Russian food and other noms

That thing kinda looks like canned kraken......

For those of you who are wondering, no, my food doesn't look like this.  I haven't even run across it yet.  And no, I'm not eating fancy caviar (or any, for that matter).  Nor am I drinking copious amounts of vodka.  However, despite what Yulia Georgievna thinks of my eating habits, I do eat food here.  And it's good.

For the most part.

Scary canned kraken aside......

A while ago Kevin posted a Buzzfeed article on my Facebook wall about odd Russian foods the natives grew up with.  Coming to Russia, a little part of me was freaking out that my food here was gonna be this list and ONLY this list.  Yikes!  This is not the case, though I have actually eaten/drunk some of what's on that list.  Here's a look at what I actually eat here in Russia.

WARNING - if the canned kraken didn't kill your appetite, the following foods might make you hungry.  You should probably grab a snack and keep it handy while you read.  I just ate dinner and this is making me hungry.  You have been warned.

First off, the food......

Пирожки

Dinner roll + filling + Russia = AMAZING

One of my favorites here is pirozhki.  Think rolls or pastry dough stuffed with whatever.  Common pirozhki fillings are cabbage and mushrooms (с капустой и грибами), meat (с мясом), and fruits such as apples (с яблоками).  Yulia Georgievna has made them once, and they were wrapped in filo dough.  It was great, except she made meat ones and cabbage ones and insisted I try each both hot and cold.  Too much food, but so good.


Also pirozhki roughly translates as "mini pies".


Блини

Mmmmmmm om nom nom

Blini are somewhere inbetween a pancake and a crepe.  Like pirozhki, you can wrap any kind of filling in them, or eat them plain.  Yulia Georgievna cooks like Paula Deen, so the blini here at my homestay tend to be very buttery.  They can be thicker - closer to pancakes - and are often filled with what tastes kinda like cream cheese.  Or they can be thin - like crepes - and super light and easy to wrap around things.  Always, blini is served with a side of Russian sour cream.  I hate sour cream in the States - I think it's revolting on its own - but the sour cream here is sweeter and I don't mind it as much if it's in small quantities.  

In my opinion, the crepe-like blini taste best less buttery and with a little bit of honey drizzled on it.  Mmmm.

This week is Maslenitsa (yay!!), so EVERYONE is eating blini.  Yulia made meat-stuffed blini on Monday and today made the wicked thin crepe-like blini.  It was served with some sort of pickled fish, which I didn't like, so I ate mine with a little bit of the sour cream and wrapped them around some fresh cucumbers and red peppers.  It was pretty good, though again with the Paula Deen cooking and my hands covered in butter.

Side note: Maslenitsa (Масленица) is a festival the week before Lent starts, celebrating the end of winter and the return of the sun.  Kinda like the Russian equivalent of Mardi Gras (but not quite).  There is copious amounts of blini to be eaten, visiting relatives spontaneously, playing in the snow (that winter thing that St. Petersburg doesn't have because it's 40 degrees out right now), supposedly a day where the guys go out on the frozen river and pummel each other, and just generally celebrating the inevitable end of winter.

So yeah.  Blini and Maslenitsa.  Fun times in Russia.


Mayo on EVERYTHING

Dun dun duuuuuuuuuun

This seems to be a staple of Russian cooking, and for the life of me, I can't understand WHY.  90% of the food here comes with mayo on it, in it, or on the side.  I've been here for almost a month and it still kinda grosses me out how much mayo sneaks into the food.

Take, for example, this terrifying salad.

Frightening, no??

According to Yulia Georgievna, yes, this is a salad.  I watched her make it and it wasn't the worst thing I've eaten in my life, but I probably won't willingly eat it again.  In Yulia Georgievna's recipe, the bottom layer is shredded potatoes.  Followed by some mayo, spread around.  Next comes some pickled herring, sliced in small chunks and fairly well drained.  Then some shredded carrots and more mayo.  After the carrots come the minced onions, and even more mayo.  And then some shredded beets.  With more mayo.  I swear, she emptied half the bag of mayo making one of these in a 4 x 4 square container (the condiments all come in pouch bags here, not jars or bottles).  Half the regular salads here are smothered in mayo, not just the herring salad.  I just can't.  Mayo is definitely not my thing.


Бутерброд

Just look at that sandwich......so tasty.  Очень вкусно

Yes, there are sandwiches here.  Where do you think I live, Siberia??  We here in St. Petersburg are civilized folk.

......at the very least, sandwiches are still a thing here.  But not for lunch.  In Russia, booterbrote/sandwiches are frequently open-faced and have cheese or butter on them with some sort of meat and often some lettuce on them.  Every morning, Yulia Georgievna sets out a small bowl of cornflake-like cereal and the fixings for a sandwich.  Usually it's cheese, ham or kielbasa, and lettuce.  She tried to exert the Paula Deen cooking, but having both cheese AND butter on my sandwich is a bit much.  Especially for breakfast, where I don't eat much anyway - mornings are too early, regardless of whether I got up at 6:30am or 10am.


Котлеты

Every time I hear someone say this word, I hear a "k" in there.  So I always thought it was "kotletki".  Ah well..

Kotleti is kinda like a meatball, except it can stand on its own and doesn't need all those noodles and sauce to go with it.  Unlike meatballs in America, these are big and don't have that same almost bready texture to them.  They're more like a homemade burger ball, though they're definitely easier to cut through, and most of the kotleti I've had has been ground chicken, not ground beef.  They make those too, and kotleti made of ground fish as well.

At Smolney, a typical lunch ends up as kotleti and macaroni.  Sadly, the school kotleti is more of a meat blob than a tasty meatball, and it's practically inedible if I don't get it warm.  Frequently, the kotleti is lukewarm and the macaroni is stone cold.  Hooray for waiting in 20+ minutes in line for subpar cafeteria food.  Although from what I remember, cafeteria is usually pretty bad, so I shouldn't complain.

In addition to all this Russian food, my host mother found out that I like oranges.  Thus, Yulia Georgievna keeps the house stocked with them for desserts.  And speaking of dessert-y things, there is a lot of chocolate and chocolate-based things as dessert here.  Yes, I do count the hot chocolate I get at the cafe as dessert.  I have a soft spot for this snack that has a chocolate and honey filling in a cake-y/bread-y brick (it tastes kinda like the chocolate poptarts but looks kinda sketchy, so I just go around saying I eat the sketchy poptarts from the vending machine).  And you can all be jealous - if I get a craving for chocolate here, a Super Size candy bar (which has 2 FULL SIZE CANDY BARS in it) is $1.  Thank you, Russia.

Now for the drinks.....


Чай

It's pronounced chai, but it's actually tea.

Allow me to digress for a moment on an awesome linguistic note.  Tea originated in China.  That seems quite obvious, right??  The interesting thing is where the name came from in Russian and in English.  The British did most of their trade with Hong Kong and the southern part of China.  It was a primarily Cantonese-speaking region, and the word for this drink was pronounced tai - thus, we know this drink as tea.  The Russians traded with northern China, which was primarily a Mandarin-speaking region, and the word for this drink was pronounced chai.  Thus is tea called chai here.

Anyway, back to the point.  Russians drink a lot of tea.  And by a lot, I mean ALL THE TIME.  They drink more tea than the English do.

Such a proper spittake

It's true!!  I get home from school and I'm offered tea.  It's dinner - Caitie should be offered some tea.  Doing homework??  Clearly I need some tea.  My host mom has even tried to have a midnight tea party with me here, and while I love Yulia Georgievna, having black tea at midnight is not conducive to getting up for classes in the morning.  However, having tea with breakfast keeps me from completely dozing off in class.  Too bad I kinda look like this during breakfast......

It's morning.  You're saying words.  Stop that

Granted, I don't look much different than this when I get to school.  My brain is functioning, thanks to the tea, but at times I still look like the world confuses me greatly and every flat surface seems like a decent enough bed.

Сок

Sohk is essentially juice.  Not too hard, right??  I can't drink the tap water here, so I end up drinking an incredible amount of juice.  Bonus - most of the juices taste more fresh squeezed than their American counterparts.  It is delicious.  I think Yulia Georgievna makes some juice by hand, since there are labels that mark a specific year on the bottles around the house that don't match the juice that's inside them.  And then I go and buy vast quantities of juice at the store because hey! juice is cheap.  For $2.50 I can get 2.5 liters of juice (generally it's a 1.5 liter carton of multifruit cocktail and a 1 liter carton of another juice).  At the rate I'm drinking juice here, I'm going through 3-4 liters of juice a week.  It is that good.  And since the juice is sold in cartons and not fridged I keep it in my room (also not fridged).  If I want cold juice, I open my window and leave the carton on the windowsill for a bit.  Seems legit.


MISCELLANEOUS

I had no idea where to put this one, but it's very tasty.  My host mom makes it for breakfast sometimes and it's got pears and cream cheese and some sort of pseudo-marshmallow thing and egg yolks in it, with the egg whites poured over the top before it's put in the oven.  Kinda like a cross between a cheesecake and a quiche, but it tastes pretty good.  It is awesome and I haven't the faintest idea what it's called, so voila!!  Mystery Russian breakfast.

Clearly I'm not starving here in Russia.  There's plenty of food, plenty of drinks, and I haven't died from trying things yet!!  I make a point of trying everything I can, even if it looks gross or smells weird.  That's all that's asked of me here at my homestay - it's ok if I don't like something, as long as I try it first before deciding to never again touch such a thing.  So we'll see how things go from here.

Hopefully I didn't make you too hungry.  Also I must end this post because there is a cat on me and she displaced the laptop on my lap and it's kinda hard to type.  Also OWW claws.  Must go.

Love me??