Pages

Monday, December 31, 2012

Happy New Year

You have to skip forward a bit through the Russian, but this totally happened. This is what my life is like. Every day.

Sunday, December 02, 2012

Солянка (Solyanka)

It's the middle of winter, the heat in your car doesn't work, and you don't want to go to the grocery store. You have some left-over meat lying around in the fridge, some root vegetables, but no remnants of the summer harvest. A can of olives stands in the pantry next to some tomato paste. What do you cook to beat back the chill? For many Ukrainians, the answer is solyanka. Quite literally meaning "hodgepodge," solyanka is left-over stew for those times when nothing fresh is available. One Ukrainian told me that this soup is not correct without at least 4 types of meat, but other blogs claim as many as 7 types are required for flavourful solyanka. I submit to you the Solokhin Family Recipe for Solyanka Ukrainskaya.

5 or so kinds of pork
1/4 of a chicken
3-4 potatoes
2 finely grated beets
1 finely grated carrot
1 diced onion
4 dill pickles
4 tbs of tomato paste
2 tbs of vegetable oil
lemon, black olives, and sour cream to garnish

1) In the biggest pot you got, start boiling the chicken in about 2 litres of water (fill the pot halfway).


2) Start chopping meat! All your bacon, sausage, hotdogs, salami, smoked ham, and bratwurst need to be chunked into dice-sized bites. Set all that aside.

3) Peel and cube your potatoes. After the chicken has been boiling for about 20 minutes, pull it out and throw in the potatoes.

4) Throw your onion and carrot on the skillet with your oil. When the onions are translucent, add the beets. While all that's going, dice up the pickles and throw them in too. Add your tomato paste and mix it all around.



5) In the meantime, we're keeping an eye on the potatoes. Are they half done? Throw in your meat, including the chicken that you were boiling. Just strip it off the bone and chop it up first.


6) When the potatoes are completely cooked, dump the contents of the skillet into the pot. It should be just about topped off with ingredients, so dump gingerly. Salt it to your taste.

7) Serve it up, not being stingy with the meaty broth. Top it off with a quartered lemon slice, a few halved olives, and a big dollop of sour cream.




















Woah, 200th post!