Stolovaya: the student cafeteria

This post is either going to make you ravenous or revolted, because today we're going back to the столовая, cafeteria. The stolovaya seems to be a love-or-hate affair for most people. Which side are you on?

Stolovaya at Lobachevsky University in Nizhny Novgorod, Russia.

I'm a lover.

Sure, occasionally comes a day when there's just nothing good out- you're picking at some wilted cabbage and overcooked cutlets- but most of the time, the stolovaya is the best place to eat well + cheap. We never ever said no to a stolovaya in Ukraine (especially the overlooked ones!) and so I was psyched to be eating once a day at Lobachevsky State University's stolovaya in July.

Here's an example of a typical meal in the student cafeteria.

Pryaniki and pig fat

This weekend I'm going to visit a friend. When I asked her what to bring (a pizza?), she suggested some Ukrainian food instead. Love this idea! :)

Marie, if you read this- borsch was on the menu, but our borsch chef has fallen ill and suggested a replacement of pelmeni instead. The fun part was that this meant visiting one of Portland's Eastern European food stores.

Russian Underground Dinner

If you're a foodie, maybe you've heard of "underground dinners"- an event that turns someone's home into a temporary restaurant. I'd never heard of the idea, but the combination of "Russian + dinner" will lure me anywhere ;) Luckily, Lena from Lena's Kitchen had that exact idea in mind last weekend-

A dozen of us gathered in Lena's backyard- Portland locals, a Hungarian entrepreneur, and several Americans born in Ukraine- for six amazing hours of eating and drinking under a walnut tree. Enjoy : )

Закуски / Starters

Shuba (herring-beet-mayonnaise salad).

Lena (in motion) and her super-sweet mom.

L: the piroshki didn't survive long on the table. R: BEST cheese spread ever.

Olivie salad.

 

The blini (which get their own special section- they were that good!)

Oladi with sour cream, smoked salmon and red caviar!

We had a lot of Instagrammers at the table : )

 

Oregon vs Ukraine: the Farmers Market

Before moving to Ukraine, we spent almost a decade in Alaska. Alaska has a lot of wonderful places to visit, but a farmers market was not one of them during those years.

Then came Ukraine.

Although Kharkiv had everything you could ever want in a supermarket (minus the customer service), the markets... well, they were WAY more fun.

Ancient babushki with scarf-covered heads sold eggs and local honey. Gruff men stood guard over trucks full of potatoes. Georgians extolled the virtue of their homemade adjika and fresh pomegranate juice. Luba at Tsentralny Rynok had the biggest smile and the best inside info on that week's fruits.

The markets always operated in a state of friendly chaos. Sellers waved you over to try their cherries or tvorog, which would be followed by a nuclear-peace-treaty level of negotiation over the price. I am terrible at haggling but D often relished the challenge ;) One time he got us an awesome deal on pomegranates for an entire winter!

I miss the excitement of these markets, and the way they eventually became familiar. Strange new vegetables, a ludicrous amount of dairy products, vendors who would remember your funny accent from the week before- exploring the market was a good way to spend the afternoon... or wind up with a new member of the household.

9 new things I tried this fall

1. Making blini for the first time in our (now not so) new apartment.

It's official: wherever one goes, whatever the local ingredients available for toppings are, blinis are still the best snack food ever!

Kachka

Clipped newspaper articles and email messages had been arriving for months- a new Russian restaurant was preparing to open in Portland and my family was psyched.

My aunt's excitement was understandable, as she has studied the language for years and visited Mari Vanna, Russian Samovar, the Vodka Room, and other renowned Russki restaurants of New York. My parents' enthusiasm, not so much. Years ago D and I brought a bag of decidedly unspectacular frozen pelmeni from a local import store to share with them and I'm surprised they would give anything serving pelmeni a second chance after surviving that bag. Mysterious reasons aside, now that we're in Portland it was really nice to all meet up and have a little taste of the food that D and I had grown so used to.

Kachka bills itself as a dealer of vodka, zukuski, pelmeni, in other words standard fare for Kharkov but considered more of a luxury in this town. One hundred grams of Russian Standard (vodka) will set you back $12. That's a mindboggling sum to my Ukrainian-ized pocketbook (4 bottles of champagne! a whole bottle of imported high-end booze!) but it's a price preceded with "mere" or "only" in the US. And they're crazy if they think I'll pay 26 uah for some sunflower seeds, but no one else at the table batted an eye at that scandal.

Sticker shock aside, though, the food and drinks hit the spot.

Who's in your kitchen?

Hmmm... if omens are to be believed, then we'll be saying goodbye to Ukraine soon. Just before coming here, a broken toe meant donning this awkward contraption for a while. Then yesterday morning I broke a glass jar and got a deep cut in almost exactly the same place as the break. Could it be a sign from the universe??

In the meantime (read: when not dropping heavy things in there), I'm usually in the kitchen with a camera. You know how we sometimes miss the everyday details and suddenly blink and notice them for the first time? That's happened with the food products in our kitchen. One day they were regular bags and jars and the next day I looked again and saw all the faces staring back.

Check it out for yourself...

 

The ladies

A young girl on a bag of sour cream.

Found on a box of milk, so I call this one "The Milkmaid".

This particular scene of domestic bliss possibly takes place after the milkmaid moves to the city, gets highlights, and becomes the mom on a package of pelmeni.

How to make pelmeni (not really)

Step 1: Pick up your friends. Then go out and gather your ingredients.

This includes making a quick stop for beef/pork at a little red shop covered in sausage advertisements and popping into the neighborhood grocery store for extra flour.


Step 2: Gather the men in the kitchen. (This includes that particular man who's been telling you for days that making pelmeni is women's work and that you're going to be slaving in the kitchen for hours while he drinks beer with the other guys.) Ensure the men have access to liquor.

Step 3: Leave the men to their tasks.

Step 4: Go for a walk with the other women. Watch a rainstorm in the distance, swat mosquitoes, wander into giant cylinders, and come back as dusk falls.

Step 5: Return to find the men still drinking...

... and showing off trays and trays of perfect looking pelmeni!

Step 6: Enjoy a glass of wine while the men oversee the final stages of preparation, aka adding the perfect hexagons to a pot of boiling water and then bringing them to the dinner table.

Voilà!

I totally was not expecting the "pelmeni lesson" to go like this. It almost felt like March 8th (International Women's Day) to get the night off from cooking. Maybe D was pulling my leg the whole time or maybe he was just as surprised as I was to find himself in the kitchen for 3 hours! Hopefully the labor wasn't too backbreaking for them, as they did have a dough machine, a meat grinder, and a special honeycomb-shaped pelmeni maker at their disposal. And that pelmeni- WOW. The best ever!!

One other cool part of the evening was the huge field we walked through. "I've got the biggest backyard in all of Kharkiv!" our host proudly exclaimed when we first arrived.

It was indeed gigantic. I guess that's how Sasha grew to such enormous proportions. Or, of course, maybe he got his hooves on the leftover pelmeni and that's what did it ; )


Have you tried pelmeni? Homemade or store-bought?
If you haven't had the chance yet, would you like to try it someday?

Hungry 2

Well, we may have managed to visit most of Kharkov's landmarks, but there still is far to go when it comes to restaurants! Here's an update:

Capri Pizza

With the glorious arrival of sunshine and long days, the Shevchenko Park cafes and nightclubs have sprung to life. Capri Pizza opened their open air restaurant just off of Freedom Square and we recently met here with a friend to enjoy dinner in the fresh evening air. So fresh, actually, that it was a good thing blankets were available to ward off the chill!

Clockwise: service button, dessert, "Jamaica" pizza (45 uah), dolmades (39 uah)

There were a wide variety of pizzas available (40-75 uah) as well as pasta (42-55 uah), salads (23-70 uah), desserts (22-35 uah), and drinks. I've yet to try any of their other locations but really- what beats sitting in the park in summertime?!

Twenty Two pub & restaurant

Immersion

It's an easy mistake to make, assuming that moving abroad means you'll quickly and painlessly become fluent in the local language. "The immersion method," they say, "it totally works." We all hear stories of people who were able to converse in Spanish like a pro after only a summer in Argentina. We all know someone who could speak impressive Norwegian after a semester studying abroad. And of course there's pop culture polyglottery and language hackers like Benny the Irish Polyglot, the man who claims that 3 months is enough to get conversational in languages like Mandarin.

I love Benny- he's an absolute inspiration in a world full of naysayers- but is it true? I doubt immersion is the absolute answer. If it were, there would be no Chinatowns. If it were, surely all expat wives would be fluent, as they are usually the ones dealing with shopping, education, doctors, and domestic engineering non-stop in the new language. Even 2 years of living with the locals as a Peace Corps Volunteer isn't always enough to get you there.

More McDonalds

This is kind of embarrassing to write about. It's one of those cliches that Americans are known for- starting wars, wearing tacky shorts in cathedrals, and spreading fast food around the world like a venereal disease :p But I stumbled across the picture below in my Russian textbook last night and now I've got McDonalds on the brain.

This is an old textbook, rescued from a professor's giveaway pile several years ago. It was published in 1991, the year the USSR dissolved into the CIS, so everything had been written a year or two prior with the assumption that the USSR would still be around upon publication. It's full of model conversations about cooperative apartments and the exciting return of commercialism. The authors were very enthusiastic about the introduction of new words like маркетинг (marketing), words "so new that the stress has not yet been fixed" and мини-ЭВМ (electronic mini-computer).

Anyways, part of the textbook's overall storyline involves Bob McDonald, an exchange student from Columbia University who has (as of chapter 3) spent most of his time hanging around the office and looking scruffy. In the picture above, fur-hatted Boris asks: "Bob, if it's not a secret, are you related to the famous McDonald guy?" "No," replies Bob, "my father is a businessman". Hmmm... product placement, anyone?

In this second picture we see the first McDonalds cafe to open in Moscow in January 1990. You might think to yourself "Wow! It was like Black Friday for french fries back then!" but wrong! It still is! Here's a McDonalds news release from January 22, 2013: Kyiv McDonalds again becomes the 2nd most popular in the world. AGAINST 34,000 OTHER MCDONALDS, people!! Imagine!* And just a few weeks later, on Feb 4th, 2013, a new press release: 8 Ukrainian McDonalds entered in the world's top 100.

(*D and I actually went there once in 2007 and were lucky to escape with all our limbs intact.)

Making borsch (in 8 easy steps)

There are two ways to make borsch.

The first way is to invite over someone who knows how to make borsch.

The other is to roll up your sleeves and get to it.

I prefer the first method, of course : ) but for those of you inspired enough to try your hand at borsch-making, here you go!

Back in the kitchen

After our business lunch spree, I rolled up my sleeves and got back in the kitchen.
Now, I proudly present to you... the first 2013 edition of на кухне!

Enjoy : )

My new favorite snack

This is the best thing ever. It's easy to make, inexpensive, and the veggies- even the cabbage- stay crisp for days. It's as satisfying as popcorn: crunchy, salty, and sweet. Source: Natasha's Kitchen.

A Blast from the Past

Kremlin Butter / USSR Highest Quality

This butter is produced right here in Ukraine! There's a factory in Khmelnytskyi as well as in Zhytomyr.

Curry, Ukrainian-style

Мужчина на кухне 4

With the hot weather (70 - 80 F or more), we're not sure what exactly to cook.

These were D's most recent soups:

Crimean Fast Food

Although the likes of McDonalds is popular throughout Ukraine, in Crimea it's more traditional to eat at a place like this.

Cafe Firefly (located in Yevpatoria): chebureki, pelmeni, beer on tap, cold drinks

Чебуреки, or chebureki, are one of my favorite foods. Do a Google image search- you'll quickly see that they're the most delicious thing ever! Chebureki are popular in Crimea. You'll see little stands (called a чебуречная) on almost every street. Anyways, back to the cafe-

We started out with a cabbage salad, of course.

Then on to pelmeni (Russian dumplings).

My beautiful, beautiful chebureki!

One with cheese, one with meat

And for D, the local favorite.

For those of you planning a trip, a meal like this costs less than $10 in most small cafes. We sat at long tables surrounded by groups of men drinking over lunch and families feeding their energetic children. One guy was passed out in the corner.

If you're interested in making your own chebureki, head over to EverydayRussianFood.com. There is a recipe there (ahem, a recipe starting from scratch). If you want your food faster, you can make chebureki like D's mom does in the states: mix up some raw ground beef with onion and spices, add a little meat to the middle of a tortilla and fold the edges together, wet the edges with water and press so that the edges stick together, fry in a hot pan with oil until browned (about a minute). They taste like HEAVEN just out of the pan!