Beets Me

"Everything I do, I do on the principle of Russian borscht."

Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Russian poet 

Some people think that borscht is just beets. I for one, love beets but an entire pot of the blood red root vegetables might put me over the edge. You would think that spending a year in Russia would make a person never want to eat a beet or a potato again, but I found that while on exchange in Khabarovsk, Russia, Russian food is repetitive but can be quite delicious depending on who makes it. 

I have a friend from Canada that I met while on exchange, and he happened to live with a pensioner that was quite the Ruski chef. I learned to ask for "just chai" when she offered us after school snacks on cold winter days, otherwise the table would double over with pies, salads, soups, fish, and meat dishes- we were commanded to finish it ALL because she had no place to store it. Her name was Evelina and she had a small apartment in the city center, and she was also a recent widow. I think the fact that she hosted my friend gave her a sense of purpose. When my mom and uncle came for a visit, she fed them lunch. To this day, I remember my uncle rolling around on her carpet holding his full belly and groaning. 

One of the things Evelina made quite excellently was borscht. It had carrots, wild garlic, and chunks of beef as well as rich beets. She would serve it with dill and sour cream, and hunks of brown bread that she got at the local market. I should have asked her for a recipe- it was amazing stuff. Last night I decided to see how close I could come to recreating Evelina's prize borscht. I cut up plenty of fresh beets, added cabbage, and carrots, onions, beef stock and garlic, and boiled and simmered it until became a thick stew. I toasted some bread, and put it on an authentic Russian plate that Evelina had given me as a gift years ago. I also sprinkled some dill over some sour cream, and called my parents in for dinner. It tasted pretty good. Russian food is typically not spicey and the flavors are usually pretty dull to mild- it usually needs a bit of salt and pepper, and as I ate I thought of Evelina in her kitchen on the other side of the world. 

Lovin' From The Oven

"Boys who spent their weekends making banana nut muffins did not, as a rule, excel in the art of hand-to-hand combat." 

~ David Sedaris

So first off, imagine this...there are two muffins baking in an oven. One turns to the other and says "good god it's hot in here!" Her fellow muffin exclaims, "holy cow a talking muffin!" I have heard this joke more times than I have digits on my hands and feet, but I love it none the less. :)

Well, to tell you the truth I blame my friend Hilary for making me forget my goal of "no baked goods for one week". When I opened up my facebook account at approximately 9:32 this morning, I received the notification that I had been tagged in a photograph. A photo of a smiling girl and a fresh baked blueberry muffin no less. Ignoring the fact that my pants hadn't been fitting lately, I rushed down stairs and immediately began thawing some frozen berries in a bowl of hot water. 

Someone once asked me what the difference was between a muffin and a roll.  My response was that a roll is a type of bread, whereas a muffin is more like a breakfast cup cake. When I was younger, I got muffin mix from the grocery store and was always dismayed to find that the resulting baked goods were spongy, slightly purple, overly sweet things. Banana nut muffins are a bit easier to concoct. Really it's just a matter of making the quick bread batter and scooping it into tins. It's also harder to screw up- I mean, can you really over mix something made out of smushed bananas? This time, unlike earlier days, I made sure to thaw the berries completely and rinse them in a strainer over the sink before adding them to the batter. 

Some of my best memories include muffins. Every morning, after hopping off the bus, I would rush into the warmth of my high school cafeteria and stand in line for breakfast. The food at the local high school is amazing. Let me repeat; the food at the local high school is amazing! There was none of that spray cheese on tortilla chip nonsense. or chicken nugget and under cooked gloppy, orange macaroni day. Instead we got to have Thai food, and fresh wraps, Odwalla juices, local salad greens (my botany class grew them in the school's green house!) and some of the most addicting baked goods the world has ever seen. My friends and I would sit around before homeroom, catching up on gossip and forgotten homework, and nibble away at cinnamon rolls and breakfast sandwiches, and a wide array of muffins. There were raspberry or pineapple and coconut, chocolate chip, wild berry, banana walnut, apple cinnamon, and a number of others. 

One day, my stepfather came to pick me up at my college in a snow storm to take me home for the weekend, and we stopped at a diner in the middle of nowhere. He brought in one of his homemade cups in which the waitress could pour his coffee, and the owners of the restaurant joked about trading several loafs of bread and a few pies for his pottery. 

"No thank you. This is one of my favorites." He said politely. We rode home in the station wagon, our mouths and bellies indulging in large, grilled raspberry muffins. 

My favorite muffin memory is about Hilary, in fact. We were on a high school class trip to Washington DC, and she and I shared a hotel room with two of our mutual friends. We were all overly tired after a busy day of shopping and various excursions, and we were nestled cozily in our room, with the lights off. Just as we were dozing off, Hilary sat up laughing and exclaimed, 

"I love muffins!" We all groaned and tossed our pillows in her direction, but we all agreed that it was one of the Hilary moments we would never forget. 

I am off to pedal away some of the muffin remnants settling in my stomach, by way of my mom's stationary bike, but I don't feel too guilty for going back on my goal, just for today. 

Happy Accident

"I want you to fill your hands with mud,

     like a blessing." 

~Mary Oliver

Much like the creation of myself, these buns were a happy accident. I am one of those people that doesn't bother to check the refrigerator or pantry for the necessary ingredients before I begin to cook. You would think coming from a family of eight, particularly a hungry family of eight, would have taught me to check ahead of time for butter or leftover yams or frozen tofu... but I digress. I end up googling "substitutions for _____" more often than I'd like to admit, but being ill prepared enforces the idea that much of life is a learning experience after all. For example, apple sauce is a good add in to a batch of snickerdoodles when you only have half the amount of margarine needed! The only downside is that the end result tastes like a Granny's Apple Pie scented candle. 

Even if I don't like to research the contents of the kitchen ahead of time, I love learning about the history of food. My friend Katie and I decided to enter the Academic Fair in middle school. Our topic- "the history of ice cream." We made a big poster covered in photos and stickers, facts and figures about the cold dessert. We even had samples of ice cream to hand out to fair goers. One was just ordinary, store bought, but the other we churned ourselves in one of those old fashioned crank powered things that requires rock salt and dry ice. Though Katie got frost bite, and it turns out most of our facts were not exactly correct, we received a third place ribbon. Since then, I make a point of looking at the family trees of all the foods I meet. 

This time, I had meant to make cinnamon rolls. (Look on page 302 of The Big Book Of Breakfast by Maryana Vollstetd, for my favorite recipe) Snow was being blown in great whirls from the cloudy sky, and I was in the mood for something along the lines of a giant, gooey Cinnabon.

The lineage of cinnamon buns is a little tricky. Some say it was invented in Sweden, where it's called kanelbulle. Others say that the Macedonians get the prize because they came up with a sort of haggis spring roll (lamb innards for breakfast anyone?). In any case, they have evolved into a ghastly caloric breakfast that I for one adore. 

Still groggy from sleep, I peered into the fridge. Hidden among slices of squash and riccota pizza, was a box containing one lone egg. I had already combined the warm milk and yeast, so I threw in the yolk and looked for something eggy. We had a bottle of canola oil, so I decided to add a splash of that. Apparently there are occasions where you can use vinegar in place of eggs (say for vegan caesar dressing) or if desperate, a blob of miracle whip, but the thought of combining vinegar or mayo with cinnamon and sugar made me rather nauseous. I then realized we had about a third of the amount of butter required, so I hoped I'd added enough oil to make up the difference. In the end, I wound up with a mound of sticky, floury, cake battery dough which I stuck in our warm utility closet for an hour. It didn't exactly billow up like a parachute the way bread dough is supposed to, but I floured my hands and rolled it into balls, heated the oven to 375 degrees and figured it couldn't hurt to bake the stuff. Once the blobs were on a greased baking sheet, I coated them with a mixture of maple syrup and vanilla extract and sprinkled the tops with sanding sugar and a dusting of cinnamon. After half an hour of baking, the sweet perfume of rolls wafted through the house. When I opened the oven, six gleaming, tan, rather large rolls stared up at me. My step sister, her boyfriend, my mother and my stepfather and I all dived in. Though I don't have a recipe to share, the buns filled the cinnabon gap nicely.