Whether this develops into a monthly tradition or not, here is another installment.

Lunches/dinners:

• Miso soup with tofu, spinach and scallions. I used to buy miso soup packets at Trader Joe’s until I discovered real miso paste at my local supermarket. Making the soup from miso paste is cheaper and tastier.
• Cabbage and rice patties spiced with yellow curry. I made a giant batch of rice and have been using it in various recipes for nearly a week, so you’ll see it mentioned more than once below. This is my take on typical Russian cabbage patties, which my mom used to make fairly regularly in Moscow and which do not normally include rice or curry (the original version consists of finely chopped cabbage held together with egg and flour and seasoned with salt and pepper). Interestingly, she, too, has altered the original recipe, and now adds carrots, green peas, onions, broccoli, and sometimes tofu to these patties.
• Rotini with mushrooms and tomato-cream (actually, tomato-soy milk) sauce. Very simple, very quick, reheats well. Good with parmesan on top and a green salad on the side. Not much more to say about it.
• Pelmeni. I made them but didn’t eat them – my husband did. There is still a big plastic bag of them sitting in the freezer. He doesn’t really cook, and the pelmeni are a convenient quick meal for him when I’m not home or too busy to make dinner.
• A dish inspired by the Tex-Mex version of migas, recently publicized here (original recipe here). In my case, it was more like a deconstructed burrito – torn-up tortillas, kidney beans, soy chorizo, and leftover rice all fried together, then made even tastier with the addition of hot sauce and cheese.
• Almond butter/apple/cheese sandwiches. This was my dinner after coming home from class at 8 pm one day last week. My husband politely refused when offered a bite. Not his idea of a tasty sandwich, apparently, but I loved it.

Breakfasts:

• Breakfasts tend to be quick and simple in our home. For me, it’s usually either a bowl of oatmeal with flax seeds, raisins, and sometimes walnuts, or a fried egg with a piece of homemade bread or wrapped in a tortilla with hot sauce, cheese, and maybe leftover rice. My husband enjoys a heartier breakfast and either has dinner leftovers from the night before or noodle soup (either one of those Trader Joe’s Thai rice noodle bowls or Dosirac, a Korean ramen that is widespread in Russia and that we recently found at an International District grocery store that we frequent).

Snacks:

• Plain yogurt with homemade peach jam from last summer. I love it that preserves can keep for so long and that I can eat them almost a year later and think about how I made them and what was going on in my life at that time.
• Uncooked tempeh slices. Weird, I know, but I think raw tempeh is delicious. I don’t even put any sauce on it. I think I am going to have some right now.

First, a bit of background…

What are pelmeni?

Pelmeni are small dumplings consisting of seasoned ground meat wrapped in a dough pocket and shaped similarly to tortellini (occasionally, you’ll see semi-circular or hexagonal pelmeni – this usually means they were made by a machine or with a special pelmeni-making device that some people use at home). Pelmeni are cooked in boiling water and served hot. They are thought to have descended from Chinese wontons or pot stickers. In Russia, they first became popular in Siberia, where they are still a favorite dish, especially during the cold months. Eventually pelmeni spread all across Russia.

In Russia, you can buy a pack of frozen pelmeni at nearly every grocery store, and you will have a hot meal minutes after coming home. There are also cafes (called pelmennye) that specialize in pelmeni. However, homemade pelmeni are considered superior to the store-bought or restaurant ones. They are somewhat time-consuming to make, but if you have a couple of hours, you can make hundreds of pelmeni and store them in the freezer for months, pulling out and cooking as many as you need for dinner that night.

What are vareniki?

Vareniki are essentially a vegetarian version of pelmeni (although there is a version that is filled with meat that’s been cooked, then ground into a paste and mixed with sautéed onions). Unlike pelmeni, they are not very common in Siberia but are quite popular in western parts of Russia and are also widespread in Ukraine. Traditional fillings for vareniki include mashed potatoes with sautéed onions (see recipe below) ; tvorog (Russian farmer’s cheese); cherries; and cooked buckwheat (kasha). Just like pelmeni, vareniki can be made ahead of time and frozen until ready to cook.

And now the recipes:

Pelmeni filling

1 lb ground meat (50/50 mixture of beef and pork is traditional; you can also try lamb, chicken, or turkey or any combination of the above. If using chicken, turkey, or beef, increase the amount of onion or consider adding some chopped fresh herbs for extra moisture. You can even add some water to the filling.)

½ medium onion

1 tsp salt

¼ tsp ground black pepper

Finely grate the onion or chop it into very small pieces in a food processor. Add it to the ground meat along with salt and pepper and mix everything very well; using your hands works best. If you have leftover filling, you can freeze it until you are ready to make another batch of pelmeni or use it to make meatballs, chili, hamburgers, kotlety (Russian-style burgers), etc.

Vareniki filling – potatoes and onions

2 large potatoes

1 medium onion

½ tsp salt

½ tsp sugar

¼ tsp ground black pepper

Vegetable oil or butter for sautéing onion

Peel the potatoes, cut into chunks, and boil until tender. Drain and mash. Peel and trim the onion and chop coarsely or finely, as you prefer (I like approximately ¼ inch pieces). Sauté the onion in vegetable oil or butter until tender, translucent, and lightly browned. Add to the mashed potatoes, season with salt, sugar, and black pepper, and mix well. Let the mixture cool before filling the vareniki.

If you have leftover filling, it can be frozen and used later to fill another batch of vareniki, or you can use it to make Russian potato patties known as kartofelniki or kartofelnye kotlety. Mix the leftover filling with an egg, a few tablespoons of flour, and another sprinkle of salt and pepper to form a mixture that is thick enough to be shaped with your hands. Form round patties about 2 to 3 inches across and ½ inch thick, coat in flour or breadcrumbs if desired, and fry in vegetable oil until browned on both sides. Serve with sour cream or your favorite sauce.

Dough ingredients

2.5 cups all-purpose flour (plus a few more tablespoons as needed)

½ cup water (plus a few more tablespoons as needed)

1 egg

1 tsp salt

Making the dough

Mix the flour with the salt in a bowl, turn the mixture out onto a clean, dry surface such as a very large cutting board or a tabletop and shape into a mound. Make a hole in the middle and break the egg into the hole. Gradually add the water as you mix the dough with your hands. It will look like a mess at first, but the dough will come together after a few minutes of mixing and kneading. (Alternately, you can start by mixing all the ingredients in a bowl with a wooden spoon, then turn the dough out onto the table or cutting board for kneading. It’s a little less messy this way.) You may need to add up to a few tablespoons of flour and/or water if your dough is too dry or too wet. Keep kneading until the dough no longer sticks to your hands and is smooth, elastic, and not too tough. (If the dough does become too tough, cover it with plastic wrap or a damp towel and let it rest for about 20 minutes, which should make it more pliable.)

Making the dumplings

Divide the dough into several portions and roll one out with a rolling pin on a very lightly floured surface, turning the dough over several times. Keep flattening and stretching the dough until it is about as thick as 10 sheets of paper. Use a cookie cutter or a thin-rimmed glass 2 to 3 inches across to cut circles out of the dough. (I use SVALKA wine glasses from IKEA, which are 2.5 inches across, and they work very well.) The scraps of dough that are left over after you cut out the circles can be mixed with your next piece of fresh dough and used again – but don’t reuse them too many times or they will make the dough too tough.

Another method is to shape the dough into “sausages,” slice them with a knife, and roll out each slice individually to the required thickness and size. Personally, I find that this takes longer and does not produce uniformly-sized dumplings.

Place about ½ tsp of filling at the center of each circle, fold the dough over to make a half-circle, and pinch the edges closed. (Your seam won’t hold if there is too much flour on the dough or if you accidentally get it wet. If the dough is floury, moisten the edges very lightly with a drop of water; if it is wet, add a tiny bit of flour.) Now bring the ends of the half-circle together until they overlap a little and pinch them closed to form a tortellini-like shape.

Repeat with the remaining dough and filling, placing the finished pelmeni or vareniki on a lightly floured surface and making sure they aren’t touching each other. At this point, you can either cook them or freeze them for later use.

The above dough recipe makes anywhere between 50 and 100 dumplings, depending on the size of your dough circles, the thickness of your dough, and whether or not you reuse the dough that’s left over after you cut out your circles. A typical main-course serving is about 15 dumplings.

Cooking the dumplings

Bring a pot of salted water to a boil, add pelmeni or vareniki and stir so they don’t stick to the bottom. If cooking pelmeni, you can add a couple of bay leaves to the pot. Technically, they are ready once they float to the surface, but I usually cook them for 2-5 more minutes (about 5 minutes for pelmeni because of the raw meat and about 2 minutes for vareniki).

Freezing the dumplings

Place pelmeni or vareniki on a cookie sheet and freeze until they are hard to the touch, about 30 minutes. Quickly (before they have a chance to thaw out and stick to each other) transfer them to a plastic bag and return to the freezer, where they can be stored for up to several months. Use several plastic bags or a heavy-duty Ziploc bag if you plan to store them for more than a couple of weeks.

Serving

Vareniki are served drained, while pelmeni can be served either drained or with the cooking water, which becomes a light broth after the pelmeni are cooked. Vareniki are usually served with butter or sour cream (or mayonnaise, if your vareniki are filled with pre-cooked meat). Toppings for pelmeni are more varied and can include one or more of the following:

Butter

Sour cream

Mayonnaise

Chopped fresh herbs such as dill or parsley

Chopped green onions

White vinegar

Hot mustard

Hot chili sauce

Leslie has just published a photo essay about our trip, which you can view here. Take a look at it, read the comments underneath the pictures, and re-create our trip for yourselves!

I hope you also take some time to browse other sections of Leslie’s website. Fresh-PickedSeattle is a comprehensive compilation of food-related events and resources in Seattle and beyond. It includes an events calendar, a Seattle food blog feed, maps of farmers markets and specialty grocery stores, a CSA directory, and much, much more.

We will make two kinds of Russian stuffed dumplings – pelmeni, which feature a ground meat filling, and vareniki, which generally come with a vegetarian filling – in our case, it will be mashed potatoes mixed with sauteed onions. I will show how to make and roll the dough, fill and close the dumplings, and, 10 minutes after the last dumpling has been filled, they will be ready for you to enjoy with toppings of your choice, such as butter, sour cream, and chopped herbs.

Here is the event info:

Date: Sat, Feb 27, 2010

Time: Winterfest runs from 1 to 4 pm; the cooking demo will start around 2:30 and end around 3:30 pm

Location: Meadowbrook Community Center, 10517 35th Ave NE, Seattle, WA 98125

Cost: cooking demo is free with event admission, which is $15 for member families and $25 for non-member families; part of the proceeds goes to support orphanages in Eastern Europe

For more info, please visit http://www.orgsites.com/wa/frua-inc/_pgg2.php3.

Note: the activity is billed as a demo but there will be plenty of opportunities for hands-on involvement if anyone – kids or adults – wants to participate! Of course, if you would prefer to just watch, that is fine too; you will still get to eat in the end!

So, what is cooking in the kitchen of the little Craftsman-style cottage that we are renting in Seattle’s Lower Queen Anne neighborhood? (A word about the kitchen: it’s the reason I persuaded my husband to move into this house. It’s nothing special by most people’s standards, but it’s way larger than the kitchens in any of the apartments we’ve lived in, and it has the best light – and the best view – of any room in the house.) It’s not only Russian food, and it’s not always vegetarian, either. Here is a sampling of foods I’ve made in the past week or two:

• Kimchi fried rice with homemade kimchi, daikon, mushrooms, and eggs. I made kimchi for the first time a few weeks ago using a loosely adapted David Lebovitz recipe. We loved it and ate it every day for about a week until it was almost gone, at which point I remembered that Molly Wizenberg’s and Matthew Amster-Burton’s new podcast, Spilled Milk, recently featured a recipe for kimchi fried rice, and saved the leftover kimchi for this dish.

• Boiled buckwheat groats. These are sometimes called “kasha” in the US – in Russia, the word refers to any kind of cooked cereal – and are great with a bit of butter at breakfast or as a side dish. Some people eat it with milk as a breakfast dish.

• Cauliflower, green beans, mushrooms, and tofu sautéed in Thai-style yellow curry with coconut milk over jasmine rice. I never have all the seasonings on hand to make even a semi-authentic version of a Thai curry, but my approximation of the real thing seems to satisfy the craving for that rich/creamy/spicy/tangy taste that I get about once or twice a month.

• Ukha (Russian fish soup). There are many versions of this soup, but my husband prefers the simplest one there is. This soup contained exactly five ingredients: fish, potatoes, bay leaf, salt, and pepper – six, if you count water. I usually add a half or a whole onion, which I discard once the soup is done, but I didn’t have any in the house and felt that it wasn’t critical for the flavor.

• Borscht with homemade kvashennaya kapusta (Russian-style fermented cabbage). This, too, was for my husband. I am not a huge fan of soups, and I prefer to eat my kvashennaya kapusta plain or dressed up with a bit of oil and one or more of the following: raisins, fresh or dried cranberries, or chopped apples.

• Jim Lahey’s No-Knead Bread, as adapted by Mark Bittman. I’ve been baking this bread nearly every day since discovering the recipe in early December. Love it. I still can’t get over how easy it is and how good the bread is. Between this bread and a couple other kinds that I occasionally make, I don’t plan on buying bread ever again unless some unforeseen circumstances force me to. In fact, the only time I bought bread at the store since my first bread-making experiment at Thanksgiving was for my cooking class in late December, when I needed baguette slices on which to spread the cheese salad. 

However, I wasn’t sure what to teach during this upcoming spring class, especially given that it was scheduled so far in advance. Who knows what the weather is going to be like on March 20? Spring, especially in Seattle, is so unpredictable. This fickle season may slap us with a cold, gray, and drizzly day – just like today, or it may bless us with blue skies, warmth, and sunshine. I considered teaching a class on soups, which most Russian families eat every day, as they are considered a necessary precursor to a proper meal, especially during cold weather. But what if the outside temperature is in the 60’s and people come in wearing T-shirts and sipping their iced coffees? Hot soup will be the last thing they want to think about, an unwelcome reminder of winter that is technically ending that very day, the day of the vernal equinox.

All right, I thought, I could teach a class on cold soups instead. Cold borscht and cold sorrel soup really hit the spot on a warm day. But, again, what if the weather doesn’t cooperate and my students are wrapped in scarves and parkas and dreaming of curling up on their couch with a mug of hot chocolate as they watch me prepare a soup that is supposed to be chilled before eating?

Well then, I’ll just have to make both kinds, I decided, and so the concept for this class was born. In this class, which is called Borscht, Two Ways, you will learn how to make a hot borscht and a cold borscht. Make no mistake about it, these are two very different soups – cold borscht is not simply hot borscht that has spent time in the refrigerator. Other than beets and potatoes, and salt and sugar for seasoning – and, of course, the must-have sour cream topping – these soups share no ingredients and taste completely different from each other.

So, whether it is chilly and wet or warm and sunny, I hope you will come to this class and learn all about borscht-making! As always, you will receive copies of the recipes to take home, and, depending on the weather, you can try making either the hot version or the cold version in your own kitchen for dinner that night.

Here are the details:

Date: Saturday, March 20, 2010

Time: 2 pm to 4 pm

Location: Cascade People’s Center, 309 Pontius Ave N, Seattle, WA 98109

How to register: Sign up here

This salad is named for its creator, Lucien Olivier, a 19th-century Belgian chef who ran the Hermitage Restaurant in Moscow. His original recipe called for ingredients like grouse, caviar, and capers, which became either very expensive or completely unavailable during the Soviet times and were eventually replaced with cheaper and easier-to-obtain basics like potatoes, eggs, and peas. Even though the contemporary version shares virtually no ingredients with Olivier’s invention, it continues to bear his name and remains extremely popular in Russia, which is really not surprising because it is so easy and inexpensive to make – and so very tasty!

The basic components of this salad – as it is made today – are potatoes, eggs, carrots, peas, and mayonnaise. The majority of Russians will also agree that either pickled or fresh cucumbers must be included. Beyond that, there is wide disagreement. Most people add some kind of meat – my mom and grandmother have always used boiled beef; others swear by boiled chicken, bologna, salami, or hot dogs. Other optional – and controversial – ingredients include raw onions and apples. In the 1990’s, when canned corn became available in Russia, some cooks started adding it to the salad. I am sure that there are many other variations on Olivier that I am not aware of. If you have a favorite one, let me know!

What follows is a recipe that I put together based on my mom’s and grandma’s way of making this salad, which is also the way I make it. Like many Russian home cooks, they never followed a specific written recipe, and, like them, I don’t normally measure out the ingredients when I make Olivier at home. Instead, I like to play it by ear – or, rather, by eye, starting with a few potatoes and eggs and adding carrots, peas, and pickles until I am satisfied with the color balance – a healthy amount of orange and green against the creamy whites and yellows. Then I add the mayo – not so much that the vegetables drown in it, but a good amount that will moisten and bind the salad. Below the Olivier recipe, I am posting instructions for making Russian-style mayonnaise out of regular American mayo. Give it a try – I think it really makes a difference for both taste and texture.

I encourage you to experiment with this salad and create a version that works for you. Play with the ingredient amounts, leave out something you don’t like, add something unusual. I’d love to hear what you come up with!

Olivier salad

Ingredients

5 medium to large potatoes, boiled whole with the skin on until tender (It is best to use a low- or medium-starch variety, such as red, white or yellow potatoes. High-starch potatoes, such as Russets, are OK too but be sure not to overcook them and to mix your salad carefully, or they will turn into mush. In Russia potatoes for salad are usually boiled, but you can also steam or microwave them.)

4 hard-boiled eggs

4 pickled cucumbers (cucumbers that are fermented in brine (such as half sour pickles) rather than pickled in vinegar will result in a more traditional taste)

3 medium to large carrots, boiled whole (or cut in two-three pieces) with the skin on until tender

1 can peas, drained

¾ to 1 cup mayonnaise (preferably Russian-style – see recipe below)

Salt to taste

Optional: 1 cup of cooked meat or meat product such as beef, chicken, bologna, salami, or hot dogs

Preparation

Peel the potatoes, the carrots, and the eggs. Dice potatoes, carrots, eggs, and pickles (and the meat/meat product, if using) into ½ inch cubes. Put the diced ingredients in a large mixing bowl along with peas and mayo. Mix carefully, taking care not to crush the peas too much. Taste and add salt if needed. Transfer to a serving bowl and decorate with chopped parsley, if desired. Mayonnaise and salt should be added shortly before serving, so if you are not planning to serve the entire quantity of Olivier right away, do not dress/season your leftovers until they are ready to be eaten.

Serves 4-6 as an appetizer

* * *

Russian-style mayonnaise

Russian mayonnaise has a somewhat bolder flavor than American mayonnaise. It is also thinner, with a consistency that is similar to cake batter. Although I’ve found that American mayo works all right in Russian recipes, I suggest trying the following modification for a more authentic taste:

Ingredients

1 cup mayonnaise (preferably full-fat)

1 tbsp sugar

¾ tbsp vinegar

½ tsp salt

¼ tsp hot mustard

Preparation

Whisk all the ingredients together until thoroughly blended and sugar is dissolved.

In addition to those who came to the class, other people who were instrumental in making it happen include Jessica Dally at the Seattle Free School and the staff at the Ballard Branch of the Seattle Public Library. Thank you guys!