Devon Avenue, Chicago

Last weekend the boyfriend and I went to Chicago, ostensibly to hang around downtown and Navy Pier. What I really wanted to do was to check out the ethnic grocery stores on Devon Avenue. I got a quick glimpse of Devon a couple of years ago when I was in Chicago with my parents and they had taken a wrong turn while looking for the freeway entrance. The street was teeming with ethnic groceries--Russian, Indian, Turkish--and I've been intrigued ever since.

When you first turn onto Devon, Russian-Jewish businesses abound. I spotted a Jewish community center, an Israeli restaurant and Russian grocery stores, bookstores and video stores. Several blocks later, stores with names like Tbilisi and Balalaika give way to blocks and blocks of Indian and Pakistani businesses, with the occasional Chinese restaurant thrown in.

I did a quick Google search the night before our trip and unearthed Argo, a Georgian cafe/bakery/grocery where we stopped for lunch. A small fence separates the tiny two-table cafe from the actual bakery, where two employees were busy rolling out dough when we came in. I asked the friendly owner if they had hachepuri, Georgian cheese bread, and, of course, they did. We were served hot, flaky puff pastry stuffed with feta cheese on paper plates. Then we sampled meat, potato and sauerkraut pirozhki, all made with the same flaky dough. The potato pastry was the best of those three, but hachepuri was my favorite.

We took home a pound of pelmeni--Argo sells all sorts of frozen doughy goodies--two more hachepuris and five loaves of bread, still warm from the oven. One of the breads was a long, baguette-like loaf and the other four were lavash. Lavash, a round, puffy bread that looks like a baked pizza shell, was fantastic. I wish I had taken a picture of it but we ate one loaf in the car on the way home, another loaf after we got home, and the rest we gave to our respective parents.

Argo also sells Georgian and Russian specialties like sour plum sauce, adjika (a spicy relish), suluguni cheese (used as filling in hachepuri), kefir, sour cream, caviar, etc. (See this for another review of Argo, plus pictures. I think the owner is in the first photo.)

After lunch we walked down Devon, past the Indian restaurants and the women in saris, past the mosques and Pakistani groceries smelling of exotic spices and the video stores displaying posters of Bollywood hotties. We were too full to eat anything else. I'd love to come back and explore this part of the street, and I'm especially intrigued by the very reasonably priced lamb and mangos in the ethnic groceries.

* Argo Georgian Bakery
2812 W. Devon Ave.
Chicago, IL 60659-1502
(773) 764-6322

Meme: Five Things to Eat Before You Die

I'm terribly excited to finally get tagged with a meme. (Thanks, Rebecca!) I love memes and always read them when I'm skimming through a blog that's new to me. I can do without memes that ask for five things you keep in your purse, or whatever, but food-related memes give a glimpse of the blogger's personal history, and that's always a plus.

Rebecca, of Eat, originally originally wrote about five things she's never had and wants to try. I would have liked that kind of meme more. I'm new to cooking and foodie-dom, so there's quite a lot I'd like to try. I just haven't been around long enough to have an intimidatingly exotic list of foods.

But, for now, here's my list of five:

1. Blini, my sentimental favorite. Half a dozen of warm blini with butter, jam, honey and sour cream, washed down with a big pot of tea, is one of the most delicious meals you can ever eat.

2. Manti, steamed Uzbek lamb dumplings. These are oversize pockets of dough with a filling of lamb, onions, coriander, cumin, and, sometimes, pumpkin, stuffed in the middle. They're always steamed in a special dumpling steamer. My boyfriend's mom makes pretty great manti, and she once taught me to make them from start to finish. We used ground lamb, but to make the authentic version you have to chop boneless lamb by hand. Hot, juicy manti must be eaten with your hands, I'm told, never with a knife and fork. Too bad I wasn't blogging when I got my manti lesson, but I'll make them myself one of these days.

3. Fresh fruit in season. I eat lots of fruit but so much of it is disappointing. Really good fresh fruit is one of the great pleasures in life. This is my fruit and berry hierarchy: A-list fruit-- peaches, mangos, nectarines, apples, strawberries, blueberries, raspberries. B-list--melons, pears, grapes, oranges, grapefruit. C-list--Plums, watermelon.

4. My mom's Napoleon cake. Once year, usually around Christmas or New Year's, my mom bakes a Napoleon. You can buy mille feuille pastry ready-made, of course, but my mom makes her own. It's tricky and time-consuming, but worth it, we all agree, when we bite into layers flaky pastry and cream made of butter and sweet condensed milk.

5. Chocolate frozen custard from Kopp's. The creamiest, smoothest, richest ice cream I've ever had.

I'm tagging Jeff of Eat Wisconsin, Helen of Beyond Salmon, Betty of Cuisine Quotidienne, Lindy of Toast and Katherine of ToastPoint.

Making Pickles

What you see above is pickle-making in progress. I'm using a family recipe that my mom dug out of my grandmother's hand-written recipe notebook. I'm not canning, mind you, just making pickles that'll keep in the fridge for about a month.

Here's how: I scrubbled clean about 25 farmer's market cucumbers and cut off the ends. Then I pricked them all over with a fork and put them in a bowl with layers of dill seed heads, black currant leaves (optional) and half a dozen garlic cloves. (If I had horseradish root, I'd use it.)

I brought a liter of water to a boil, added a tablespoon of sugar and two tablespoons of kosher salt, and poured the hot water over the pickles. Then I added about two tablespoons of vinegar to the bowl. I put a plate with a weight (a bottle of vegetable oil) over the bowl. The brine is working its magic as I write this, but we'll see how the pickles turn out in two days.

Update: The pickles are pretty good: nice and crunchy, if a bit too salty. They need another day in the fridge after their two-day brine bath for the best taste.

Kvass Update

Well, my kvass was interesting. Drinkable? Not really. But interesting. Let's write kvass-making off as a learning experience.

I filled two bottles with kvass last Monday morning and left them on a kitchen counter to start fermenting. When I got home I found one of the corks lying in a puddle of kvass next to the bottle. I stuffed the cork back in and let the kvass ferment for a few more days, but not surprisingly the kvass in that bottle was completely flat and tasted terrible. The second bottle, which remained corked the whole time, was closer to the real thing. The kvass was carbonated, smelled right but tasted oddly sour.

I'm not up on my food chemistry, so I'm not sure what happened. Did the recipe call for too little sugar? Was the bread at fault? Someone notes in the comments that you can't make kvass out of borodinsky rye bread, which is what I used.

For the sake of comparison, I made another batch out of kvass starter (photo above), one of the weirder things you can buy at the Russian store. Kvass starter is a thick, molasses-like liquid to which you add sugar, yeast and water. This fake kvass is sugary sweet, but more palatable than the sour batch.

My enthusiasm for making kvass has dimmed a little, although I may try again, using better bread.

On Farmer's Markets and Corn Chowder

I take back everything I said about how expensive eating local is. For the past month and a half I've been buying almost all my produce at one of the local farmer's markets and most of the the vegetables there are cheap. You can get eight zucchinis for a dollar. A whole basket of excellent, firm cucumbers for two bucks. Three pounds of excellent tomatoes for $5.

But does locally grown food taste better than supermarket produce? Some snap judgments of veggies I buy almost every week:

Tomatoes: Incomparably better than store tomatoes, of course. Still, I've had more than a couple of starchy farmer's market tomatoes.
Corn: So sweet that I wouldn't mind having it for dessert, with butter.
Zucchini and yellow squash: Unlike pallid supermarket squash, farmer's market squash is a deep, golden yellow. I also like round squash, which I've never even seen at the supermarket. I can't tell much of a difference in taste between farmer's market squash and store squash, though. Maybe I should taste test raw zucchini.
Potatoes: I've only tried the fingerling potatoes so far, but they just might be the best potatoes I've ever had. I can eat them like candy with a little salt and sour cream.
Cucumbers: I love tiny, super-firm, super-crunchy farmer's market cukes. I often eat them as a pre-dinner snack while cooking.
Carrots: Pretty good, but not as flavorful as I would like them to be. I've had sweeter bagged baby carrots.
Radishes: Farmer's market radishes used to be almost too spicy for me. Then I had a couple of store radishes, and they tasted so bland and blah in comparison.
Green beans, broccoli and eggplant: Damned if I can tell the difference between farmer's market versions and the stuff I buy at the grocery store in January.

There's something very pleasurable and even sensual about shopping at the farmer's market. Ripe tomatoes glisten in the sun like odalisques in an Ingres painting. You can smell fresh dill, basil and cilantro from afar. If you go to a big and crowded farmer's market, like I do, you will feel a kind of happy mood, an overall sense of well-being in the air.

That said, I'm not a total convert to the Eat Local movement. There's something a little facetious about giving up spices, coffee, tea and non-local fruits and vegetables. Foodies in the '60s and '70s fought and died so we could have Middle Eastern couscous, olive oil from Italy, and cheese from France. Why you'd want to give that stuff up as a matter of principle, I have no idea. So I will shop at the farmer's market while I can, just because most of their produce tastes better and is cheaper. Come November, I'll be back at the soulless big mart, stocking up on vegetables from God knows where.

Corn Chowder--I bought far too much corn on the cob last week so I made corn and roasted poblano chowder. This recipe is adapted from the Williams Sonoma Everyday Roasting cookbook.

You toast a tablespoon of cumin seeds in a frying pan until they become aromatic. Add the cumin seeds, along with a couple of chipotle chilies (I used jalapeno), a bay leaf and 1/4 teaspoon of rosemary (I used thyme) to four cups of milk. Bring the milk to a simmer, but don't boil. Take off the heat, cover, and let stand for 20 minutes.

Meanwhile, broil a couple of poblano chilies (the recipe called for 3; I only had 1 on hand) until their skin is black. Let cool; then peel and remove stems, seeds, etc. Dice and set aside. In a heavy stockpot, sauté a chopped onion in olive oil and butter. Salt to taste. Add a crushed garlic clove, a teaspoon of ground cumin, and cook for 5 minutes. Then add kernels from 4 ears of farmer's market corn and the poblano chilies. Cook for 5 more minutes. At this point I added a couple of cooked, diced potatoes. The recipe didn't call for them, but they weren't amiss.

Strain the milk through a sieve into the corn and onion mixture. Simmer for 15 minutes. Puree 1/3 of the soup in a blender or food processor, and add it back to the stockpot. The suggested garnish is chopped scallions, but I used a little chopped parsley and crumpled feta.

Kvass--Rye Bread Beer

As I write this, a batch of kvass is fermenting in my basement. Kvass is a mildly alcoholic Russian bread beer, usually made out of stale rye bread and yeast, and flavored with fruit juices or mint. You drink it cold as a summer beverage or use it as a base for okroshka, a chilled summer soup.

You can buy kvass or kvass starter at some Russian stores, but I wanted to make my own. There's no reason or rhyme for this. I don't have any nostalgic childhood memories of kvass. In fact, I remember tasting kvass only once. The most memorable part of this experience was buying it from a street vendor who was manning a beer barrel-like contraption (see the Wikipedia photo). I don't know what kvass tastes like, but I have a pretty good idea of what I want it to taste like. It should be yeasty, carbonated and sweet and sour, with a hint of lemon and mint.

While making kvass at home is not unheard of, it's not something people in Russia do everyday. When I told my parents that I'm making kvass, they smiled indulgently and wished me luck. Making kvass isn't hard but it does stretch over a couple of days and involved soaking dried rye bread in hot water and a lot of straining liquids through a sieve. I used two recipes, one here, and the other from a hilarious, out-of-print cookbook called Perestroika: The Dinner Party. (The theme of this book is a multi-course, perestroika celebration dinner, complete with a kulebyaka--cabbage pie--in the shape of a hammer and sickle and tablecloths made of Pravda newspaper.)

I'm holding off on praising homemade kvass for now. It takes a couple of days to ferment in a cool place, so I haven't tasted it yet. I don't know if the final result will be blog-worthy--I suspect my kvass will taste a bit flat. However, I can tell you that my kvass smells exactly how I think it should taste, and that my kitchen now has a not at all unpleasant aroma of a beer brewery.

I wish I could quote you Pushkin or some such on the greatness of kvass, but for now I can only offer these tidbits, mined from the Web:

*"Kvass is considered a tonic for digestion, an excellent thirst quencher and, consumed after vodka, an antidote to a hangover."

*Coke is ruining local kvass production by dominating the market with quasi-kvass. Kvass is hardly a "Soviet-era" beverage, by the way; Kvass production goes back centuries.

*Kvass has an alcohol content of anywhere from .7 to 4 percent.

*The recipe I'm using has the potential to taste terrible.

*You can make kvass out of apples, huckleberries or beets.

*Okroshka is low-carb. I can't wait to make orkoshka if my kvass turns out. This soup is basically a Russian version of gazpacho--you chop up cucumbers, scallions, ham, potatoes, eggs, radishes and dill, add kvass as stock, chill and eat with sour cream or spicy mustard.

*Americans are not so keen on kvass.

Weekend Cooking Notes

*I survived the heat wave by eating salads and steamed corn-on-the-cob. Now that the weather has mercifully cooled down, I'm back in the kitchen. Today I made an unexpectedly wonderful dinner. Nothing new, nothing unusual, just pretty great late summer food.

Once again I made hachepouri, Georgian cheese bread. Last time I ended up with one big cheese pie. This time I halved this recipe and made six small pies. Three of them looked a lot like calzones--oval and puffy. The other three turned out like stuffed pita bread, and were much better. I think the trick to this recipe is flattening out the cheese-filled dough pocket until it's at least 1/2-inch thick. I bet hachepouri would be wonderful filled with caramelized onions and tomatoes along with the cheese, but then you'd have calzones. We ate warm hachepouri with Julia Child's ratatouille.

*Inspired by a Moroccan veggie stew with couscous at Casablanca, a local Middle-Eastern restaurant, I made a pretty good chicken version last week. I don't think I got the spices quite right, but I was pretty close. I sliced a boneless, skinless chicken breast into strips and sautéed it until it was almost done. Then I removed it from the skillet and added a bunch of carrots, zucchini and yellow squash, cut into ¼-inch ovals. Cooked them until they started getting soft and golden, then added garlic and spices--cumin, coriander, cinnamon (key spice), a teaspoon of sugar and a little cayenne.

Fresh tomatoes would work very well in this, but I was saving mine for salad. So I added about 1/2-3/4 a can of whole, peeled Muir Glen tomatoes and a splash of water. Brought the whole thing to a boil, simmered until the veggies were soft, then added the chicken and a couple of tablespoons of plain, full-fat yogurt, and simmered a little more. Casablanca doesn't use yogurt, but I think it really made this dish. The chicken breast did manage to dry out even though I didn't cook it very long, but I used it because I wanted to make a 30-minute weekday dinner. Next time I'd use a whole chicken, cut into parts. Chickpeas and eggplant would be very nice this kind of stew, too. Eat with couscous or rice.

Pelmeni in Madison

It's 90+ degrees in Madison on Sunday afternoon, and where do the boyfriend and I stop for lunch? At Pel'meni*. This tiny whole-in-the-wall on State St. sells nothing but pelmeni--Russian--Siberian, really--dumplings. I love the spartan look of this little eatery: four tables, four steaming pots and a blackboard menu. On the menu are meat and potato pelmeni. Five dollars gets you a styrofoam box full of dumplings, a piece of (forgettable) rye bread, and condiments like sour cream, chopped cilantro, curry powder and a spicy chili sauce.

The pelmeni are good, although not all that much better than the frozen dumplings I buy at the Russian store. An order feeds one moderately hungry person--we ended up having a pelmeni feast with four orders. As we ate we daydreamed about opening a dumpling eatery of our own. Our working name is "Dumpling House," and we'd sell pelmeni, vareniki (big dumplings filled with farmer's cheese, cherries, sourkraut or potatoes) and manti (Uzbek steamed lamb dumplings). I'd totally steal the blackboard menu, too.

After pelmeni I accidentally on purpose steered us toward the University of Wisconsin Union Terrace* where we tried some Babcock chocolate ice cream--made on campus at the Babcock dairy plant. It was perfectly acceptable but doesn't hold a candle to, say, frozen custard from Kopp's. Still, the Union Terrace is a pretty great place to mull over ice cream at this time of the year. Plenty of tables in the shade, a nice lake view and fresh-faced high school grads on tour, sober for now...

*Pelmeni
505 State St.
Madison, Wis.
(608) 250-1976
Open on Sundays, despite what the online listings say.

*Union Terrace
800 Langdon St.
Madison, Wis.

Variations on a Theme

*Remember tvorog and blueberry pie, also known as pie-oh-my for its jaw-droppingly rustic appearance? I baked another pie a few days ago, taking my own advice from last time.

Although this version was far more attractive, I think the recipe is inherently flawed. Isn't it disappointing when you want to love a recipe but the result isn't really worth it? Last time I thought the deep pie dish was at fault for the dough not baking through all the way. This time I used a shallower dish but still ended up with a thin strip of raw dough right under the cheese filling.

I sadly have to conclude that the wonderful cheese/blueberry filling is too thick and wet for this type of dough. There has to be a better use for it, though. A pre-baked tart shell, maybe? We’ll see.

*Besides Central Asian food, my other cooking interest in Middle Eastern food. There's some overlap between the two. Claudia Roden's The New Book of Middle Eastern Food has a few Armenian, Georgian and Uzbek recipes, and Anya von Bremzen's Please to the Table features a lot of food that could pass for Middle Eastern. In fact, the first recipe in the book is for tahini and hazelnut dip, which, we are told, comes from Azerbaijan. The next recipe is for cucumber and yogurt dip, by way of Armenia.

Stuffed vegetables are well known to both cuisines, so today I made stuffed zucchini. The filling I wrote about here. Both Roden's and von Bremzen's cookbooks have similar recipes for lamb and rice filling with spices. Instead of broiling the hollowed zucchini shells, this time I sautéed them in olive oil for 10 minutes. Stuffed, baked and ate with my fingers. Yogurt would have been an authentic condiment, but I was out. Sour cream made a pretty good replacement.

*The New York Times' the Frugal Traveler explores Georgia and Kyrgyzstan. The food is good, the prices are cheap, tourists are scarce and the locals are friendly. I want to sleep in a yurt and eat goat stew with plums and tarragon, too. Take me with you, Frugal Traveler!

Not Quite Russian Food & Georgian Cheese Pie

I get really excited about cooking Central Asian (Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan) and Caucasian (Georgia, Armenia) food. Traditional Russian food is a tough sell. It's considered heavy and starchy. Every other recipe calls for beets or potatoes. It's not spicy or colorful enough for Westerners.

But, oh, the food of those impossible-to-pronounce-and-find-on-a-map Soviet republics:

The New York Times on Central Asian food:

"Reflecting the influence of silk and spice trades, there are tastes of China and India everywhere...Dishes that define [Central Asia] include lamb kebabs; shurpa, which might be a hearty vegetable-beef soup spiked with cumin or a thin lamb broth; and rice pilaf, whether chunky plov or one of the luxurious pilafs that adorn traditional Afghan banquets."

The Traveler's Lunchbox on Georgian food:

"The thing that appealed to me instantly about Georgian cuisine is both its familiarity and its exoticness. The foundations of the cuisine are all well known to the European palate: hazelnuts, walnuts, cheese, yogurt, plums, corn, peaches, apples, cherries, cilantro, basil, tarragon, dill, mint, cinnamon. What is not familiar are the preparations: beets with sour cherry sauce; beans with pomegranate and fenugreek; eggplant with walnuts and saffron; chicken with cilantro, dill and plums; rice with raisins and honey. It's as if the familiar flavors of Europe had been handed to someone who was instructed to forget everything he knew about the continent's gastronomic heritage and instead reinvent the wheel, which somehow he managed to do with subtlety, sophistication and finesse."

I know very little about the food of Central Asian and the Caucaus. My childhood palate was formed by borsh, blinchiki and potatoes in St. Petersburg. I do remember getting a whiff of grilled lamb from the shashlik stands during the summer, but shashlik was considered ridiculously expensive so I never actually tasted it.

I plan to cook a lot more of this exotic Stan-land food in the coming months. Today, I tackled hachepuri, Georgian cheese pies. Anya von Bremzen calls hachepuri the Georgian equivalent of pizza. I followed a recipe from the Traveler's Lunchbox almost to the letter. But instead of making six little pies, I halved the recipe and made one big pie. It was very good, if not exactly Georgian. In fact, it looked a lot like an American-style pie with cheese instead of fruit filling. That hardly stopped me from cutting it while it was still hot and eating the warm, gooey cheese filling with a spoon.

With the cheese pie I ate my favorite summer salad. I'm indifferent to lettuce salads but I can't eat enough of cucumber and tomato salad with dill. I sliced a couple of small cucumbers, tomatoes and radishes and tossed them with some fresh dill. The dressing was a glug of olive oil, a drop or two of red wine vinegar and a healthy dash of salt. The salad may very well have been better than the hachepouri. This salad is also great with a dressing made of sour cream and yogurt--a teaspoonful of each per serving, plus a splash of sunflower or olive oil.

Round Zucchini with Lamb and Rice

Isn't round zucchini cute? When I saw these little buggers at the farmer's market I just wanted to scoop them up like kittens and baby talk. But reason prevailed so I stuffed them instead.

I cut off the tops and scooped out the pulp with a spoon. The squash shells and tops went into a 450-degree oven for 25 minutes. For the filling I sauteed a large onion with some ground lamb, threw in a healthy dash of garam masala, ground cumin, coriander, cinnamon and ground cayenne, and added cooked jasmine rice. The squash pulp I sauteed seperately with a couple of cloves of garlic; then I added a couple tablespoons of tomato paste dissolved in a little water. I combined the meat and squash mixture and stuffed these little guys to the rim.

I placed them in casserole pan filled with 1/4 inch water and back into the oven for 20 minutes or so. They were as good as they are cute. Next time, though, I would broil the shells, or maybe bake them longer, since the bigger zucchini were a little raw.

Green Beans with Ground Lamb

Remember how when you first started food blogging you would update as often as you could? And all you'd think about was those great recipes you couldn't wait to try out? And you'd write really long blog posts, trying to be informative and witty? And then as time went on your enthusiasm began to wane and you updated less? And less?

I suppose I'm talking about myself here. Yes, I've fallen into a food rut. The last four meals I've cooked were vaguely Asian stir-fries, which is all I seem to have the imagination and the desire for these days.

And yet! Today I made something completely new to me-lobio khortsit! Yes, I'm being all foreign and pretentious about green beans with ground lamb. Lobio khortsit could pass as the Georgian version of Hamburger Helper--"the Caucasian equivalent of spaghetti and meatballs," says Anya von Bremzen--but it's so much better.

I tweaked Anya's recipe a little, but this is the basic idea: Saute a large, chopped onion in olive oil till golden; add a pound of ground lamb and cook for 10 minutes. Then add a can of chopped plum tomatoes, plus their liquid, two cloves of crushed garlic, 1/2 tsp. hot Hungarian paprika, 1/8 tsp. cinnamon, 1/8 tsp. cumin and a pound of trimmed, blanched green beans. Cook on low heat for 15-20 minutes or so, until the beans are very tender--Georgians like their green beans well done, and I do too. Eat with rice.

(Anya has you saute the uncooked beans in butter for 10 minutes before adding them to the lamb. If you do this, cook the green beans and lamb on low heat for 20 minutes, covered, and then 15 more minutes, uncovered.)

This is simple food and maybe I liked it so much because I hadn't cooked anything new in a while. In any case, this is pretty delicious stuff. Don't leave out the cinnamon--it's responsible for that exotic, Georgian je ne sais quoi of lobio khortsit.

Homemade Ricotta: a Public Service Announcement

Is there anything you can't do with curdled milk and a piece of cheesecloth? Regular readers of this blog know about my relentless love of tvorog--making it, eating it and baking with it. I'm no less excited about making homemade ricotta. Granted, I've only tried this recipe once, but I can tell you that you should really be making ricotta if you aren't doing so already.

Ricotta is even easier to make than tvorog. Bring milk and cream to a boil; add lemon juice; reduce the heat and stir for a couple of minutes until the milk curdles. My only qualm is that half a gallon of milk barely yields two cups of ricotta and, unlike tvorog, ricotta keeps only for two days.

Vinigret

Vinigret is basically a beet and potato salad. Wait, keep reading. It's a potato salad that's worth making and eating. Don't be turned off by the beets--they're grated and mixed with ingredients that bring out their sweet-and-sour flavor. Don't be turned off by the root vegetables--this salad is light, zesty summer fare. But don't go thinking that this is some kind of health food--traditionally, vinigret is accompanied by lots of rye bread, herring, sardines and vodka. I made it for our 4th of July cookout, and we ate with grilled chicken thighs. Vive la melting pot.

Cook, cool and peel 4-5 salad potatoes. Simmer a large beet until tender and let it cool. Dice and combine in a large bowl: the potatoes, 1-2 small cucumbers, 1/2 cup or so red onion and a couple of dill pickles. Grate the beet and add to the bowl. Add 1-1.5 cup peas (use canned for an authentic Soviet vinigret; fresh or frozen for the American version), chopped scallions and chopped dill. Some people also add cooked carrots, diced.

For the dressing I used sunflower oil, red wine vinegar, a little dill pickle juice, a pinch of sugar, salt and pepper. Toss the vinigret, chill for 30-45 minutes and eat.

Svekolnik (Cold Borsch)

I have trouble with seasonal cooking. I like hot soups year-round. I will rarely turn down a good stew. I'm uninspired by salads until August, when I can pluck tomatoes and cucumbers right from my mom's backyard garden. I may have qualms about using the oven when it's 80+ degrees in my non-air conditioned apartment, but a nice poppy seed roll chases away my regrets.

Svekolnik, also known as cold borsch, is one of my consessions to warm weather. It's nothing like hot borsch, which is a meal in a bowl. Rather, svekolnik is a light, low-calorie soup that tastes bests when the weather is hot, hot, hot. It could almost pass for hip, vegan raw food. I'm cheating a bit here because my mom made the soup above. But I liked eating it and will make a svekolnik of my own one of these days.

I don't have the exact recipe, but the basic technique is this: In a soup pot, bring beets and water to a boil, then simmer until the beets are tender. Remove and cool the beets, then peel and grate, adding them back to the liquid.

[Update, August 08: The recipe is this: thoroughly wash and scrub a pound of beets. Cover the beets with six cups of water; bring to a boil; then simmer for 60-90 minutes until soft. Proceed as written.]

Add lemon juice, red wine vinegar, sugar, salt and pepper to the beet liquid to taste. This is the hardest part--underseason, and the soup will be bland. It should taste sweet-and-sour, erring on the side of sour. My mom's secret ingredient is a good splash of dill pickle brine. Chill the soup throughly in the fridge, preferably overnight.

Right before serving, chop up: hardboiled eggs, boiled and peeled potatoes, fresh peeled cucumbers, scallions, dill and parsley. I also like pickles in svekolnik. Divide the fix-ins between bowls, ladle the soup over the top and serve with sour cream.

Chocolate-Covered Sirki

A reader recently e-mailed me and asked if I knew how to make sirki (сырки). Sirki (literally "little cheeses") are small, cheesecake-like bars made with tvorog (farmer's cheese; similar to Quark cheese in Europe). I had never made sirki at home or tried storebought ones, so I did a little research: I asked my mom. She confirmed that sirki are made with tvorog and adds-ins like sour cream, vanilla, chocolate, nuts, raisins, etc.

Sirki were a favorite children's treat in Russia, and very small kids were sometimes plied with chocolate-covered sirki when they wanted ice cream. (I had never even tried sirki because, in the usual Soviet fashion, they disappeared from the stores around the time I was born.) [Update: I finally tried them when I went to Estonia and Russia in 2008.]

I found a few recipes for sirki-like desserts in Soviet cookbooks. The most common dessert is tvorozhnya massa ( "tvorog mold"), made by creaming butter and sugar, then adding eggs, tvorog and sour cream, and chilling the whole thing on a rounded plate. All this sirki talk was making me (and my mom) hungry for the real thing, so we bought some sirki from the Russian store in chocolate, almond and vanilla flavors. They tasted a lot like American-style cheesecake but were a bit tangy, like yogurt. Vanilla was the best of the bunch, but these sirki were cloyingly sweet and pricey.

Next I tried a recipe for chocolate-covered sirki from Anya von Bremzen's Russian cookbook Please to the Table. "These rich chocolate-covered cheese confections, sold in the dairy department in Soviet grocery shops, used to be a favorite childhood treat," writes Anya.

The recipe has you mix tvorog (I used 1.5 cups), 4 ounces cream cheese, sugar (Anya calls for 7 tbs; I used 3) and two egg yolks in a food processor. I also added 1 tsp. of vanilla extract. Then you add lemon zest, lemon extract and lemon juice, but I just used 3 tbs. of lemon juice. (The tvorog/cream cheese mixture has a lot of culinary promise. It had a nice, smooth texture and tastes like mousse.)

Wrap the mixture in a damp cheesecloth and place in a sieve that's set over a bowl. Cover the cheesecloth with a plate, put a weight on it (like a heavy can) and refrigerate overnight. The next day, use a small scooping spoon to shape the mixture into 1.5-inch balls.

Freeze the tvorog balls for half an hour to firm them up, then melt 12 ounces of decent dark chocolate in a saucepan or double boiler and let it cool a little. Anya calls for melting the chocolate with 3 tbs. of vegetable shortening; I used 1 tbs. and a splash of heavy cream. I think shortening smells and tastes like stale oil, even when it's fresh, so I'd avoid it completely and simply use heavy cream to make a ganache.

Dip the tvorog balls in the chocolate and let cool on a wax-paper covered plate. Chill in the fridge until the chocolate is firm. I ended up with 15 or 16 sirki. They tasted like little cheesecakes and would work well as dessert or post-dessert bites. I think you can experiment a lot with this recipe, using ricotta instead of tvorog, or sour cream instead of cream cheese, and nuts, chocolate or dried fruit in the tvorog mixture.

Lamb Shish Kebabs, or Caucasian Shashlik Demystified

I noticed that one of the much-mocked Weight Watchers cards from the '70s features "Caucasian Shashlik". This dish isn't as mysterious or gory-looking as Weight Watchers would have you believe. Shashlik means shish kebab in Russian (this word is of Turkish origin). Caucasian means it's from the Caucasus region, which includes Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan and some parts of Russia.

I wouldn't consider Caucasian shashlik diet food by any means, but it is pretty excellent cookout fare. Here's an essay in pictures on Uzbek lamb kebabs.

Firing up the grill.

Skewering the meat, alternating lean pieces with fatty pieces.

On the grill.

Sprinkling the kebabs with a mixture of water and vinegar as they cook.

All done! Uzbek lamb kebabs are tradionally served with vinegar and thinly sliced onions.

All gone.

For further details, check out the lamb kekab recipe and its variations in Anya Von Bremzen's Please to the Table.

Big bowl of boneless lamb, cut into cubes. The lamb was marinated overnight in a mixture of thinly sliced onions and cumin and coriander seeds.

Poppy Seed Roll

Remember how I wrote about all those wonderful, complicated cooking projects I was planning to accomplish this week? Well. I got back from Mexico (the weather was very nice, by the way) feeling lazy and languid. I grudgingly realized that I have a real life to attend to, but all I wanted to do was sleep until 11 a.m., go to the beach, swim, tan, eat, tan, swim, eat, sleep, rinse, repeat. I guess I'm not a real cook at heart. While I was away I didn't miss cooking and barely thought about it. Back at home, I lolled about the apartment and thought about making something half-way interesting, but then I got sick, which turned me off food and cooking for a few days.

So when I got better, what did I finally make? I pulled out some frozen dough from the fridge, smeared some pre-made filling on it, baked the whole thing and voila--I made a poppy seed roll. It's not as slatternly as it sounds. The frozen dough was 1/2 recipe of the sweet yeast dough I had made a couple of weeks earlier. The poppy seed roll recipe was from Please to the Table. I didn't have any poppy seeds on hand and wasn't about to shell out for two cups of them when I didn't know how frozen yeast dough would handle defrosting.

I added some walnuts and lemon zest to the canned poppy seed filling, rolled out the dough into a 12-inch square, spread the filling all around, rolled it up and baked it at 350 degrees for 45 minutes. The dough rose alarmingly in the oven. I don't know whether I'm doing something wrong, or if the recipe is faulty, or if this is normal, but Anya von Brezen's sweet yeast dough swells to gargantuan proportions during baking. While the roll was cooling my boyfriend remarked, "It looks pregnant." I thought it looked like a baby beached whale. But the roll was pretty good, canned filling and all.

Will I shake off my post-vacation laziness and cook something from scratch ever again? Stay tuned to find out!

Mazurka (Fruit and nut bars)

This is what I made after an evening of packing for my trip to Mexico. Expecting a long and hungry day of travel, relieved only by airplane food, I figured I should take something that would keep well and keep me sated.

I don't know why I haven't written about these no-brainer fruit and nut things before. I got the recipe from my boyfriend's mom and I've been making them weekly all winter. Don't ask me why they're called mazurka--a dance of fruity and nutty flavors, maybe?

In any case, mazurka is neither a cookie nor a cake nor really a bar. It's simply a jumble of fruit-and-nut goodness, cut into squares. Mazurka smeared with peanut butter and washed down with tea makes a very nice breakfast or snack. I also like to crumble it into yogurt.

This is how I make it: mix 4 eggs with 3/4 cup of sugar. Beat in a cup of flour. Mix in a cup of walnuts, a cup of raisins and a cup of dried cherries or cranberries. Pour into an oiled pan and bake at 350 degrees for about 35-45 minutes. Cut into squares or bars.

You can use any combination of dried fruits and nuts, of course. Just make sure there's something sweet, like raisins, and tart, like cranberries in there. The more generous you are with fruits and nuts, the better your mazurka will be.

Vote for Yulinka

*MKE, a local lifestyle weekly, has nominated Yulinka Cooks in its blog of the week contest. This is a right of passage for Milwaukee bloggers, and I wouldn't mind winning. Vote for me here.

*Unfortunately, I can't woo new readers with tantalizing recipes for kvas (rye bread beer) and vareniki (fruit dumplings). I won't be doing much cooking for the next week as I'm leaving for Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, on Saturday. I should be back next Saturday, June 10. Then I'll have another week of vacation, which I hope to spend playing lady of leisure. I'm planning complicated, multi-step cooking projects.

*I've been busy with work and packing this so I haven't cooked anything blog-worthy lately. The most notable dish was a variation of this shrimp scampi pasta, to which I added cherry tomatoes and spinach.

*"The Virtuous Eater, of course, has underlying health reasons for her food rules--fewer pesticides, reduced additives, no trans fat--not unlike the way many scholars believe Kosher laws were initially formed to protect Jews from unsanitary food. But the Virtuous Eater, like her historical God-fearing counterparts, also considers adherence to her dietary laws an ethical imperative and an important public exhibition of piety, a model for the less observant. It's no longer particularly acceptable to brag about one's church attendance or volunteer details of one's own genealogy or pedigree, but a blow-by-blow account of the short life of an ear of organic, local sweet corn is appropriate conversation for dinner and a credit to any cook."

Are you a Virtuous Eater? There's much more to say about this article, but I'm too tired right now. I do think most food bloggers are voluptuary Virtuous Eaters.

Tokana Two Ways

Reason #3,845 why I love Anya von Bremzen's Please to the Table: In addition to recipes for run-of-the-mill Russian food--borsht, etc.--Anya features food from the former Soviet republics. Everyone knows about kasha and blinis, but have you ever heard of a tokana? Neither have I. According to Anya, tokana is a "Moldavian stew suffused with garlic, fresh tomatoes and sweet paprika." I've been eyeing the recipe for mushroom tokana for a while, so I made it for lunch last week.

Pay no mind to the token photo. I've yet to discover how to make stews look attractive in pictures. But the tokana itself was surprisingly good. I was expecting something like a paprika-flavored tomato sauce, but instead I got a chunky, sweet-and-sour veggie stew. The recipe is online and I followed it almost to the letter. All you do is sauté mushrooms, onions, bell peppers, tomatoes (I used canned) and garlic; flavor with sweet paprika, thyme, fennel seeds (I tossed in some leftover braised fennel) and white wine; and simmer for 15 minutes.

I thought tokana would work well with beef, so a few days later I made a beef stew using the same combination of veggies and spices. I browned some cubed stewing beef, tossed in the sautéed, paprika-and-thyme spiced veggies and simmered for two hours. The sweet and sour, veggie-laded beef was pretty good but I liked the vegetarian version better.

Anya suggests mamaliga, a Moldavian/Romanian corn mush (i.e. polenta), as a side. I've never had polenta so I made a practice version and I'm still split about it. Cooked with water, as suggested, polenta is just blah. Cooked with stock or milk and butter—Anya’s recipe calls for a stick and a half!--polenta isn't bad. I have to grudgingly admit that polenta is pretty good comfort food, but I still think it’s best eaten for breakfast with milk and called by its plain-Jane name: cornmeal porridge.

A Saturday Breakfast

This is a pure vanity post, inspired by today's breakfast. On weekdays I have a piece of fruit, usually an apple, for breakfast at my desk at work. My ideal weekend breakfast, however, features yogurt or tvorog, some sort of a fresh baked good and black tea. It’s indulgent but not so brunch-heavy that you feel like you've eaten your daily allotment of calories half an hour after getting up.

From left: black loose-leaf Indian tea with a slice of lemon, yogurt scones and tvorog topped with plain yogurt and jam. I like to read something—anything—when I’m eating breakfast. This might jibe with the whole savoring-your-food-without-distractions philosophy, but I think everything tastes better when you’re reading while eating. I picked up this bad habit when I was a kid and I still find myself reading labels on jars and bottles when I'm lacking reading material at the table. I don’t get the Saturday paper so today I settled for an old issue of W magazine. Do thin models encourage poor body image? If only! I ate two buttered scones, licked my fingers and wanted more.

Zucchini and Yellow Squash Gratin

It's easy to cook for someone from the same cultural background as you. My boyfriend, P., is basically a meat and potatoes guy. But thanks to spending the first 13 years of his life in Uzbekistan, the former Soviet republic, he knows all about Russian food. Kasha? He was practically weaned on that stuff. Tvorog? A wonderful midnight snack. Beet salad? I want some more, please. How often do you find a big guy's guy who happily eats cabbage and beef aspic?

Unfortunately, P.'s palate is too russified for some popular American foods. Namely pasta, but especially any kind of veggie-sauce pasta, which he says is food for "girls on diets." (Dried pasta gets no respect in Russian cooking. One cookbook I own advises boiling it for 25 minutes.) I love girlie pasta and that's what I often make when I find myself eating on my own. Today's lunch wasn't technically a pasta dish, but it's good with any kind of noodle.

Slice a bunch of zucchini and yellow squash (I used two of each) into 1/4 inch rounds. In batches, sauté in olive oil for a little while until the vegetables soften. Spread the veggies in a casserole dish with a couple of minced and sautéed garlic cloves. Top with some good tomato sauce. I didn't have any sauce so I used halved cherry tomatoes. Sprinkle the whole thing with grated mozzarella--you judge how much is enough--and Parmesan. Bake in a 425-degree oven until the cheese is slightly browned.

Appropriate sides are good bread or new potatoes, but I ate this with linguine, pouring the zucchini-olive oil-tomato juices on top. This is really late summer food and I hope that I'll be eating it by the panful in August.

Pie Oh My

Because I haven't blogged quite enough about things to do with curdled milk, I baked a tvorog and blueberry pie this weekend. Seriously, it's not like I decided to make Yulinka Cooks a tvorog-themed blog. It's just that I always have milk and buttermilk nearing expiration in the fridge. I figure that I'll make tvorog and find some use for it later. Sometimes I'll end up eating it for breakfast or lunch; sometimes I have no choice but to bake with it.

I've actually had my eye on this pie recipe, from Anya von Bremzen's Please to the Table, for at least a year. I like tvorog, I like blueberries and I like a challenge--sweet yeast dough. Remebering what I learned last time--more flour!--I had far less trouble making the dough this time around. The trouble came later.

For the cheese filling, I mixed 1 1/4 cups of tvorog with a couple of tablespoons of sugar, an egg yolk, 1/2 teaspoon of vanilla extract, lemon zest (I used lemon juice) and a tablespoon of sour cream. The recipe calls for fresh blueberries, mixed with a little sugar, but I used frozen. This was a mistake, as frozen blueberries release a lot of juice when they bake.

You need 1/2 recipe of the sweet yeast dough for this pie. I rolled out 3/4 of the dough into a 13-inch round and draped it across a 10-inch pie plate. I made my second mistake here, using a pie plate that was far too deep. Use a standard pie plate or something shallow. The other quarter of the dough is for the lattice strips. I tried to make them no more than 1/4 inch wide, as instructed. Even though mine were too thick, I still wound up with a leftover hunk of dough (used for mini-vatrushki).

The above photo shows the pie before it went into a 375-degree oven. I had a few concerns about it looking kind of messy (not to mention the pie-making mess in the background). When it came out, it was... Well, look at the top picture. "Rustic" is a kind way of putting it. "Peasant-style" would also work. But it didn't quite look like an elegant northern Slavic pie that Anya promised.

Because the pie plate was too deep, the shell didn't bake all the way through. I thought the tvorog filling could have used a little more browning, which it didn't get thanks to the lattice. The frozen berries released too much juice. But how did the pie taste? Good! Really, this is a very nice adult dessert (or breakfast). I've become a big fan of sweet yeast dough--it's not too sweet or leaden. The boyfriend had about three slices and proclaimed the pie "yummy" and "not very heavy." So there you go--just use fresh blueberries and don't bother with the lattice. The cheese and blueberry filling would work just as well on a flaky, American-style pie crust, I think, or in a tart, which is what I might try next time.

Lasagna

It’s funny that I’m so big on cooking Russian food these days. Between the ages of, say, 10 and 19, I didn’t get all excited about borsht or sirniki. I didn’t spend my Friday nights sparring with sweet yeast dough for vatrushki. And I certainly wasn’t looking forward to summer so I could make kvas—rye bread beer.

No, what I really wanted to eat as a kid was American food—-or what I thought of as American food. It began with fast food. My mom’s first job in America was at McDonald’s, and I fell in love with Happy Meals, chicken McNuggets and fries. Then we got a toaster and I toasted countess slices of Wonder Bread, which I ate with Kraft cheese slices. After that came the microwave and along with it frozen pizza and frozen dinners, followed by potato chips and Doritos, gummy “fruit-snacks,” fruit roll-ups, Lunchables and other highly processed goodies.

When I started getting into cooking, I had little desire to cook or eat cabbage and beet-based dishes. I wanted to make what Americans eat. And what do Americans eat? Tacos made from taco kits, Hamburger Helper and burgers on cottony buns, of course. Sometimes I tagged along with my mom when she went grocery shopping and cajoled her into buying and making this stuff. We’d have it once or twice before going back to classic Soviet weeknight food—-soups, kotleti (beef patties, kind of like burgers but served without the bun) and fried potatoes.

Occasionally I would hit upon better ideas, including homemade meatloaf, Asian-style stir-fries and lasagna. My favorite was, of course, the lasagna. It didn't matter that lasagna wasn't exacty American. I just knew that it was unheard of in Russian cooking and that the freezer aisle at the grocery store was full of frozen lasagna dinners. Lasagna marks my food evolution because I would usually guide my mom in making it rather than the other way around. It’s also one of the few non-Russian dishes my mom still cooks even though I’m not around to pester her to make it. Our lasagnas went through many variations and food-fad stages over the years—ground beef lasagna, ground turkey lasagna, chicken lasagna, veggie lasagna, low-fat lasagna and others.

It took years of practice but I think I made one of my best lasagnas yet tonight. No recipe—I don’t keep track of proportions and I’ll make it a different way next time. The filling was made of extra virgin olive oil, a huge, sautéed onion, sautéed red, yellow and green bell-peppers, sweet Italian sausage, a couple of garlic cloves, a couple of handfuls of chopped parsley and a can of San Marzano tomatoes. Mozzarella and Parmesan between the layers. The filling was so good that I half-considered ditching the lasagna and just eating it with pasta. But I carried through and had a perfectly good American dinner.

Some Thoughts on Blinchiki

Helen's lovely and poignant post about blinchiki inspired childhood memories and a real craving for these thin Russian pancakes. Like I commented on Helen's blog, as a kid, I had the same fascination with flipping blinchiki when my mom made them on weekend mornings. I wrote about savory blinchiki before and I don't intend to re-post the recipe or the instructions--I urge you to check out Helen's authoritative guide to making and flipping crepes. (I use a spatula and sometimes even my fingers to flip them. Ouch.)

Rather, I want to offer some tips and thoughts on making blinchiki a beloved weekend breakfast tradition on par with fresh-baked brunch goodies.

-Do make blinchiki on weekends only. It takes some time to fry them and you can't hurry this process along.

-The first blinchik will usually tear when you flip it. I think that's because the pan hasn't had time to heat up properly. The French say "La première, c'est pour le chien." (The first one's for the dog.) In Russian, it's "pervei blin komom." (The first one's a mess.)

-If you don't have a dog, do eat the scraps of the first blinchik! You'll be behind the stove for a little while and will need something to tide you over.

-Eat one well-made blinchik while you're working, too. It'll give you a taste of what's to come.

-Sweet fillings are for weekend blinchiki. Savory fillings are for weeknight blinchiki.

-Serve blinchiki buffet-style with a nice assortment of toppings.

-I tried to give an example of appropriate toppings in the above photo. I suggest you offer: at least two kinds of jam (that's apricot and raspberry in the photo), sour cream, butter, honey and sugar. Maple syrup wouldn't be bad at all. Nutella works, if that's your thing.

-Do make a big pot of tea to wash down the blinchki. Coffee will work as blinchiki breakfast beverage, but ideally you want black tea and lots of it. Make sure the tea is hot and ready when you serve the blinchiki.

-Blinchiki with tvorog (farmer's cheese) become blintzes. That's a Yiddish word, by the way, not a Russian one. I has some leftover tvorog so I mixed it with a little sugar and sour cream, filled and rolled up a couple of blinchki and topped them with honey.

-Don't believe those recipes that say two blinchiki per person is enough. If they're filled, maybe. If not, everyone will want more. I know I will. Figure on five per person.

Guest-at-the-Doorstep Apple Charlotte

The frou-frou name is courtesy of Anya von Bremzen. My mom has been making this very easy, not quite a cake, not quite a pie apple dessert for ages, but I had thought the recipe was a family exclusive. So I was really surprised to find an almost identical recipe included in von Bremzen's Please to the Table and described as a classic, last-minute Russian (or, more likely, Soviet) dessert.

This is the sort of dessert you make when you want something sweet to finish up a meal but have no time to bake or shop. I memorized the recipe a long time ago--3 eggs, a cup of sugar, a cup of flour, 4 apples, slice, mix, pour, bake--and even my dad has successfully made this. Because it's so easy we used to make this all the time, but then I got bored with it. Don't make this apple charlotte too often, and you'll be surprised by just how good it is when you do have it. This is my tweaked recipe:

-Oil a 9-inch pan and sprinkle with breadcrumbs.
-Core, peel, quarter 3-4 large, tart apples and slice them into 1/4 inch pieces. I use Granny Smith. Arrange the apple slices in a circular pattern in the pan.
-Sprinkle the apples with a little cinnamon, nutmeg or ground cloves.
-Preheat the oven to 350.
-Beat 3 eggs in a bowl, add 3/4 cup of sugar, beat until the mixture is smooth and pale yellow. Beat in 1 tsp. vanilla extract.
-Beat in 1 cup of flour. Add a splash of milk (3-4 tablespoons), continue beating till smooth.
-Pour the batter evenly over the apples.
-Bake until the top is puffy and golden, about 50 minutes.

This is excellent when eaten warm, but do let cool it for 30 minutes or so. Sprinkle the top with powdered sugar before serving.

On a Month and a Half of Food Blogging

-Wow, blogging takes up a lot of time. I'd estimate it takes me an hour to an hour and a half to write a pretty basic post/recipe. I used to read in my free time! Now I'm writing up my dinner.

-My photos are rubbish and that probably won't change anytime soon. I use a cheapie digital camera that my dad got as a thank-you present at a work conference. But I know that the fault really lies with me, not the camera. I have almost no understanding of basic photography, including stuff like lighting, and I don't feel like learning. Like that Harold guy on Bravo's Top Chef, I'm, you know, a cook, man, not some photographer!

-When reading high-end food blogs, I sometimes wonder why I bother. The stunning photography, the 10-course dinner parties, the Michelin-starred restaurants... I remind myself that I aspire to be a good home cook, a good housewife cook, as some snooty French chef put it on Top Chef.

-Do I post about my failures? I like it when bloggers write their kitchen blunders and recipes that just don't turn out. Still, when I failed spectacularly in making tuiles last week, I tossed out the cookie scraps and put away my camera. I regret this now; it would have made an amusing post. I should have started with a pic of the ruined tuiles and the title "This Is Not a Tuile." But too many mistakes and blah recipes are overkill. I like to pick up tricks and hints and promising recipes from the blogs I read.

-"A blog needs a sense of purpose. The author can't just curl up on the sofa like an overfed retriever and recollect his last bowl of kibble; he should strain forward like a terrier who's late for an appointment with a ham bone."

Some wag wrote the above back in March and ruffled a few feathers in the food blogging world. But I think he's right. My purpose, I suppose, is to write about Russian home cooking. Problem is, I don't cook Russian food every day, or even every week. In the past few days, I made perfectly good and even kind of photogenic food, including an Asian-type stir fry with noodles and swordfish with sauteed potatoes (tonight's dinner).

But I didn't blog about these meals because they don't fit my theme. Plenty of other bloggers can cook and write about this kind of food better than I can. Here's what I do want to write about in the future: Kvas (rye bread beer), plov (Uzbek lamb and rice stew), eggplant and red pepper salad, Uzbek food in general (my boyfriend's family is from Uzbekistan), more good things to do with beets and tvorog.

-I started a blog and the world failed to notice. What's wrong with you, world?! Leave one freakin' comment or something!

Eggplant Caviar

Eggplant caviar, the classic Russian appetizer. Eggplant caviar is like borsch in that there's no standard recipe for it; every cook has his tricks. This is how I make it:

Preheat the oven to 425; pierce one medium eggplant all over with a fork and bake until soft, 45 minutes to 1 hour.

Cut the eggplant in half; peel; chop the pulp.

Heat some olive oil in a large skillet. Be generous with the oil, as eggplant absorbs quite a lot of it. No one likes a dry eggplant caviar. It should be nicely oily, but not greasy.

Finely chop and saute: A large onion, two small or one large carrot, 1-1.5 cup bell peppers. You can use green or red or whatever peppers. I used orange and yellow. Cook vegetables until the onion is golden and the carrots and peppers and soft.

Add the eggplant pulp and 1 minced garlic clove. Simmer over low heat for 10-15 minutes. Seasoning eggplant caviar is the hardest part. You typically use tomatoes, canned or fresh, or tomato paste; a little sugar; lemon juice or vinegar; salt and pepper. I end up using a different combo every time and I don't keep track of proportions, tasting until I get it right. This time I used about 1/2 cup of chopped, canned tomatoes, a couple of tablespoons of tomato paste, a teaspoon of sugar, a couple of squirts of lemon juice and red wine vinegar and a couple of dashes of salt and black pepper.

After adding the seasonings, simmer for 15 more minutes. Add another finely minced garlic clove or two, depending on how much you like garlic, and take off the heat. Transfer to a bowl and chill for several hours in the fridge. Serve cold or even warm, but never hot.

You can eat eggplant caviar with rye or pita bread, but it's just as good over rice or with some boiled new potatoes. I even like it with pasta. When eggplant caviar turns out very well, people will eat it straight right out of the serving bowl.

An Underripe Pineapple

A few days ago I had an underripe pineapple on my hands, so I roasted it. I rarely make baked fruit desserts because I am too impatient not to eat the fruit as is. However, a very tart pineapple is no fun to eat straight up so I took advantage of the opportunity to experiment.

I chose a recipe out of a swanky Williams Sonoma roasting cookbook. It's a book I often consult for inspiration, but I don't really cook from it. Page after page of food porn-y photos and at least four pricey herbs per recipe. This pineapple dessert is the easiest thing in there.

Core and peel a pineapple. Cut it crosswise into 1/2 inch slices. Pour whatever juice you get while preparing the pineapple into a small bowl and add 1/4 tsp of vanilla extract. Arrange the pineapple in a baking dish and pour the juice over the fruit. Sprinkle with 1/4 cup of brown sugar, 1/2 tsp. of ground ginger and--this is the most important part--1/4 to 1/2 tsp. of black pepper. Roast at 425 for 20-25 minutes.

Let the pineapple cool a little but eat it while it's still warm, preferably with some plain, creamy yogurt. The pineapple will have a spicy kick that you'll really feel as the fruit slides down your throat. The juice that the pineapple produces while baking has even more zing. If I make this again, I will kick it up a notch--sorry, couldn't help myself--with more black pepper. If you're tempted not to eat the entire pineapple in one sitting, keep in mind that the peppery zing will dissapear overnight.

Tilapia with Mushroom Kasha

I'm not a big fan of buckwheat (kasha)--it's too dry for my tastes, so I rarely make it. In fact, I've had a big package of kasha in my pantry for months and I hadn't made it once. But I am willing to reexamine my food prejudices.

I got the idea for the kasha from--what else?--Anya von Bremzen's Please to the Table. She has a promising recipe with lots of butter and wild mushrooms that you have to soak for two hours, but I went for the quick and easy version. I also wasn't sure about serving kasha with tilapia. Usually I do some kind of Asian or Mediterranean sauce when making fish, but what the hell.

To make the kasha, I brought a cup of water to boil and added half a cup of buckwheat along with a little salt. Simmered until all the water was absorbed; about 20 minutes. Meanwhile, I diced and sauteed a big onion and half a pound of mushrooms in a couple of tablespoons of butter, adding some chopped parsley at the end. A sprinkle of sage, salt, pepper. Added the cooked kasha to the skillet, mixed in a couple of tablespoons of sour cream, dumped the whole thing in a casserole dish.

Seared a couple of tilapia fillets and put them on top of the kasha. Made a quick sauce of butter, white wine and lemon juice; poured this over the fish. Baked until the fish was done.

This was surprisingly good, especially the kasha--fluffy and satisfying. I still think that kasha is kind of blah on its own, but it does go well with sauteed fix-ins, especially onions or mushrooms. It's also good with saucy food, like stew. I'll have to make Anya von Bremzen's fancy version of this, but not till the fall. Kasha is really more of a hearty cold-weather food and it actually felt like May today. Ah, well. I still overcame a food prejudice.

Eating Cheap/Eating Local

I have mixed feelings about posting this. Will I lose all my readers? (All five of you.) But here it goes.

I can't get too excited about the eat local challenge. I'm hardly qualified to talk about eating local/organic--most of the time, I don't, because I can't afford it too often It doesn't help that I'm a conservative, careful spender by nature. Yes, I could stretch my income to buy pricier organic groceries, but I'm not about to eat through my 401(k) contribution, those six months of living expenses or grad school tuition.

Six dollar eggs are an occasional treat, not a weekly purchase. I do stop by the Outpost, the local organic co-op, for good yogurt; Sendiks, the local gourmet fancy food chain, for decent bread, specialty stuff or to splurge on cheese. Still, after walking into Sendiks, the first thing I check out is the reduced produce shelf. You never know what exciting cheapies you might find there--today, I got a yellow and an orange pepper for a buck. I shop like an old lady, buying meat, vegetables, fruit and seafood on special.

I suppose I am all for eating local. I wish I could buy organic meat without flinching at the price, happily paying more to support sustainable organic farming. But ultimately, the call to eat local/organic affects me like a campaign to bike to work. It's a nice idea, but... And although I like to cook and eat well, I don't think I have the makings of a foodie. Savings trump organic asparagus!

So I am far more sympathetic to the poverty line challenge. It's closer to my frugal little heart. After immigrating to America in the early nineties, my parents' food budget was pretty small, possibly poverty line, yet the four of us (parents, grandfather, me) ate reasonably well because my mom is a careful and economic shopper and a decent cook. Our meals certainly fresh fruit and vegetables, as well as chicken, pork and beef. I don't buy the complaint that it's very hard to eat well or healthy on a budget. On the other hand, it does take some work and imagination.

Consider this tomato bean soup. My mom has made this sort of soup at least once a week when I was growing up. A big bowl, with seconds--why not?--and some decent bread makes a satisfying, nutritious meal and leaves plenty of leftovers for everyone's lunch the next day. How much does this soup cost to make? A half a bag of dried navy beans is about 60 cents; a onion, a couple of carrots, two cloves of garlic and some celery stalks might run you 50-60 cents. A can of tomatoes--let's say $1.50, if you're getting the halfway decent kind. A couple of cents for a few tablespoons of vegetable or okay olive oil. The stock is made from 3-4 lbs supermarket chicken, always bought on sale for less than a dollar per pound, plus the usual cheap veggies--carrots, celery, etc. Let's say 4-5 dollars for the 16 or 18 cups of stock. A bay leaf, a little salt, pepper, paprika or red pepper flakes won't set you back much.

Still, that's $8, tops, for a big, nutritious, yummy pot of soup. (Eight dollars might buy only two meals at a fast food place.) Yes, the veggies aren't local or organic and yes, the chicken has been pumped with hormones, antibiotics and has led a nasty, brutal and short life. But isn't this kind of homemade, cheap food infinitely better than McDonald's or endless peanut butter on Wonder Bread sandwiches? I'd think that lack of planning, lack of basic cooking skills and sheer laziness is a far bigger enemy of the poor than second-rate supermarket ingredients.

I think I eat pretty well on my budget. My meals are pretty creative; I'm a decent beginner cook; I can afford to experiment and splurge often enough. (Here I am pleading poverty, yet my shopping lists over the last few weeks included the following just-for-fun goodies: A can of anchovies with capers; fresh pineapple; asparagus; tahini; fancy cheese; red curry paste; black bean sauce.) Still, it's irritating to wait for certain foods, especially seafood or meat, to go on sale when I want to eat them now. A visit to the to the local organic or 'goumet' market sometimes leaves me dejected and unsatisfied. Really, you'd think that not being able to afford organic beef is some kind of great tragedy in life.

Don't pity me, though. I am moving up in the world and one day I, too, shall eat local and organic. See you at Whole Foods in a few years!