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By feral, on January 5th, 2012%
Two months ago Murzik emailed me this recipe for sardine rillettes with the following comment: “made these a few times, total hit with everybody, especially served on some bread with a side of salad – perfect lunch! or makes pretty good little appetizers.” Even though I had no clue what the word rillettes meant, the recipe looked so appetizing that I bought a can of sardines, a pack of cream cheese and all other ingredients — but never got to mash them together.
Yesterday Murzik made them for lunch. The preparation took about 3 minutes, and I immediately regretted my procrastination. It was a love at first bite and an instant addition to my impress-in-5-minutes-or-less recipe list.
 Snooping around Murzik & Husband’s kitchen (and its garage extension) in El Granada, always results in new inspirations and useful culinary discoveries. To demonstrate, here’s the first thing I saw upon arrival:
 This is probably only about a quarter of their home-canned bounty and certainly puts my own feeble canning attempts to shame. These shelves deserve their own reality TV show: “Extreme Canning . . . CONTINUE READING → Sardine Rillettes and 5 more tips from El Granada
By feral, on December 24th, 2011%
Obviously, I still need to work on a few things, e.g. smiling and speaking. But I do believe this new and exciting medium has a bright feral future. Please enjoy this video tour of my garden and keep in mind that it was really freezing this morning — normally, it looks much bigger. Although I didn’t harvest anything from the garden other than the above footage, today was overall a terrific day for me. I slept until 10, then located and successfully disposed of a little dead mouse that had been filling the house with anti-holiday spirit, and finally cooked a trio of Russian/Hanukkah comfort foods for dinner: borscht, roasted apricot chicken and, my absolute favorite, potato latkes.
I was very happy with myself about this dinner. Especially because I managed to eat somewhere between 10 and 15 latkes. For the record, these potato pancakes are my most favorite food in the world. Ever since I was very little, they never failed to make me happy. Needless to say, back in Belarus they were a regular food, not a once-a-year Hanukkah treat — but nonetheless, always a . . . CONTINUE READING → For the first time ever, a video tour of the garden
By feral, on April 22nd, 2011%
When life gives you lemons, make lemonade. By lemons I mean the disgusting mix of rain, snow, hail and wind that made it impossible to work in the garden yesterday, and by lemonade I mean borscht. Not the cold borscht, of course (the recipe I posted last summer complete with a spelling guide and Russian primer), but rather its hot cousin. These two borschts are two entirely different soups, as you know. When the weather is hot, you make the cold one, and vice versa.
There are many schools of thought when it comes to hot borscht, and it isn’t uncommon to hear the adherents of different traditions question the authenticity of rivaling recipes. “You call this borscht?!! There’s no X in borscht!!!” Or, “How can you make borscht without Y???” Although a staple of Russian restaurants, it is of Ukrainian origin and has many, many incarnations. Perhaps, as the time progresses and life gives me more lemonade ingredients, I’ll translate and post a few more representative recipes from my Russian cookbooks. Today, however, I’d like to share the result of my own borscht-making evolution.
While most hot borschts use beef stock as a base, my version is . . . CONTINUE READING → hot borscht for a cold season
By feral, on March 7th, 2011%
Today was THE day to eat blini. The final day of maslenitsa, which I wrote about a few posts ago. It is also known as the “forgiven” Sunday because Orthodox Christians are supposed to ask each other for forgiveness and to forgive on this day. I didn’t do much of that (adding to my task list) but I did eat a ridiculous number of blini, all day long.
  And, as promised, I tried out a buckwheat blini recipe. My parents also brought some this morning, so we had a real blini extravaganza! Here, for your comparison, is my mom’s amazingly thin, delicious blin on the left; and on the right my experimental buckwheat pancake-crêpe.
You might notice a few differences, apart from the obvious lox with capers versus caviar with sour cream (Fage Greek yogurt in this case, actually…): (1) color (my mom’s wheat blini are golden-yellow whereas my buckwheat friend is grayish-brown) and (2) holes. The buckwheat one has such a pretty lace . . . CONTINUE READING → buckwheat blini
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