A New Year's salad + other dishes

Look at that beauty!! :) This is a salad named «мой генерал» and it comes from this YouTube video. It's like any New Year's salad you would find in Ukraine: mayonnaise, mayonnaise, and mayonnaise. I miss Ukraine the most during the holidays, so I decided to make a few things that are served there this time of year.

The salad is a variation on the popular holiday salad olivie, which D's mom makes every December. (Here's a good recipe for that salad.) I liked the layers and the look of «мой генерал», though. It was SO EASY to make. You simply layer chicken + vegetables, with a nearly-catastrophic layer of mayonnaise in between everything.

The next idea came from a Russian-language pin on Pinterest:

Hard-boiled eggs, tomatoes, and (more) mayo.

When my mom saw this plate, she balked. "I know that your husband's mother would not allow that on the table!" (Remember that time we gave his mom a deadly doormat?)

The more I thought about it, the more I realized my mom was right. Who came up with this pin? There's such a stigma about the мухомор mushroom that maybe you'd never find this on a Ukrainian table. But... it's awfully adorable!

 I tried one more thing for the table- съедобная новогодняя елка, an edible Christmas tree. There are lots of different ways to do this (like these!) but I went with one we could serve with Christmas breakfast.

It ended up being rather ugly and unstable. Instead of looking like a magical mini елка, it looked exactly like fruit-stuck-on-a-carrot-stuck-on-an-apple. Oh well.

We had a good, quiet Christmas. How was yours? My brother gave Chili a funny lion costume, which she tolerated for about twenty seconds.

Around New Years, a card arrived from Ukraine with these stamps (спасибо, Алиночка)- it's definitely year of the rooster.

And... more matryoshki!!! :D :D I'm starting to accumulate a serious collection now.

Also, of note-

We went to a local vegan restaurant over the holidays. They had borsch on the menu! It was, um, different. Imagine a borsch with cashew cream and no beet flavor. Still, borsch is borsch.

After the restaurant, my brother gave me this-

He found it in his seat pocket on a recent flight overseas. I'm not particularly enthralled by Moscow, but I do love cute maps.

The other side was equally interesting. The airline now flies direct Bangkok - Tehran flights, so it was full of info about Iran (mainly, things you aren't permitted to do there.)

So, that's how we spent the end of 2016. It was fun to try making a New Year's salad; I'll do that again for sure next year. Did you try making anything new during the past couple of weeks? Do you borrow any foods or traditions from another culture?