Hretchka

This blog is supposedly about my culinary experience in Ukraine, but, as I realized yesterday, I have been lazy about posting actual Ukrainian Cuisine.  Hretchka is a staple here, and all the Americans I know who live here either love it or hate it.  I’m in the first camp, but that may have something to do with the way I prepare it.  Hretchka is roasted whole buckwheat groats.  The name means “Greek” which is somewhat strange considering that buckwheat originates in East Asia, and was most likely brought to this part of the world by the Mongols.  By itself Hretchka has a slightly sweet, nutty flavor, but the nice thing about it is that it is good with almost anything.  I often eat it for breakfast with fried eggs and hot sauce, but this post is about a more dinner appropriate combination.

Comfort Food

This post is about risotto, a dish that I absolutely love and find comforting. It might not be fair to refer to risotto as a “dish”. To me, the name refers to rice cooked using a particular technique, but after that there are so many variations– from meaty risotti to vegetarian, from simple ones flavored only with wine to those featuring a dozen ingredients– that to call it a “dish” seems as much a misnomer as calling pasta a “dish”. This time I opted to make a meaty, stick-to-the-ribs version. It took some searching to track down some rice and cheese (I finally found some Carnaroli and some Grana Padano in a grocery store that stocks a lot of imported goods), but other than that, Ukraine happily provided me ingredients. While I was at the market picking up the meat and vegetables, I noticed that there were bags and stacks of fresh radishes, so I picked some up to make a salad. A Ukrainian friend who had never tired Italian food came over to observe, help, and eat

Lazy #2

In my last post I mentioned how bored I’d gotten with the egg.  However, after a week off from eggs, I couldn’t resist buying a bag of them.  Here in Ukraine one buys a plastic bag with 10 eggs in it instead of a carton with 12.  They are almost always brown and still have chicken crap on them.  I like to get mine from the ladies at the market because each one of them sells eggs from a particular nearby village.  The name of the village is usually prominently displayed next to the price.  This allows the buyer to know what they are buying in a more intimate way and to figure out which villages produce the best eggs.  One of the things I love about eggs is the tens of thousands of things one can do with them.  In particular is one of my stand-by lazy dinners.  I guess it is a form of tortilla or frittata, but I can never flip the damn thing without it falling apart, so I tend to just finish it in the oven.

Getting more for my money

I eat a lot, and an important part of my cooking is finding inexpensive sources of good quality protein. As much as I would love to eat steak all the time, I simply can’t afford it. Also, if we look at the traditional diets of people around the world, meat is a luxury item that shows up perhaps only on Sunday nights. My usual source of cheap, quality protein is the egg, but after making omelettes, frittate, tortillas, over-easy, Benedict, and scrambled one hundred times apiece, I grew tired of the egg. Going back to looking at traditional cuisines (especially in Italy where people were often dirt poor) I found beans. Beans are a great source of protein, are filling, and are so cheap, they’re almost free. The problem is that they’re bland. However, they can be surrounded by flavorful ingredients; from hummus where garlic, lemon, olive oil, and tahini mask the blandness of chickpeas to the barbecue sauce and pork flavored versions I’ve eaten at countless cookouts, cuisine has a way of squeezing the beans into our diet to make the meat last longer. Tonight I made something between fagioli all’uccelletto and cassoulet with my own twists to boot.

Steak-Frites

I got up this morning and went to the market to get some beef. I fully expected to find some chuck (here it’s simply called neck) or another stewing/braising cut. However, when I arrived my beef lady insisted I buy another cut. The meat is cut very strangely here, but based on the look and feel of the meat and her insistence that it was soft I decided that it was either sirloin or, at worst, top round. I bought it and took it home. As I walked home, I tried to decide what to do with it. I had some good potatoes at home, and I was really looking forward to having a nice steak; so I decided to make the Belgian classic Steak-Frites. I could have left it at that, but I decided to go another step (I was having company to help me eat), instead of making simple Steak-Frites like the one I ate in Brussels at the beginning of a night that would lead to one of the worst hangovers of my life, I made Steak Au Poivre (pepper steak) with a rich, brandy-flavored cream sauce, steak fries, and roasted Brussels sprouts.

It’s pronounced [skōn] because there’s an o in it.

I’ve been getting bored with having fried eggs and hrechka for breakfast every morning, and now that I know that I’m keeping my apartment, I decided to make some breakfast that would be worthy of a post. I like oatmeal, but it too has been getting boring. I started digging around on the internet and decided to bake something crispy and rich, and I stumbled upon a recipe for oat scones on Epicurious. Scone sounds really fancy, reminiscent of some foggy harbor in Ireland or Scotland. (For the record I do have a memory of eating scones in Ireland when I was 9.) However, they are actually extremely easy and fast to make. I had to do some adapting for Ukraine because we have no cream of tartar here (McGee informed me that baking soda reacts with the acid in the cream of tartar so I just threw in a 1/4 teaspoon of vinegar at the end). I think it turned out well.

The Joy of Roasting

This Friday I woke up early and walked over to the market. I wandered around for a bit before a beautiful piece of meat caught my eye. I took it home and wondered what to do with it and eventually decided to continue my foray into roasting. There seems to be a love of roasting among my peers; who doesn’t salivate at the thought of hot, slightly crispy meat? Vegetarians. But one would be hard-pressed to find a vegetarian whose eyes don’t widen at the mention of roasted squash or eggplant. On the other hand, there also seems to be a fear of roasting. We seem to associate the term with the hassles of Thanksgiving dinner, endless basting and burnt hands or, worse, with the disappointment of dessicated beef slathered in some sort of sauce and served with watery mashed potatoes in cafeterias and mediocre restaurants. However, inspired by love of roasted meat and vegetables, armed with McGee, and emboldened by recent successes with roasting chicken bits, Jason and I set forth to make some dinner.

Lazy #1

I don’t understand people who can’t cook or who claim that they have no time or energy to make delicious meals. Making complex, labor-intensive dishes is a lot of fun, but I can’t find the motivation every day. So I, like most cooks, have a repertoire of things to make when I feel lazy. None of these are dishes that will shock or awe anybody, but lazy dishes often make for some great eating (and hopefully some decent photos). Everybody has a favorite lazy dinner: my mother likes to make clean-the-refrigerator stir-fry. Some people throw together macaroni and cheese, some make omelets, some just grilled cheese, but this time I made my go-to lazy dinner.

Liver Redux

The mere mention of the word liver causes most people born after 1980 to balk. Perhaps they were overexposed to their grandmothers’ tough, overcooked version of it. Cartoons and kids’ shows depicting liver as the ultimate in adult misunderstanding of what kids want (pizza) served to deepen this distaste until it became the instinctual retch that it is now. However, I’d like to think that the rise of chefs like Fergus Henderson signal a willingness to reconsider. I have always loved liver (except during my vegetarian years) because I always had it cooked to the point that the outside was brown and crisp and the inside hot and creamy. It was always accompanied by fried onions that complimented the richness of the liver and, a little surprisingly given their own sulfur content, mollified somewhat the unpleasant flavors of the sulfur compounds that give liver its sometimes overstated flavor. So, this week I set out to find a way to make chicken liver, my favorite kind, more palatable to my peers. Only the cayenne and the grapes are actually my ideas; the rest of the recipe I cobbled together from bastardized Epicurious recipes. After some experimenting during the week, I recruited Colleen, whose generation regards chicken liver as a delicacy, to give me a hand and we got to work.

Endless Summer

A summer morning visit to the market plunges one into a sea of grandmothers selling fruits and vegetables brought from their cottages, gardens, and villages. Each week sees the arrival of one variety and the departure of another; everything is extremely seasonal as all of it is grown within 100 kilometers of the city. The only consistent factor is the double-take prices. I bought organic tomatoes for about 20 cents per kilo, cucumbers for 15, cherries for about $1 per kilo. The downside of this frenzy is that come winter, the prices jump almost fifteen-fold. So, I, like a good Ukrainian, bought kilo upon kilo of vegetables this summer and heated up my apartment with afternoons of canning. Now in January I can enjoy the bounty of the Ukrainian summer. Here’s a sampling of some of the prettiest jars in my closet.

From left, back row: salsa, peeled and seeded tomatoes, salted tomatoes, giardiniera; front row: melon jam, roasted bell peppers, mosarda, pear-lemon-ginger jam, pickled eggplant.