Beet Kvass: Not For the Faint of Heart

First off, let me just say that I take no responsibility for this recipe. I tried it, it was tasty, and there were no ill effects so I am assuming it's safe enough. There is, after all, enough wild yeast in your average kitchen for this to culture properly without adding bread, salt or whey like most beet kvass recipes will suggest. A tsp of salt per quart will definitely make this safe, but my dad swears that isn't how his grandmother did it.

Farmer's Cheese -- not quite tvorog, but not quite not.

I'm not going to lie: this isn't the best way to make tvorog. In fact, it can hardly be called tvorog at all because it's really more like a paneer or a farmer's cheese than tvorog -- it lacks the tang of a true tvorog. Still -- if you're in a hurry, or if you have a gallon of milk that's about to go bad, or if you like your soft cheeses to be milder and sweeter this is a perfectly good method. Traditional, proper tvorog depends on live cultures from kefir, cultured sour cream or buttermilk (or in the case of raw milk, you can culture it by simply letting it sit out and go sour). As demonstrated here, you mix warm milk with your culture and let it sit for a day. Heat again, separate the curds and there you have it.

This is faster, and while the flavors are decidedly less complex, it's still a good cheese.

You need:
Milk - 1/2 gallon
Vinegar - 1/4 cup

Zucchini Pancakes

Everyone loves to grow zucchini -- it's a forgiving vegetable in any climate and even the worst gardener will often find themselves with a veritable bounty in no time. The trouble is, few people like to eat squash, so they try to hide their secret shame away in zucchini bread, brownies, and other places where you won't actually have to taste zucchini. These crunchy pancakes are my favorite use of the summer surplus of squash. They're really not a lot more difficult to put together than a pancake mix once you get comfortable making them. Since there is so little flour in the mix, it really doesn't matter what kind you use. They come out crunchy on the outside, and tasting like a pancake (and not much like a squash) on the inside.

If you puree your squash, you can pretty much use this recipe to make dainty little zucchini blintzes, but that's a story for another time. 

Poppy Pasteli

Some time ago, I had the brilliant idea that I'd make my own Halvah. The giant blocks at the Russian stores strike me as a bit questionable -- they never seem to change shape or size, which raises some questions about freshness. So, I went out and got myself some 2 pounds of sesame seeds from the bulk section at Winco, and promptly forgot about them. This is how my great ideas usually end. By the time I remembered this bag of seeds (or rather, found it under a pile of reusable grocery bags while tidying the pantry) my craving for halvah had passed.

These pasteli are roughly traditional Greek pasteli, only with added poppy seeds because we really like poppy seeds around here. Pasteli have been around since at least the 15th century BCE, so really that should be proof that they're pretty much timelessly delicious.

You'll need:
1 cup sesame seeds
1/2 cup poppy seeds
3/4 cup sugar
1/4 cup honey


Heat your sugar and honey on a low heat. Once they're all mixed together, add your seeds and let them cook for about 15 minutes, stirring constantly. By this point, the seeds should have lost their initial pallor and become a rich golden brown. If they're still pale, keep cooking, otherwise transfer your mixture to a greased(!!!) piece of parchment paper or baking sheet and smoosh it down. Cut it before it cools if you want nice clean lines.

If you, like me, end up spreading your seed mixture onto an ungreased parchment paper -- fear not. You can get it off by simply heating a cookie sheet or pizza pan on the stove and laying the parchment+pasteli on it for a minute or so. The paper will peel right off, and make the whole thing easier to cut up as well.

Baked Cabbage in Pickle Brine

This is one of my absolute favorite foods, and seems to be uniquely Ukrainian.  I can't seem to find an official name for it in any language, but it's a baked cabbage that has been soaking in leftover pickle brine for a few days. It's sort of like a lazy sauerkraut, but also not -- it has a completely unique flavor profile. It's a shining example of culinary efficiency: that leftover brine you'd otherwise toss out becomes a marinade for a completely new dish. The brine from this batch came from the pickles I made late last fall, and it was super. It would work just as well with store-bought pickles, though.

I didn't have a chance to take a photo of how it's supposed to be eaten, since this batch was gone in a matter of hours, but it's best served as a coarsely chopped salad with a little fresh garlic and some sunflower oil(the good kind with the strong smell!). Mmmm

Draniki -- the world's laziest latkes

 

I feel like I'm constantly being barraged by latke recipes. Most are made with flour, eggs, matzoh, eggs and whatever else but I find that usually the simplest approach is always the best -- culinary lex parsimoniae or something. This recipe is super easy -- true "poverty food" -- yet still maintains all of the crunchy, greasy goodness of any other potato pancake recipe. As a bonus, it's gluten-free and vegan.
It comes more-or-less from my family's age-old recipe for deruny/draniki.


The recipe for these is so simple I won't even bother hiding it under a cut.

Ingredients:
Potatoes -- any kind, approximately 1 Russet per adult or more if you're a glutton like me. If it's an organic, thin-skinned potato, you don't even have to peel it.
Salt -- to taste

Optional: Garlic, spices

Step One:

Toss everything into a food processor and puree to an even consistency. 

Step Two: Fry like you would any ordinary pancake, either in a pan with a thin layer of oil or on a well-oiled griddle. You know they're done when the outside is a crispy golden brown.

These are great with sour cream, caramelized onions, apple sauce and pretty much anything you can think of.

Meatless Borscht

Meatless borscht seems to go against the very nature of what most people consider to be a proper borscht -- beefy, beety, but mostly beefy. There are of course cold borschts, svekolnik and whatnot -- but this is not quite it. Despite its contrarian nature, it's a very hearty and versatile(and delicious!) soup that takes very little in terms of time and resources. It tastes best if you let it "steep" overnight or longer, so it's best made in advance.

First Post: An Introduction

People have been idealizing rural lifestyles for centuries. Really, the in some ways the Urban Farming movement isn't too different from Virgil's Eclogues or the swarthy muzhiks that Doesoevsky so longs to imitate. For some reason, mankind is hard-wired with an incurable longing for the way things were, for simpler times and simpler problems -- the rural idyll is somehow still seen as ideal for many people.
I for one am proud to a part of this rich tradition of slightly out-of-touch urban academics and intellectuals longing after the wholesome lifestyles of peasants.

I am Ukrainian, and I was raised eating and speaking Ukrainian. Ukraine has been the breadbasket of Europe since before the Greek poets started making agriculture cool, so I like to think we know food. Traditional dishes have been developed through years of wars, foreign occupations from all directions, famines. Most foods are rich, simple and seasonal --  they embody a lot of what contemporary locavore, slow food, urban farm movements represent.

The purpose of this blog is twofold. First it is, in its own way, an idyll -- a Kitchen Idyll, if you will . It contains (or at any rate, will contain) foods I grew up with- heritage recipes I learned from watching my parents and grandparents cook and which they no doubt learned the same way. Eastern European serfs were not a particularly literate group of people, so writing down recipes wasn't exactly something they did. I learned to cook the same way my grandmother and her grandmother did -- repetition and adaptation -- but I'll do my best to come up with exact proportions for those of you who actually know where your measuring cups are. Adaptation, I think, is the most important -- my recipes have been adapted somewhat to my own lifestyle and they will no doubt continue to change to suit their new masters, but this does not make them any less traditional.

Second it is simply a discourse on living well and living simply, making do and avoiding things that come in boxes or tubes.