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.

Hretchka with Sausage, Onion, and Herbs

Hretchka is really easy to make.  Unfortunately this doesn’t stop a lot of people, including a lot of Ukrainians, from overcooking it in too much water and ending up with a mush instead of a nicely cooked grain.  (Note: Buckwheat is not a true grain because it is not a grass, but it looks and tastes like one, so I’ll call it one).  I started by rinsing the raw groats.

Then I put them into a pot and added 1.5 measures of water, some salt, and a teaspoon of sunflower oil and brought it to a boil.  Then I turned the heat very low.  In short, I cooked more or less like rice.  While the hretchka was cooking, I diced some fairly fatty sausage and some onions.  The sausage went into the hot frying pan, and when a good amount of fat had rendered, I tossed in the onions.  These sautèed for a while, and at the end I threw in some minced garlic.

I mixed this in with the cooked hretchka and topped it with minced dill and parsley– the two ubiquitous herbs of Ukrainian cooking.  The hretchka was a nice, hearty background for the stronger flavors of the sausage, onion, and herbs, and, more importantly, this was a very filling one-bowl dinner.

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

Pork and Mushroom Risotto with Radish Salad

I started brainstorming on what sort of risotto I wanted to make and did some searching on the internet. I found lots of recipes (some particularly tasty ones can be found here) and cobbled a few together to create my final dish. I decided that I wanted to use pork because it is light and slightly sweet and would not overpower the flavors of the wine and cheese. I had to wander around the vast meat section of the market to find a piece that was only 250 grams, and I got some weird looks from the pork ladies, but in the end, I found a nice little piece. I diced it fairly finely, salted and peppered it, and set it aside to relax for about an hour.

One of the ingredients that can truly make or break a risotto is the broth. I used a full liter of broth in this one, and I wanted it to give the dish a rich taste. However, to my surprise, I found I had only a tablespoon of concentrated chicken stock left from my last batch. So I mixed that with the liter of water and tossed in some celery stalks that were past their prime, a couple onions, black pepper corns, parsley stems, a bay leaf, the bone from the pork, and the stems from the mushrooms. I let this simmer for the hour that the pork was relaxing, and I ended up with a nice pork and mushroom tinted chicken broth.

After straining the broth, measuring out my rice and wine, slicing the mushrooms, and grating the cheese, I was ready to go. I started by heating my pan. Unfortunately, in Ukraine unless one is willing to pay for expensive, imported cookware, most available pots are very thin. So I had to use a diffuser that is probably older than I am to make up for my pan’s thin bottom. The downside is that this made heat control a bit tricky. Once my pan was hot, I threw in some butter and started to brown the pork along with some rosemary. When the pork was brown, I took it from the pan with a slotted spoon and then got the mushrooms started. After they were nicely cooked but still soft, I added them and what was left of their liquid to the pork.

Now it was time to begin the long, labor-intensive process that is making risotto. I added a little butter to the pan and poured in my rice. I stirred without pause for about 7 minutes while the rice fried. When the grains had started turning translucent, I poured in half a cup of warm white wine and stirred like hell. When the wine was almost completely absorbed, I added a ladle of hot broth and continued stirring.

Thus we began the process of making the risotto. For the next half hour or so, my friend and I traded off stirring the rice and adding more broth every time it started to get dry. When half the broth had been added and the rice was starting to soften, I added the mushrooms and pork and kept stirring. Finally when all the broth had been absorbed and the rice had tripled in size, I took the pan off the heat and mixed in grated Grana Padano and a pinch of cinnamon. The risotto was creamy and extremely rich. The mild flavors of the pork and mushrooms were a good match for the bite of the cheese and the richness of the broth. The cinnamon added a certain nutty quality that brought out the nutty, grain flavor of the rice.

After the risotto we drank wine and enjoyed the salad of thin radish slices, lettuce, and chervil that I drizzled with a mustard vinaigrette.

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.
Baked Egg Tortilla Frittata Thing

The one ingredient that is absolutely constant in bakedeggtortillafrittatathing is the potato.  I enjoy frying potatoes as much as the next person, but this is a lazy dish.  Instead of taking the time to fry the potatoes I first washed them and then put them in a pot and cover with cold water.  I brought this to a boil and then relaxed for 20 minutes.  When they were tender, I dunked them in cold water and then shucked their peels.

I cut these into slices and did the rest of my chopping.  Then I fried some fairly fatty sausage slices.  After they were nicely browned, I took them out and fried the potato slices in the rendered fat.  Instead of taking forever to fry, the pre-boiled potatoes browned in about 1 minute per side.

One of the best things about this dish is that it can be varied to fit taste, mood, and what happens to be in the fridge.  After frying the potatoes, I put them aside to cool and sautéed some onions, garlic, and some marinated roasted bell peppers that I had canned this summer.  Then I beat the eggs along with some salt, pepper, and paprika.

Once all the ingredients had cooled somewhat, I mixed everything together and then dumped the mixture into the still-hot frying pan.  I gave the pan a good shake to get everything evenly distributed and put it into a moderately-hot (375˚) oven and baked it about 7 minutes until the eggs had set.  Done.

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.

Baked Beans and Chicken with Tomato Sauce

You may be thinking, “Hey, he said this was about cheap alternative protein sources, but there’s chicken in this!” You’re right. There is chicken in this, but the beans make the it go much further. This one thigh was enough for me tonight, and I am usually barely satisfied by an entire leg. So, step one, of course, was soaking the beans. There are many people who use the standard overnight method, but I actually prefer the quick-soak method for two reasons: first, it is faster and better suited to my spur-of-the-moment dinner decisions, and second, it does a better job of leaching out the difficult-to-digest carbohydrates that are behind the musical properties of beans.

I covered these guys with water and brought it to a boil. Then I put the cover on them and went to teach children. When I got home five hours later, the beans were doubled in size and the water was a sickly yellow color. I drained them and put them in fresh water to cook. While they simmered, I chopped everything and got the bacon started.

I got the bacon nice and brown. By now the beans had simmered for about an hour, and while the bacon cooked, I had drained them and set them aside in a bowl. I tossed the cooked bacon in with the beans; the two of them seem to go together well. Next I dried and seasoned the chicken thighs and put them in the hot pan of rendered bacon fat. They soon turned a lovely brown.

Once the thighs were a deep brown, I put them aside, drained all but a couple tablespoons of the fat, and threw some diced onions and carrots into the pan. I sautéed them for about 10 minutes. Excepting the carrot, this recipe was looking a lot like some I had found on the internet. However, there are problems with those recipes that I wanted to avoid; first, most of them use canned beans and tomatoes. Those are fine in principle, but when I can avoid the salt and processing and extra cost of canned things, I do. I used dried beans and my own jarred tomatoes to avoid this. Second, and more important, most of those recipes are bland. They suggest that a tiny pinch of sage or some bacon is enough to make the beans and chicken burst with flavor. This is exactly what I am trying to avoid! So, just as the onions and carrots were at a stage of being nicely cooked, I added some stronger flavor.

I think the garlic, crushed red pepper, rosemary, and thyme added an aromatic touch that blended well with the bacon, chicken, and tomatoes to give the beans some kick. After the flavors had melded and before the garlic could burn, I dumped in a jar of my home-canned tomatoes and let the mixture simmer for about 10 minutes until the tomatoes had begun to render their juices. Then I mixed in the beans and bacon and made a bed for the chicken thighs.

This went into a moderate oven for about 20 minutes and came out piping hot. The flavors had melded well, and most importantly, the beans had absorbed the mixture of aromatic herbs, meat, and tomatoes into their own, bean-y, taste. The 70 cents worth of beans made the dish very filling which meant I was satisfied with $1 worth (1 thigh) of chicken. Now I have a very rare thing in my kitchen: leftovers.

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.

Steak-Frites with Brandy Cream Sauce and Roasted Brussels Sprouts

Step one on this dinner was to cut my steak fries. I had some really good potatoes that I got for pennies at the market. I cut them into thin wedges and coated them with dried thyme, dried oregano, salt, and pepper and then tossed all that with some sunflower oil.

While the oven heated up, I got started on the meat. First I had to cut steaks from the piece of either sirloin or round that I had bought. Then I crushed some peppercorns using a frying pan and pressed them into the surface of the beef.

By now the oven was at 450° and I tossed the Brussels sprouts along with some whole garlic cloves into some hot olive oil. I had split them and made sure to put them cut side down.

I let them cook for about 5 minutes, and when they were just browning on the bottom, I threw them into the oven. I put the potatoes in at the same time. Now that I had my sides roasting, it was time to make the meat. When my cast-iron skillet was nice and hot, I started browning the steaks. I had cut one at about 1 inch and the other at more like 3/4 inch because Ukrainians don’t like steak rare, and I wanted my friend’s to cook in the same time as mine. After 3 minutes I flipped them.

By the time the steaks looked like this, the veggies had been in oven for about half an hour. I took them out and turned off the oven. The sprouts were darkly roasted, but soft, hot, and almost artichoke-like in the center. (Exactly as Mark Bittman, from whom I stole the recipe, said they would be).

Now the steaks were done, and I put them on a platter and into the warm oven. Then I tossed some butter and finely chopped onion onto the pan and sautéed that for about 4 minutes. Then I deglazed the pan with 1/2 cup brandy.

I let this reduce for about 5 minutes until it was just a glaze on the bottom of the pan. Then I added 3/4 cup heavy cream, let that reduce for another 3 minutes and incorporated a little butter, and I had a very rich brandy sauce to dress my steaks.

I sliced up the steaks, laid them out on the plate along with some steak fries and roasted sprouts. Then I gave the meat a nice helping of sauce, and we dug in. The meat was tender and the pepper was a good foil for the sweetness of the cream and brandy. The potatoes were nice and crispy (it’d be hard to mess those up) and made the meal complete. The picture at the top is of my guest’s plate. Here’s one of mine featuring the rare steak I prefer.

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.

Oat Scones with Raisins

When I say fast, I mean fast. I banged these puppies out in under half an hour. First I mixed the dry ingredients: a 1:1 mix of flour and oats (not the fast cooking kind), salt, a little sugar, and baking powder.

Next I mixed the wet ingredients. The recipe called for melted butter, and I was a bit skeptical of this as it goes against my instinct to cut butter into most baked goods. Also, my mother’s church (Quaker Meeting to be exact) potluck staple, a cheese scone, got all its flaky goodness from having the butter very carefully cut into the flour. However, I decided to risk it and mixed melted butter with milk and an egg. Then I mixed this into the dry ingredients and added a touch of vinegar and some good raisins I got from the Central Asian guy who sells dried fruit at the market and formed it into a nice round. It was looking a little greasy and I started to have my doubts about the melted butter, but I went ahead and cut it into wedges and arraigned them on a baking sheet.

They went into a hot oven for about 15 minutes, and despite my doubts they came out crusty with the oats and baking soda providing a light flaky texture. To top that, these things taste really good. They are pretty filling; I think one would be a good breakfast for a normal sized person (two for me). My only word of warning is that when one enjoys a wedge hot from the oven (definitely a good idea), one should be careful of the very hot raisin guts.

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.

Italian-esque Roast Pork Loin With Winter Vegetables

Although I had set off to the market to get some chicken, this beautiful piece of pork loin ($4!) caught my eye.

We let the meat come up to room temperature and then rubbed it with olive oil, salt, pepper and rosemary. Then we polka-dotted it with garlic slivers and put it into a moderate (350°) oven.

While the meat was starting to roast, I blanched and peeled a butternut squash that I had bought back in November and wanted to finally get rid of. Blanching the squash whole for just 3 minutes makes it possible to peel it with a humble vegetable peeler instead of slicing open one’s fingers attempting to prize the flesh from the peel with a knife. Also, it makes it possible to peel the squash whole and take nice pictures that remind us why winter squash is great:

After cleaning it, I cubed the squash along with some potatoes and onions. By the time I had finished with all this, the pork had been in the oven for about 30 minutes. We pulled it out and flipped it. The fat had already begun to render, coating the roasting pan with a layer of molten fat. We spread the vegetables around the meat, and they began to sizzle immediately.

This went back into the oven for another 40 minutes until the meat was done and the vegetables were nicely roasted. We let the meat rest for a few minutes so the juices could be reabsorbed by the muscle fibers and then carved it up and enjoyed. The garlic and rosemary offered an aromatic, slightly bitter counterpoint to the richness of the very juicy pork, and the squash and onions turned out candy-sweet and rich from the fat and juice of the meat while the potatoes were a hearty background that gave the meal a certain solidity.

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.

Roasted Chicken Bits With Veggies
Forward this post to your idiot roommate, son, cousin, boy/girlfriend who eats the poison that comes out of boxes, cans, and shrink wrap. Why a person would ever pretend like that’s food when real food is so easy to make baffles me.

Step 1: Put some vegetables into an ovenproof pan. I used a cast-iron skillet and filled it with chunks of carrots, onions, and potatoes, but I’ve also made this with winter squash, turnips, whole cherry tomatoes, chunks of apple, summer squash, and many other oven-worthy vegetables.

Step 2: Take a chicken leg (or three), rinse it, dry it, and roll it around in some oil and whatever spices you want. I used salt, pepper, paprika, and some cracked mustard seed. Then put your chicken leg skin side up on top of the veggies.

Step 3: Squeeze some lemon over the top, and add 1/2 cup of liquid to the pan. I used chicken stock, but beer, wine, juice, and water have all worked in the past. Then put the pan into a 500 degree oven and go do something else for 40 minutes.

Done.

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.

Liver and Onions… and grapes

To start with I decided that I wanted my liver to be accompanied by the traditional onions, but I needed to do something to give them a distinctive flavor to balance the “liver-ness” that my generation dislikes. I recalled some caramelized onion tarts I made on Thanksgiving and decided to replicate the filling for this dish. I slow cooked my onions with some salt and sugar until they were golden and sweet looking and then mixed in equal parts rosemary and thyme and made them into a bed for my livers.

While the onions were cooking, I rinsed, trimmed, and seasoned my raw chicken livers. Then I took the pan that I caramelized the onions in and heated it and some sunflower oil until it was on the cusp of smoking, and then I tossed in the livers. I cooked them for about 3 minutes a side until they were nice and brown:

So there I had it, liver and onions, and the first time I made it, I stopped here. Yet, something was missing from my plan: the livers were good, but I had failed to fully isolate that which makes liver great– creamy texture, rich flavor– from that which makes people hate it. Also, the liver and onions was very heavy and almost flatly rich and sweet; it needed something with some pep and aroma. So, the next time I made the dish, I set to work on a pan sauce that would cut the heaviness. An Epicurious recipe suggested vinegar, but that seemed too acrid for my taste. So I decided to balance the vinegar with grapes. I halved and seeded them and threw them in the pan after the livers were plated. I tossed them around the pan for about 2 minutes and then deglazed the pan with the vinegar, swirled in some butter and a fat pinch of cayenne, and I had sauce.

I nestled the livers onto the onions, gave them a nice layer of grapes, and then sauced them. The result was a dish that highlighted what I love about liver with the added bonus that the other ingredients– caramelized onion, herbs, vinegar, grapes– were the perfect counterweight not only to the hated livery flavor but also to each other.

The Recipe

4 medium onions cut into .5cm slices
1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp sugar
1/2 tsp each rosemary, thyme, black pepper
300g (12oz) fresh chicken livers rinsed and trimmed
2/3 cup grapes halved and seeded
1/4 cup wine vinegar
2 tsp butter
fat pinch of cayenne

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.

The Salsa is a very standard fresh salsa– tomatoes, hot and sweet peppers, salt, lime juice, onion, parsley, cilantro. I didn’t use garlic because it is known to harbor Clostridium botulinum, and since the salsa doesn’t contain high levels of salt, sugar, or acid, the canned environment would be an easy place for botulism to develop.

The Tomatoes are simply peeled and seeded tomatoes that I heat treated and sealed.

The Salted Tomatoes, however, are an incredible Ukrainian specialty. I started by dropping whole black-pepper corns, chunks of fresh horseradish, bay leaves, sprigs of fresh dill, and a cherry leaf into the bottom of the jar. I then packed the jar with tomatoes, chunks of onion, and garlic cloves, and then covered everything with a vinegar-water-salt solution. After a couple months of aging, the tomatoes become soft inside, but their skins hold them together. The result is a preserved tomato that literally explodes into the eater’s mouth (or on his shirt) at first bite. These are quite possibly the best chaser for horilka in existence.

Giardiniera is the standard Italian medley of vegetables pickled in vinegar. This particular jar contains cauliflower, cucumbers, button mushrooms, hot peppers, and carrots. I added some black-pepper corns and a couple cloves for flavor.

The Jams are also very standard. The melon jam had to be simmered for hour upon hours as melon has little pectin; I also added some lemon zest to help with this. There are some blanched almonds in there too for flavor and to look pretty. Ukrainian pears are have a floral sweetness to them, and I combined them with ginger and lemon to create a sweet and hot jam that works perfectly as a glaze for pork.

The Roasted Bell Peppers I made by roasting 3 kilos of bell peppers, putting them into a paper bag for 10 minutes, and then peeling them. I then jarred them– those 3 kilos just barely filled 3 half-liter jars–, and dumped a vinegar-sugar-salt solution flavored with black pepper, dill seed, and mustard seed.

Mosarda is Italian fruit mustard. I made it by taking a mixture of fruits and an almost equal amount of sugar and letting it soak for 3 days. Once a day I would drain the fruit and concentrate the syrup to allow the sugar to extract more water from the fruit. After 3 days it was already starting to develop a nice musky flavor from oxidation; the sugar content is high enough to prevent spoilage. I then reduced the syrup one last time and added some white wine that I had infused with ground mustard. When this mixture had reduced quite a bit, I recombined it with the fruit and jarred and sealed the mosarda and put it in my closet to age. It has a complex musky flavor from the various fruits along with a hot mustard bite that is tempered by the sweetness.

The Pickled Eggplant is another Ukrainian specialty that I love. I sliced several kilos of eggplant and put all the slices into a big, enamel stock pot. Then I coated them with hot peppers, onions, and garlic that I had run through my meat grinder and mixed with a cup of vinegar. I then put a plate on top of the mixture and moved the pot to my closet. I stirred the mixture twice a day for three days; each time I was sure to compress the mixture a little more. After three days, the eggplants were soft and darkened from the vinegar, and I jarred and sealed them. After 4 months they have a sweet, bitter taste and the interior of the slices are creamy while the peel remains just tough enough to hold each slice together.