Picnic

With my friend E visiting town, I wanted to do three things: cook, can, and relax. While we did all of those things, I also felt it necessary to show her a bit of Ukrainian culture, since she came all this way. So, Wednesday we took a break from our extravagant kitchen plans to take a bag full of meat, a watermelon, and our neighbors out to the lake behind the supermarket. The result was an excellent time, some delicious grilled шашлык (shish kebab), and some great memories.

The spread

Shashlik

Kimchi!

Ira's niece refused to even look at me. I'm gonna be a great teacher!

Beware of hop-ons. You're gonna get some hop-ons.

Totally found a hedgehog, but no one could get a  focused picture of it for unknown reasons.

Integration!

Pickles Got Made

About a week ago I made a request of all my neighbors: If you are canning something, just knock on my door and let me watch. You don't have to give me anything but the recipe. Three days ago, Paulina took me up on that. She gave me a list of products to hunt down for home-made pickles. With limited Russian ability, I was only just able to locate all the specific ingredients (it is so hard to say "liter jars with lids"!). While gathered around  the potable water refill truck, I mentioned to Paulina that I now had everything I needed and would like to know what to do next. She gave me some lose instructions (some of this, cut it, add that), but I guess she could tell that I still wasn't quite sure what to do. 15 minutes later my doorbell rings, and there's Paulina with every other married woman from the building. They marched into my kitchen and made pickles happen. Here's how it went down.

They started by "sterilizing" the jars with cold water and baking soda. Does anyone know if that's a real thing? Meanwhile, one of the women was chopping the dark green leaves from horseradish and plucking yellow flowers from dill weed. They threw that with whole peppercorns and some garlic cloves (halved lengthwise) into the jars.

Yet another lady was slicing horseradish root at an angle to be added in. At the same time, Paulina was cramming in as many cucumbers as could fit in the liter jars. Some got cut, but she says that doesn't matter.

The jars were topped off with cold water, not vinegar. A tablespoon of salt and a heap of ground mustard got added to each one. In two of the jars, I convinced the women to allow a dried chili pepper to be added for some extra heat.

We didn't actually can them per se. These plastic lids sat in boiling water until they became malleable then were crammed on the jars. Now they've hardened again, but next time I can I think I'm going to do it legit. The product is three murky jars of pickles-to-be, just waiting for winter. It was all over as quickly as it started, and the women filed out.