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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 May 25th, 2011%
Back in the Motherland, you won’t find a child who’s never been traumatized by stinging nettles. To quote my best friend and fellow-minskean Tony’s facebook reminiscences in response to this recent culinary obsession of mine, “I suffered greatly from these herbs as a child.” “They bring up the terrors of my childhood. Walk into them and the day is ruined.”
Indeed, those monsters grew ubiquitously — in courtyards, parks, and all over the perennial construction sites that we, kids, often preferred to proper playgrounds to engage in a thrilling cops-and-robbers chase (or, as this game is known in Russia, Cossacks-and-robbers) and to educate ourselves about the explosive properties of various materials, abundantly left unattended by permanently drunk workers. No matter how risqué our childhood activities might sound, eating stinging nettles never crossed our little communist minds. I did hear from my grandparents that during the war and other tough times people would make soup out of them but I always interpreted that as a metaphor for utter despair… Even if the stinging nettles of my youngster days didn’t grow amidst dog poop or bags of carbide and asbestos, I couldn’t imagine that draconian weed being served to anyone . . . CONTINUE READING → stinging nettles, part 1: a simple soup
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 August 17th, 2010%
A scary tropical monsoon poured down on Canaan today. All of a sudden lights were flickering, and there was a real Donnerwetter with loud thunder, lightening, and chickpea-sized hail. I wailed preemptively for my poor tomatoes. But luckily, the hail lasted for only a few minutes and caused almost no damage.
chilled cucumber soup, presentation by James
 The torrential storm arrived almost simultaneously with Richard and Fran who were stopping by to see us for lunch on their way from Boston to NYC. Thanks to said lunch, I now have photos of the chilled cucumber, mint and yogurt soup (on the left) and I also tried my first Alice Waters’ zucchini recipe from Chez Panisse Vegetables — the zucchini fritters (on the right).
I diverged a little from Chez Panisse recipe. I definitely used more than a pound of grated zucchini, and the zest of only 1 lemon (instead of . . . CONTINUE READING → lunch update
By feral, on August 14th, 2010%
We arrived in Canaan around 11pm last night, so I had to wait until the morning to inspect the garden. After an understandably restless night, I was out in the field at 7am. Well, after the 2 weeks of my absence the garden is now officially feral. Or, according to James: “This garden has gone rogue. It’s a maverick garden.” In an amazing kind of way though.
 There are tomatoes everywhere, and they’re getting ripe by the hour! The zucchini are the size and the shape of bomb shells. Plus, I found 8 overgrown cucumbers. They haven’t turned yellow yet but some of them have already developed a pretty thick skin and need to be peeled. So, peel them I did.
For lunch I improvised a quick chilled soup: 2 large (peeled) cucumbers, about 16 oz. yogurt, 3 small cloves of young garlic, fresh dill, about 10 fresh mint leaves, juice of a half lime, 5-6 walnut halves, salt, and a pinch of cumin, paprika and cayenne pepper — blended in a food processor and served immediately.
Both preparation and consumption happened so quickly that . . . CONTINUE READING → chilled cucumber & yogurt soup
By feral, on August 5th, 2010%
 Let’s begin with some borscht ABCs. Do you like it hot or cold? If you answered “both,” don’t worry: you are not necessarily bipolar. Hot and cold borschts (I couldn’t resist using the plural here just to see an 8-letter word that has only one vowel) are two entirely different entities. Their only common ingredient is beets — but if you were to refer to every Russian dish made with beets as borscht, you’d be in big trouble. –> skip the intro –>
As a matter of fact, growing up in Minsk, I knew the cold beet soup not as borscht but as холодник — kholodnik (from Russian kholod — cold). And there were 2 kinds of kholodnik: a red and a green one. If you happen to patronize any of the Russian dining establishments in Brighton Beach, you might have met the green incarnation, traditionally made with sorrel (or щавель [shchavel] in Russian — hence the name Schav, a cold soup in a jar that you occasionally see next to gefilte fish and matzo balls in the “Manischewitz” section of your supermarket).
. . . CONTINUE READING → what’s in your borscht?
By feral, on July 8th, 2010%
Once you learn how to spell “gazpacho,” the rest is easy. And if you don’t want to keep getting corrected by search engines each time you try to find a recipe, you can invent your own. This is my super-lazy version that I prepared for lunch today in 10 minutes (or less). I kinda just made it up from what I remember from following (or intending to follow) various recipes in the past.
 Here’s what I used :
a blender 15oz or so tomato juice 1 kirby cucumber 1/3 green bell pepper 1/6 red onion 2 tbsp sherry vinegar ca. 1/2 – 1 tsp sea salt ca. 2-3 tbsp olive oil 1 fairly large tomato (not humongous but larger than medium) 1 small slice of old bread, soaked quickly in a little bit of hot water ca. 1/4 – 1/3 cup blanched almonds (if you don’t have the almonds, use a larger piece of old bread) 1 clove raw garlic (use a small one or a half if you don’t like it to be too garlicky) a pinch of ground coriander seeds, paprika, cayenne pepper, a tiny . . . CONTINUE READING → gazpacho, with a Z
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