New Year's Party

Growing up, there were no vegetarians in my family. Food was never a moral choice. None of us were trying to make a wrestling weight class or hike the AT, so it wasn't about calories per dollar. We weren't looking for speed or convenience, but weren't overly bougie about the dinner table.

So, yeah, not this.

For us, meals were about sharing, showing love, enjoying time together over a spread of the mouth-watering and comfort-imparting. It is in that spirit that I prepared my home for NYE14, both the most important Ukrainian holiday and the last one that I'll spend here. Did I want everything to be photo-worthy? Obviously. Did I want to bask in my favourite phrase all night (Стивен вообще молодец.)? Shamelessly. Most importantly, though, I wanted to pour love all over these awesome people, because this time next year I will have been long gone.

Any Ukrainian gathering needs three things for success: copious amounts of food and alcohol, places for taking pictures of yourselves, and activities. Obviously, the first I had in spades. Goose slow roasted for 4 hours, basted with pomegranate juice every 30 minutes,

Thai coconut shrimp with sweet and sour sauce (and sesame shrimp, due to a brevity of coconut shavings),

and an American pasta salad (something Ukrainians would apparently never dream of, although it makes so much sense for their palate.) are just a few of the dishes on our New Year's table. 

In fact, all the food couldn't fit on the table at once, so the finger foods had to make their home off in the kitchen.

The rest of the night is was just joyful. We played some games, we took some pictures, we recorded video of ourselves and what we wished for the group in the coming year. In Ukrainian tradition, we wrote our wishes on slips of paper, burned them at midnight, then drank the ashes in champagne. There was karaoke and Twister. There were no fist fights (so proud of you, Ukraine). Certainly it was a night to remember. Next year, wherever I may be for NYE, I'll be thinking of these awesome people and the time we spent together. I hope they'll be thinking of me, too.

Featured

Last Friday, I was honoured to be a guest blogger over at Waegook Tom's, a kindred travel and food blog from an ex-Korean-expat. Check out my article about reconciling Korean cravings in Eastern Europe, featured as part of Tom's series "Food Porn Friday."

Okroshka (Окрошка)

It's too hot here to eat soup. Everyone agrees. Sweating in our homes or at the lakeside, the idea of a muggy bowl of borscht is wildly unappealing. Since lettuce is hard to come by and I'm tired of the go-to Uke "salad" of chopped tomatoes and cucumbers, what's the next best cool-down meal? Cold soup. Cold dairy soup. It's really much better than it sounds.

There are several variations of okroshka broth. Some are made healthily with kefir or with yoghurt. Others embrace their inner trailer park by using mayonnaise. Still others mix in beets for a lavender, bridal shower look. The following is the classic recipe: sour cream diluted with water and zested with lemon juice. The result is extremely refreshing, crisp, and not entirely unhealthy.

You need to do a lot of boiling and cubing, so it's best to make a lot at one time. If you keep the broth in one container and the contents in another, it'll last several days in the fridge without getting soggy.

• 4 boiled eggs
• 2-3 boiled potatoes
• 2-4 cucumbers
• 250 g of ham
• 150 g of radish

Everything gets cubed up, about peanut-sized. 

Stir it all together with a handful of minced dill, parsley, and green onion.

The broth is easy. For every cup of sour cream, you need a litre of water. An average amount would be about a cup and a half of sour cream and 1.5 L of water, but some people like it chunkier. Add salt and lemon juice to taste. I don't know about other countries, but here it's possible to find citric acid powder (лимонная кислота), which is commonly used instead of lemon juice.



No matter how you prepare it, okroshka is a brisk summer treat. Spice it up with mustard or horseradish. Serve it with ice cubes. Use kvas instead of water. There's no limit to the number of variations! Enjoy, and stay cool.

Kulesh

Kулеш (pronounced cool-YESH) is a camp fire soup. It originated as an army food of the Cossacks in Zaporozhye, but has since spread to camp sites everywhere. It's simple, cheap, and comforting, much like chicken noodle soup. Let's learn how to make it together. A Ukrainian will tell you that it is mandatory to make this soup over a fire, but honestly there's no reason why you can't make this on the range. Well, maybe there's one reason, but it's not a deal breaker. We'll come back to that in a minute.

Starting at the beginning, you'll need:

• 1.5 kg Russet potatoes
• 500 g cooked meat (Feel free to use any sort of leftovers you have around the kitchen. We used pulled pork, but chicken is also very popular.)
• 1 onion
• 1 carrot
• 200 g millet
• 3 bay leaves
• salt/pepper
• 1 cup greens (parsley, dill, green onion)

To hang the cauldron, Sergey cut some green branches, two with forks in them to be pounded into the ground and one a bit sturdier from which the pot could reliably hang. That metal wall was set up to protect the fire from the wind. We got the fire up, then started to boil the water. The onion goes in peeled but otherwise inatact. The bay leaves should be added as well.

Once the water is rolling, it's time for the potatoes. They should be peeled and cut into small cubes.

When the potatoes are done, It's time for carrots, cut julienne, and millet. If you are like me and have no clue what millet is, you could use a comparable grain like barley or even oatmeal. If you do know what millet is, good for you, but you're probably one of those gluten-free loonies, so bad for you. If you live in Ukraine and want to find millet, ask at your rinok for пшено (ударение на втором слог).

When the millet is soft, add the meat and greens. Boil for 5 more minutes and then serve. It's that simple. We actually used this seemingly disgusting boiled-pulled-pork-in-a-jar product. It's not as bad as it sounds. Or looks.

The only reason this must be done on an open flame, other than tradition of course, is the final step. Sergey took another green branch, peeled the bark off it, and then put the raw wood in the fire. Once the wood was blackened, He actually stirred the soup with the charred branch. It didn't make everything taste like cigarettes, as I expected it would. It just added the illusion that we had grilled the meat. Therefore, if you actually grilled the meat that you used, I think you could approximate the smokiness fairly well.

So, that's kulesh! Of course there are lots of variations. One of the more popular ones involves less water and a few beaten eggs at the end, yielding porridgy results similar to Korean juk. We, however, just stuck with the original, and it was both fun to make and filling to eat. I hope you guys enjoy it as much as we did!

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!

Fakesgiving and the End of Fall

With fall break at the end of October, several of us decided that it was necessary to take the time off we had and gather together for a Thanksgiving-style dinner. One dish per person: that was the goal. With twelve of us coming, that meant a lot of food and a lot of work. For both M and I, this was the first time we'd ever hosted a Thanksgiving event, so naturally we wanted everything to be perfect. We tapped a lot of generational knowledge built up from years of watching our own families pull off such a feat. Respect to anyone who's ever had to do this.

We hawked the meat market for a turkey, the vegetable section for celery, and the various magazines for a decent dark beer. We started cooking 2 days in advance. M busted out an impressive 3 pies, including apple, peanut butter, and a laborious pumpkin pie from scratch. The twelfth of twelve dishes came off the stove top at exactly the right time. It was an impressive spread, if I do say so myself. A delicious and moist turkey, sausage/apple cornbread stuffing, pumpkin soup, stewed veggies, broccoli casserole, mac'n'cheese, glazed carrots, mashed potatoes with gravy, stuffed zucchini, a raspberry-pomegranate sauce, buttery bread, and a big tossed salad.

My actual service is going wonderfully. They say that the first year is hard for Americans. We so eagerly want to do that we lack the patience to build the connections necessary in this country for any sort of progress. Well, I've certainly been doing a lot of integrating and relatively little doing. My neighbors have started including me in their weekly dinner parties with their other young-couple friends. I went fishing with my language tutor, where I met his father and cousin. I celebrated some staff birthdays and the pizza joint. Slowly, I meet more and more people. Slowly, my Russian is shifting from forcing myself to listen to the noises to actually understanding them (and perhaps soon to participate in group conversation). Slowly, I'm becoming a part of this community.

Perhaps the most exciting development of all happened days after the 115th birthday of the city. My school forced me to perform a song for the town's birthday, where the guy running the lights mentioned me to the director of the House of Culture, who then encouraged the leader of a small men's ensemble to invite me to join. Since that day, I have been singing with him and his ragtag group consisting of a welder, student, security guard, and chef. It has been a huge step for my language skills and my community integration, but mostly it's just really wonderful to have a hobby and a group of friend's outside of my school and apartment. Concert in December!

Lastly, I leave you pictures of my culinary club boys, who were thrilled today to cook Russian crêpes.

Молочные реки, кисельные берега

Mark Yankov learns to some
potato skillz at culinary club.

The Russian saying "rivers of milk, banks of kisel" is used when  everything in life is going great, which is true of my first month of working here at Lutugino's School #1. I have been granted classroom independence for 9 of my 18 classes, which gives me the freedom to teach as I see fit. Also, the classes I teach alone are comprised of a filtered group of only the most motivated students, so we really have a lot of potential for improvement over the course of this next year. I'm getting along well with teachers, staff, and neighbors, and I even have a regular cashier at the grocery store and egg lady at the bazaar with whom I routinely converse. I generally feel good about the Russian progress I've been making, and I feel that my tutor is effective. I've started a club for 11th grade boys who want to learn how to cook (a skill which this country seems to think men don't need) and I'm planning to attend a conference on methodology in two weeks with my counterpart. I feel generally that the school, personal, integration, and volunteer sectors of my life are successful and fulfilling.

7 awesome ladies and me, at the regional
performance for talented teachers

If that's not a wide enough milk river for your liking, yesterday the town itself celebrated its 115th birthday. "Day of the City" is a pretty big deal, including an all day concert, basketball tournament, horse rides, street food, flash mob, and fireworks. I spent the day supporting my performing students and spreading my circle of acquaintances and friends. Here are some of the highlight pictures from the festivities. C праздником!

Soviet dance number?

Kids were encouraged to decorate the pavement in the central square.

Inside the House of Culture was a singing competition that felt sort of like Tuesday night karaoke.

My 11th grader Natasha did very well!

Horse rides around the square

Several barbecue stands popped up around the edges.

Basketball tournament in the afternoon

The local militia performs.

The presentation of the city flag

Flash mob!

The ever-fabulous Shashlik

Our technology teacher demonstrates the proper de-skewering method.

This dude had no idea why I wanted to take a picture.

Lots of my students were in this one. It was really fun to watch!