with brazil and pecan nuts; risotto (yes, I have finally learned to to cook it for myself) with grilled peri-peri chicken thighs; chicken pot pie (chicken, potatoes, bacon and wine and cream under a flaky pastry crust); free-range pork roasted with apple and sage; Heck’s Nurnberger sausages with fried onions; and Highland beef ribeye with fried potatoes (parboiled, sliced and cooked with bacon, rosemary and pinenuts).

Hmm, for some reason my stomach is feeling a little heavy so I shall take it to the gym now but if you give me more pictures of far away places I will give you more words.