Summer Salad

Here’s a nice summer salad that calls for local, farmer’s market ingredients that are now in season. Boil a bunch of new or fingerling potatoes. Let cool, slice in half, and put in a salad bowl. Add diced tomatoes, chopped scallions, chopped cucumbers, minced red onion, cubed ham and quartered, hard-boiled eggs.

For the dressing, get a little bowl and mix a couple of tablespoons of sour cream, a teaspoon of mayo, ½ teaspoon of mustard, a teaspoon of olive oil and a pinch of sugar. Dress the salad; sprinkle liberally with kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper.

Fish Fry

Tilapia is cheap, healthy, easy to prepare and oh-so-boring. I used to like this mild little fish before it became my main source of seafood, thanks to a certain family member’s habit of buying it in bulk at Spartak and Sendik's. What to do with a good five pounds of tilapia? I can’t bear to bake, broil or grill it anymore, but I did discover mom’s old way of preparing fish: frying it in egg-onion batter.

Here’s how, albeit without exact measurements: Peel a small yellow onion and chop it in a food processor until it’s very finely diced, almost paste-like. Put the onions a bowl and add: 1 lightly beaten egg, ¼ cup white flour, a splash of buttermilk, and a pinch each of salt and sugar. Mix well. Dry 4 tilapia fillets throughly with a paper towel and dust them with a little flour on both sides. Dip in the batter until well coated. Preheat a splash of sunflower oil in a non-stick pan. When the oil is hot, plop the fish fillets in the pan and fry on both sides until done, about 3-4 minutes. Eat.

Great with a squeeze of lemon and veggies on the side. I went with homemade pickles and Korean carrot salad. Delish—so delish, in fact, that I finished off a plateful without bothering to take a photo.

Lazy Man's Seledka Pod Shuboi (beet and herring salad)

I got the idea for this salad from Chainaia Lozhka, a Russian fast food chain where I had lunch one day in St. Petersburg. Chainaia Lozhka (Russian for teaspoon) sells exclusively blini and salads, including this nice beet and herring combo. It’s no secret that I like the Russian way with beets and smoked fish, so I don’t know why I didn’t think of this myself.

This salad is really an informal version of seledka pod shuboi, a multi-layered, herring-beet-vegetable dish served on special occasions. Just mix all the ingredients and the dressing in a bowl instead of layering them in a dish. You could even forgo the potatoes for a lighter version.

Braised Cabbage

Enough with the melancholy; let’s talk cabbage. I’ve been craving something cabbage-y ever since I had a lunch of coleslaw and fried potatoes back in Tallinn. It’s been cooler here in Wisconsin; so I went with braising-—a surefire way to make cabbage mild, rich and almost dip-like. This recipe, which I made up as I went along, was good with grilled chicken and even better on its own the next day.

In a large plan, I sautéed a chopped onion and some diced bacon in a splash of olive oil on high heat until the onion was soft and translucent, about 6 or 7 minutes. Deglazed with some marsala wine, and added a whole head of shredded cabbage, stirring it often. Then another good splash of marsala and white wine (about ¾ cup altogether), since I had two open bottles that I wanted to finish up.

Sautéed on high heat until the cabbage cooked down, which only took 10 minutes or so, and added kosher salt, a bit of paprika and a bay leaf. Turned down the heat to low, covered the pan, and let the cabbage cook another 30 minutes. About 10 minutes before it was done, added about 5 ounces of chopped ham and a couple of ounces of yogurt cheese (available at Russian groceries, but all kinds of cheese will work here, especially Parmesan, goat and feta). Topped with chopped scallions for serving.

Where I'm Writing From

A post-trip reflection:

I often feel like an imposter when I write about all things Russian on this blog. Sure, I’m from Russia and I speak Russian, but consider: I left that country when I was nine; I don’t really follow Russian news or politics; my Russian is riddled with English words, phrases and slang; I have a lot of trouble writing in Russian (I can read it, but much slower than English); and, as a coupe de grace, I really don’t know much about Russian cooking. Reader, I’ve been leading you astray.

Yes, you can read about borsch and blini on the blog, but I don’t cook them very often. I don’t know how to make vareneki or kulibiyaka or kulich or even everyday fried potatoes and kotleti. Truth be told, I’m not really interested in cooking or eating these foods. Too high carb, too greasy, too much work.

I’ve built a chunk of my identity on being “Russian.” I’ve written dozens of school and college essays on my “multicultural” identity. Teachers and admission counselors are suckers for that sort of thing, you know. I’ve based my blogging projects on Russian themes, a good niche opportunity. I don’t know of any other English-language, Russian-themed cooking blogs (although the Russian-born writers of Beyond Salmon and Sassy Radish feature the occasional recipe).

When my train rolled into St. Petersburg this past July, I felt jittery with excitement and anxiety, like a baffled tourist in a foreign land—-which is exactly what I was. Should I take the bus or the tram? Which one? Where do I buy the tickets? How do I validate them? Where’s the Hermitage? How much is 100 rubles in dollars? (Not much.) Within four days, I was told that I don’t have the fortitude for life in Russia, that I wouldn’t be able to re-adjust if I moved back (I won’t) and even that I have an American accent (a stinging and untrue accusation--I may speak ungrammatically at times, but I don’t have an accent).

So I may be from Russia , but I’m not really “Russian.” I certainly wouldn’t be considered Russian had I stayed in Russia , not with a Jewish father and a Tatar mother. I’m not really Jewish, either—neither my parents nor distant relatives in Israel could muster much enthusiasm for our possible move to that country, and I’m on a vague, mostly disinterested periphery of Jewish life here. My mother’s Tatar background is a mystery.

Neither am I 100 percent American—I speak Russian at home. I like beets and herring. I grew up on Marshak, not Dr. Suess. I tell people that I’m from Milwaukee , but I’ve also spent stretches Madison , Wis. , and in Ohio . I’ve attended nine different schools before I graduated from high school. I’m from everywhere and nowhere.

I know there’s a hint of self-pity in what I’m writing, but I’m mostly ok with being a cultural and ethnic mutt. I don’t have much use for introspection and identity politics. It’s just that every once in a while, like when looking over old family photos or talking with people whose relatives aren’t scattered throughout three continents, it makes me a little sad.

Makeover

Here’s a list of my recent food cravings: dilled potatoes, sour cream, homemade pickles and kefir. No, I’m not pregnant. It’s just that I’ve been to Russia. All I want to eat is simple, Slavic peasant food, heavy on the beets, fermented dairy products and rye bread. This week I made svekolnik (also known as cold borsch) and farmer's cheese, and spruced up old posts on these dishes.

My Eastern European Adventure in Brief

Background: Born in St. Petersburg in the early 1980s. Immigrated to the U.S. at age 9 in the early 1990s.

Itinerary, July 2008: Tallinn, Estonia, and St. Petersburg and Moscow, Russia. This is my first time in Estonia and my first back in Russia since the move.

Travel companions: Parents, born and raised in Russia.

My verdict: Russia is a foreign country in which I happen to speak the language.

Parents' verdict: The exterior has changed (shops full of consumer goods), but the Soviet mindset and bureaucracy are alive and well. (Note: This doesn't apply to Estonia. Tallinn looked and felt like a perfectly civilized, European city.)

Best thing eaten in Tallinn: Something called "Witches' Pudding," a mashed potato/mushroom/cheese casserole. Can anyone point me to a recipe?
Best surprise in Tallinn: Biting into these little fruit tartlets, filled with farmer's cheese instead of butter cream.
Best way to spend an evening in St. Petersburg: Walk down Nevsky Prospect, to the Hermitage, then to the Neva River.
Other ways to have fun: Go grocery shopping and gaze at half a dozen varieties of farmer's cheese (including raspberry and poppy seed flavors).

Best way to stick to a food budget in Russia: Eat rye bread (17 rubles, a little less than a dollar) and chocolate-covered sirki (about 5 rubles, or 30 cents). Wash this down with kvass--rye bread beer, lightly carbonated, mildly sweet and very refreshing (20 to 40 rubles, depending on the vendor).
Best way to blow a food budget in Russia: Eat anything else. Why is Eastern Europe still considered cheap? (It's not.)

Best surprise in Russia: The fast food chain Teremok, which sells sweet and savory blini and soups. Ideal meal: Borsh, blini with goose liver pate and half a liter of kvass. Other ways to pass time in St. Petersburg: See palaces.
Go on long walks in parks: Read some Pushkin: Things to avoid: Interactions with clerks, cashiers and office workers of any sort. You will be ignored at best; yelled at at worst.

Parents' final verdict: Farewell, Russia. No love lost.

My verdict: Someday, I'll be back. If only for the goose liver blini.

Back in the USSR

Hey, did I ever blog about my upcoming trip to Estonia and Russia? No? Okay. I leave...tomorrow. I'm off to Tallinn and St. Petersburg and maybe Moscow. I haven't been back to Russia since I moved to the U.S. when I was nine. I hope to return with pictures and stories and yummy food memories, but I really don't know what to expect.

Wish me luck, and see you in late July.

Welcome, Journal Sentinel readers

My longtime dream has come true: this little blog got a shout-out in a real, live newspaper. I was interviewed by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel for a story on leftovers, which you can read here.

New readers, start with this post for my wit and wisdom on leftovers. Got a favorite leftover recipe? Share it in the comments.

Here are some more ideas on using up leftover food:

Milk: Make homemade cottage cheese (aka farmer's cheese, curd cheese or tvorog).

Cottage cheese: Bake muffins.

Cooked, cold chicken: Make chicken-stuffed crepes or chicken and spinach hachepouri.

Raw chicken, random vegetables: Make stock.

Tomatoes past their prime: Roast 'em.

Roasted tomatoes, canned tomatoes, or tomato paste: Make chana masala soup.

Cooked vegetables: Make salad.

Salad Olivier

“A young woman, trapped in Brighton Beach by her immigrant parents’ expectations, finds her place at the family table by sitting down with a knife to make Salad Olivier. It is the Russian party dish par excellence: a mound of hard-boiled eggs, canned peas, pickles, potatoes and meat, diced and bound with a tangy mayonnaise. For particularly swanky occasions, the salad is covered with aspic.”

The above passage is from a New York Times article about the Russian immigrant writer Lara Vapnyar. A lot of Vapnyar’s stories reference food, and I was amused to see Salad Olivier singled out. The Times makes it sound like Olivier is a joke, a dish on par with jello salads or sloppy joes on the American table. Yet no Russian celebration is complete without it. I usually bypass Olivier because clumps of mayo turn me off, but I wouldn’t mind a lighter version, made with yogurt-based dressing and frozen rather than canned peas—a gentrified, upscale Olivier, if you will. In fact, this weekend, I had a request to make Olivier for a family cookout. I hemmed and hawed for a while, but then gave in. My version is pretty traditional, save for the dressing.

Method:

Peel and boil 3-4 potatoes and a couple of carrots until soft—be careful not to overcook the carrots. Cook 3 eggs until hard-boiled. Cool the eggs and vegetables completely.

Cube the potatoes and carrots; place in a salad bowl. Add ¼ cup finely chopped red onion and 3-4 cubed dill pickles. Peel and finely chop the eggs; add to the salad, along with ¼ cup of finely chopped parsley or dill (or both). Add a couple of cups of cubed ham, cooked chicken or cooked beef. Add ½ cup peas (the frozen kind, defrosted beforehand—not canned, please.)

For the dressing, get a bowl and mix some sour cream, plain or Greek yogurt (or mayo), ½ tsp. sugar, a squeeze of lemon juice, a splash of pickle brine and some kosher salt and black pepper. Dress the salad right before serving. Spruce up with a parsley sprig and a tomato slice.

Fun With Leftovers

A food blogger for the local paper writes that some of her friends can’t stand eating leftovers. They toss food that’s more than a day old. That reminds me of my promise to share my very own tips on stretching your grocery budget. Tip no. 1: Don’t toss leftovers.

I really don’t understand why people wouldn’t eat leftovers. Is it the American obsession with hyper-freshness? Is it because eating the same thing twice in a row is boring? I can’t cure excessive zeal for food safety, but I can offer some ideas on making leftovers a little more interesting.

Here’s one: use leftovers to make salads. Recently, I found myself with a fridge full of grilled chicken, grilled tomatoes, and sautéed green beans, all left over from a cookout. I knew everything would taste inferior if I just nuked it in the microwave. Instead, I cubed the cold chicken and tomatoes, heated up the green beans for barely a minute and cut them into 1-inch pieces, and chopped up some scallions, parsley, and a hardboiled egg. All this went into a salad bowl with a bit of olive oil and balsamic vinegar for the dressing. A completely new dish made out of last night’s food.

From a previous post, more ideas on using up leftovers:

Milk: Make homemade cottage cheese (aka farmer's cheese, curd cheese or tvorog).

Cottage cheese: Bake muffins.

Cooked, cold chicken: Make chicken-stuffed crepes or chicken and spinach hachepouri.

Raw chicken, random vegetables: Make stock.

Tomatoes past their prime: Roast 'em.

Roasted tomatoes, canned tomatoes, or tomato paste: Make chana masala soup.

Cooked vegetables: Make salad.

Russian Grocery Tour: Spartak

Welcome to Spartak, the third stop of my Milwaukee-area Eastern European grocery tour (see also the first and second installments). Word on the street is that Spartak is the most popular of all Milwaukee-area Russian groceries. This small, bustling store is well-priced, well-stocked and staffed by reasonably helpful employees.

Location: 5587 N. Diversey Blvd., Whitefish Bay, (414) 332-3347.

Atmosphere: Just your average Russian store—beige shelves, scrappy posters on the walls, a large freezer filled with dumplings, fish, etc., in the back. Be prepared to stand in line on the weekends. Spartak also gets very busy and crowded around the holidays (that would be New Year).

Customer Service: Surprisingly good! Every time I’m in, the male cashier asks if I need help finding something, brings out items as requested, and promptly rings them up.

Product Selection: A very nice variety of everything from sauces to buckwheat kasha to the delicious marinated tomatoes described here. This is also the place to get candy, sausage, herring, and various unusual dairy products. Make sure to check out the goodies in the back freezer--this is where Milwaukee’s entire Soviet diaspora buys fish like tilapia and flounder, and puff pastry dough for semi-homemade pirozhki.

Pricing: Honestly, I haven’t been doing an item-by-item price comparison between the stores I profile, but the prices here seem pretty reasonable.

Buy: Marinated tomatoes and other pickled vegetables, sold in big glass jars by the back wall. Look for the brand with the red-nosed babushka logo. Also: kielbasa, herring (whole and packaged chunks) and smocked mackarel.

Avoid: I haven't had anything terrible here, but make sure to check the expiration dates on packaged products. No matter how friendly and helpful, Russian grocers just aren’t as stringent about this stuff as Americans.

Final Rating: ****

Rating Key:

*Soviet cafeteria food

**Day-old buckwheat kasha

***Borsch made by a non-native

**** Babushka’s homemade pirozhki

*****Black caviar on a buttered baguette and a shot of chilled vodka

Updated: Eggplant, tomato and pepper salad

Food at Russian gatherings rarely includes a set meal with courses. Instead, there’s a big spread of appetizers, salads, canapés, cold cuts, pastries, sandwiches, cakes, and so on. I’m usually tempted by the salads, which are never made with lettuce. Rather, they’re heartier potato-based offerings, marinated salads or cooked, mixed vegetable salads like the one above. I didn’t make this excellent eggplant, tomato and pepper salad, but I loved the idea:

-Thick, round slices of eggplant, sautéed in sunflower oil until soft
-Very thinly sliced raw tomatoes
-Very thinly sliced raw green peppers
-Very thinly sliced white onion rounds
-Julienned carrots
-An entire bunch of chopped cilantro (I’d use dill or parsley, a personal preference)
-A couple of tablespoons of sunflower oil and a little white vinegar for the dressing

Grocery Shopping on the Cheap in Milwaukee

Hey, did you hear there’s a recession going on? If not, news stories about rising food prices will tell you all about it. I hope you’re as amused by money-saving tips like “buy things that are on sale” and “don’t throw away leftovers” as I am. Kitchen economics actually is a topic that’s near and dear to my heart. I’ve toyed with the idea of writing a recession guide to grocery shopping in Milwaukee, but I hesitate because my guide would require the reader to a) have a car, b) have extra time to shop around c) shop mostly for produce, non-organic meat, dairy and some pantry staples, and c) shop for two adults, or two plus a young child at most. I won’t pretend to know anything about feeding teenagers.

What I can do is offer some Milwaukee-area shopping suggestions for the penny-pinching semi-foodie. This isn’t really meant for locavores, the strictly organic-minded, green activists, or those who would spend their last cent on artisan cheese. My target audience is people who want to make reasonably good food without blowing their budget.

Lena's—“Shockingly cheap vegetables under the glare of fluorescent lights…” is how I’ve described this chain in the past. You don’t go to Lena’s for the atmosphere; you go for the produce prices—$1 a pound strawberries, anyone? How about a huge bag of red, orange and yellow bell peppers for about 70 cents? The quality can be spotty, but more often I can’t tell the difference between these veggies and the ones sold across the street at the Outpost, a pricy, organic grocery store. To the “but food should be expensive!” crowd, I say: No farmer’s market or co-op initiative or corner grocery or eat local crusader will offer fruits and vegetables at these prices to people who couldn’t afford them otherwise. Also, Lena’s runs specials on whole chickens at 69 cents a pound. Just sayin’.

El Rey—This chain of Mexican groceries reminds me of the international stores on Chicago’s Devon Street. Busy, colorful, English rarely spoken. I like the big store on National Avenue and 16th Street. The last time I stopped by, 30-cent avocados and 50-cent super-sweet mangos were on offer. The meat department selections are well-priced and stocked with unusual items like tripe and tongue for you au courant nose-to-tail eaters.

Asian Mart--The place is rundown and the selection can be spotty, but the husband-and-wife owners are super-friendly and the prices are good. There’s a variety of produce and even frozen whole fish sold in the back, with prices written on a chalkboard. Call ahead if you want something specific. This store also carries a nice selection of Asian goodies, from sauces to rice to bowls and steamers.

Sendik's has a reputation as a high-end chain, and the Nehring-owned stores are indeed expensive. The Balistreri-owned locations, on the other hand, have some good deals on produce, fish and meat. You can find surprisingly good-quality vegetables on the reduced produce cart at the Silver Spring Drive store.

Coming next: More places to shop, including farmer’s markets. Plus, my very own money-stretching cooking tips.

Turshi

One of the things I like the most about cooking is transforming a charmless, underwhelming ingredient into something delicious. That’s why I enjoy pickling and marinating so much: you start with a blah vegetable—cucumbers, say, or cabbage or mushrooms--add some ratio of salt, sugar and vinegar, wait a while, and end up with that briny/tangy flavor that only pickling can produce. Magic!

In the past few months I’ve made pickled mushrooms, this marinated vegetable salad and gravlax (as well as pickles and sauerkraut in years past). I’m pleased to add turshi to my pickling repertoire. I first learned about turshi—Armenian pickled vegetables—from Anya von Bremzen’s cookbook Please to the Table. I’ve had mixed luck with Anya’s recipes so I hesitated to try it, but then reader and commenter Victoria Frolova kindly offered to share her grandmother’s version. I used bits and pieces from both recipes to come up with my own. It tastes a lot like the marinated vegetable salad mentioned above, but crunchier and spicier.

Method:

This recipe is based on one liter of liquid. You will need about 3 large carrots, a medium head of cauliflower, 2 large red peppers, 2 or 3 celery stalks, a large onion, 5 cloves of garlic, a bunch of herbs like dill and parsley, kosher salt, sugar, bay leaves, hot chili peppers, peppercorns and maybe some vinegar. Slice carrots and celery into matchsticks, separate the cauliflower into florets, peel and cut the onion into rounds, cut peppers into strips, and mince the garlic. You could also add zucchini, tomatoes and cucumbers, sliced into rounds.

Bring a pan of water to a boil and blanch the carrots and cauliflower for about two minutes. Drain, then layer the vegetables in a large glass jar with garlic, chili peppers and herbs.

For the marinade, bring a liter of water to a boil and add 6 teaspoons of kosher salt, 8 teaspoons of sugar, a couple of bay leaves and a small handful of peppercorns. Let the marinade simmer a little until the sugar and salt dissolve. Victoria suggests adding a tablespoon of white vinegar at this point if you want a tangier flavor, which I did. Cool the marinade for five minutes, then pour it over the vegetables and seal the jar. Keep turshi in the fridge; it should be done in about two weeks (mine took two and a half). Start tasting after a week or so.

Zucchini Cheese Pie

This Mediterranean vegetable cheese pie has been on my mind ever since Ann at Redacted Recipes blogged about it. I’ve been meaning to whip it up this week, but when the time came I didn’t have most of the ingredients. That rarely stops me, however, so I’d like to present my take on a vegetable cheese pie: a layer of zucchini covered with ricotta-parmesan-pepper-tomato topping. I actually used homemade farmer’s cheese (aka my famous tvorog) in place of ricotta, which worked very well. A nice discovery, as I rarely use farmer’s cheese in savory recipes.

Method: I covered the bottom of a round, foil-lined pie pan with thinly sliced, salted zucchini rounds and roasted them at 425 until they were soft, 20 minutes or so. (You could also sauté the rounds in olive oil instead.) In the meantime, I combined a cup of farmer’s cheese with an egg, ¼ cup of grated parmesan, a couple of ounces of mozzarella, some leftover roasted red and yellow peppers, and a little leftover tomato sauce. (You could leave out the peppers and tomatoes just as well, or use other vegetables in their place.)

I spread this mixture over the soft zucchini, and baked the pie at 425 until the cheese was firm and golden-brown, about 25 minutes, plus the last five minutes under the broiler. The pie tastes best lukewarm, so let cool 10-15 minutes.

Roasted Vegetable Salad(s)

I wow my co-workers with my culinary prowess at least once a week. No, I don’t bring baked goodies to work. Nor do I feast on elaborate leftovers. It’s my “vegetables with stuff” that impress. I often roast whatever veggies I have in the fridge and mix them with cheese, herbs, dressing and maybe chicken or fish for lunch the next day. These salads, even when eaten out of a plastic container, look colorful and pretty. Served on real plates, my lunches look like something out of Gourmet (or maybe the Whole Foods salad bar, but you get my point).

My salads revolve around some combo of zucchini, tomatoes, peppers, asparagus, cauliflower and carrots. Is there an easier way to cook these vegetables than to roast them? You cut ‘em up, toss them in a foil-lined baking dish with a splash of olive oil and some kosher salt and pepper, and stick 'em in the oven for a while.

I usually roast at 420 or 425; peppers take about 45 minutes; zucchini, asparagus and carrots, 20 minutes; see this for more on tomatoes and cauliflower. Cooking chemistry does its thing, and the vegetables emerge from the oven sweet and nutty. (I also like to roast fruit: once, I made a delicious roast chicken with grapes and pitted cherries -spread the fruit in a roasting pan, plop a prepped chicken on top, and follow your usual method. Past-their-prime strawberries, peaches, apples and pears all improve in the oven. Add some caramelized onions to your roasted fruit, and voila: instant chutney.)

I top the cooled vegetables with scallions, dill or parsley, olives, if I have them, and goat or feta cheese. For the dressing, I usually use olive oil, a squeeze of lemon or lime juice, or some red wine vinegar. Sometimes I mix in a little roasted garlic. Or I make creamy dressings with mayo, plain yogurt or sour cream, and olive oil.

On Food Likes and Dislikes

Above is a photo of a wonderful lunch I had on Saturday: smocked mackerel and boiled new potatoes with sour cream. Does that sound good to you? It tasted wonderful to me. But it saddens me to admit that few Americans my age would go for this repast.

This lunch got me thinking about how we develop food preferences. I love all things brined, pickled, smoked and fermented: fish, pickles, sauerkraut, kefir, and so on. I was weaned—almost literally!—on this stuff. In Russia, infants were given kefir instead of formula. I gave up pickles for potato chips after coming to the U.S. You don’t want to be the kid who eats weird crap when you’re nine, you know. In my late teens and early 20s, however, I rediscovered Russian food. It’s cool to be all diverse and multiculti when you’re in college! One taste of fatty, luscious smoked mackerel and I never looked back. On the other hand, I also love food that no one had ever heard of when I was growing up, and that my parents still won’t consider eating: sashimi, curries, tofu, etc.

Now, my boyfriend, who immigrated to the U.S. in his teens, has far more Soviet tastes that I do. Last week, he asked me to cook some buckwheat. “We could have it with kotleti,” he said. “Or hot dogs.”

Okay.

Kotleti are pan-fried meat patties, kind of like burgers but served without the bun. They’re the weekday staple of Russian households, the Soviet equivalent of sloppy joes. Hot dogs, always boiled, never grilled, are another go-to Soviet protein.

When I sing praises to the foods of my childhood, I don't mean boiled potatoes, hot dogs and kotleti. This is the kind of food I never, ever crave. And if I were to make this stuff, I would cook a “gourmet,” Epicurious-ized version. Buckwheat with chicken stock, dried mushrooms and caramelized shallots. Kotleti with panko breadcrumbs and Indian spices or something. And hot dogs—well... I just don’t have much to say about hot dogs.

So when I heard the boyfriend’s request, I put on what I call my PR face—the look spokespeople have during news conferences. Open, fake-friendly and willing to answer questions—to a limit. “Sure,” I said. “I could do that.” Shallots, dried mushrooms and panko are on my shopping list.

Grocery Tour: Parthenon Foods and Deli

This is the second stop of my Milwaukee-area Eastern European grocery tour (the first installment is here). Parthenon Foods is not a Russian grocery store—it’s owned by Greek immigrants—-but it sells all the usual Eastern European goodies, as well as lots of Mediterannean and Middle Eastern items.

It may look like a rundown quickie mart from the outside, but this store has an excellent selection and very friendly, if sometimes overbearing, service. The isles are cramped with stuff (jars of picked vegetables and souvenir plates by the register, bags of spices and rice everywhere), so be careful when maneuvering your way through the store—you may knock something over.

Location: 9131 W. Cleveland Ave., West Allis, 414-321-5522.

Atmosphere: See intro.

Customer Service: Super-duper friendly. You will be asked if you need help at least twice during your visit. If you’re overloaded with bags, the owner may help you carry your purchases to your car.

Product Selection: A large selection of olive oil, lots of pickled vegetables and yummy spreads like lutenitsa, spices, pasta, unusual grains like buckwheat and millet, a small liquor department, cheese, Greek yogurt and kefir, Russian and Polish candy, pickled and smoked fish, and lamb and fresh fish on Wednesday. Also some frozen, pre-made stuff, like dumplings and pierogis. You can see more on Parthenon's Web site.

Pricing: Reasonable. Good deals on deli items like olives and cheese.

Buy: I love the creamy, soft French feta sold at the deli. The halvah, sold by weight, is pretty good, too.

Avoid: I don’t remember any duds, but admittedly I haven’t sampled my way through most of the deli and meat/fish selections.

Final Rating: ****1/2

Rating Key:

*Soviet cafeteria food

**Day-old buckwheat kasha

***Borsch made by a non-native

**** Babushka’s homemade pirozhki

*****Black caviar on a buttered baguette and a shot of chilled vodka

Roasted vegetable and potato salad with smoked salmon

If you had the good fortune to acquire a huge smoked salmon fillet, what would you do with it? My first instinct was to slice it up and eat it over the cutting board with my fingers. That would have been okay if I were eating alone, but since I wasn’t, I felt obliged to make something more coherent. A dig through the fridge revealed potatoes, peppers, asparagus and cherry tomatoes. Voila: Roasted vegetable and potato salad with smoked salmon.

I roasted a cup of cherry tomatoes, a couple of garlic cloves and two yellow and orange peppers, cut into strips, at 430 for about 25 minutes, then added a pound or so of trimmed asparagus to the pan for another 10 minutes of roasting. In the meantime, I parboiled two potatoes and sliced up some—ok, a lot--of smoked salmon into chunks.

I let the vegetables cool a little when they were done; then I cut the asparagus into 1-inch pieces, peeled and cubed the potatoes and combined everything in a salad bowl. For the dressing, I mixed the soft, roasted garlic with a couple of tablespoons of lemon juice, a tablespoon of olive oil, and some kosher salt and black pepper. The salad was great, and I regret only that I didn’t have any parsley, scallions or goat/feta cheese on hand to make it downright fantastic.