One Day in Moscow..

..we decided to go to a park.

Expectation:

 [Translation: Happy City Day! Take an enjoyable break at Ismailovski Park!]

Reality:

Oh, Russia, always full of surprises.

“Jane! You know how to use your words, if you don’t like how I cook you need to say it! Jane!”

And so has begun many a scolding from my host mom when she thinks I haven’t been eating enough. Remember in one of my first posts after meeting my family when I noted that my host mom, unlike other Russian hosts, understands not to try and overfeed me? Well, that held true for about a week. After that it was all like, “JANE eat this hot dog, you need to put it in the cheese sauce.” “Oh it’s 8am? Eat this tiramisu quick.” “JANE why haven’t you touched this endless pot of mushroom meat soup?” “JANE I can’t let you go home to your mother looking so thin! What will everyone think?!” “JANE if you don’t like the way I cook then you need to say something! JANE.”

The funny thing is that I honestly have liked everything my host mom has fed me here. Sometimes it’s a little bit more of a grease-feast than anything else, since she definitely uses straight up vegetable oil as pasta sauce. Like, by the gallon. I don’t think she gives two hoots about actual nutrition, but that only makes stuff tastier.. amirite? But due to the sometimes excessive amounts of oil, I usually eat much smaller amounts than I’m sure the past male students she hosted did. This leads to her assuming I don’t like how the food tastes, which I have found in general in Russia not to be a problem. Not a problem at all J.

I have also found that most Americans typically don’t know anything about Russian cuisine. For this reason, I am offering you all a tutorial: Russian Food 101 at a discounted price! And luckily for you, that price is free. So grab your pen and paper because class is in session!

I. Here are the main ingredients to any real Russian dish:

1.     Dill

2.     Sour cream

3.     Mayonnaise

4.     Eggs. Usually hard-boiled

5.     Potatoes

6.     Mystery meat

7.     Sour cream (to top the first slathering of sour cream, of course)

8.     More dill

Without these extremely vital ingredients, it is likely you will be eating straight up meat and potatoes. Additionally, it is important to mention that Russia’s only two food groups are carbohydrates and meat. So if you’re craving the nutrition that can only come from fresh fruits and veggies, prepare yourself for stockpiles of cabbage, beets, and cucumbers. And these things will probably be pickled.

II. Moving on, the Russian approach to a meal is all about the courses. There are typically four plus an optional salad (if we're talking formal meal, restaurant meal, and eating at the stolovaya/cafeteria type meal). Here’s where ima break it down for you:

The first:

The first course is a soup or broth dish, which will inevitably be topped with sour cream and served with a piece of bread, either white or black. It was a strange adjustment to order soup with every meal, but whenever we didn’t, the stolovaya ladies would act like we were some sort of alien breed, asking, “первое блюдо не  БУДете?” (you’re not getting the first course?!).

This really just ended up being one of the better phonetics lessons our group received during the program, since it’s nearly impossible to forget the intonational structure of a phrase, which a grumpy stolovaya lady yielding a heavy ladel harangues you and your grumbling stomach with day after day. As much as I despised those cafeteria employees, who knowingly work in an international university’s dorm yet hate international students, I do owe them a bit of a thank you: thanks for unintentionally teaching phonetics better than our psycho-pants actual phonetics teacher. Also thanks for never poisoning me. And now, more soup talk.

• Borsht. Beet soup. What more is there really to add?! I could eat borsht everyday and never cease to enjoy it. In fact, for the first three weeks this is pretty much what I did. Then my host mom refused to make it again. In her defense, it does take a lot of time to prepare. All that beet choppin’. But I still eat it at any chance I get. The beetier the better!
• Okroshka. This is actually the one food I got served in all my time here that I was too repulsed by to eat. It’s a soup served cold, which is a horrifying idea in itself, but add the fact that it consists of essentially raw vegetables, eggs, and cooked meat with a broth of kvass/vinegar/kefir/maybe even beer and topped with sour cream, and I’m a puking woman. Kvass is the traditional broth, which I will elaborate on later, but the okroshka we had at the stolovaya was definitely made with vinegar, a version prepared more often during Soviet times since it was cheaper. One whiff of this and we were all too nauseated for lunch that day.
• Schi. This was another soup I highly enjoyed. It consisted of cabbage, some kind of meat, onions, carrots, spicy herbs (probably dill, lets be real. But maybe basil), and something sour like sauerkraut, pickle juice, or sour cream.
• Картофельный суп/Potato soup. Contains potatoes. And broth. Maybe some floating mystery meatballs. Usually a pretty solid, safe option. 

Borscht! This was my first meal in Russia!

Okroshka (aka barf in a bowl)

Potato soup!
[also note the salad, bread, and mystery meat behind it]

The Second:

This is the main part, consisting of a meat-type thing and a side, called a “garnish,” which is usually some kind of potato or other starchy thing. 

• Cotletti. Meatballs. Kind of. The cotletti from the stolovaya were just creepy grayish balls of mystery meat, which, although they didn’t have any kind of horrifying flavor, still did not really captivate my interest. My host mom’s cotletti, on the other hand, were da bomb. She added all sorts of surprise treats inside of those things. I think hers included onion, egg, mushrooms, and a less horrifying shade of meat coloring.
• Pelmeni. These are one of my absolute favorite Russian foods. They’re essentially just dumplings. Like all Russian foods, these will be slathered in sour cream, mayonnaise, ketchup, or butter. I’m legitimately salivating thinking about these right now.
• Shashlik. A typical aspect of Georgian cuisine, Shashlik can easily be defined as Skewered meat chunks of deliciousness. That’s all you really need to know.
• Kolbasa/sosiki Sausage and hotdogs. Woohoooooo. When my host mom actually got up to make breakfast for me on weekend mornings it would be hotdogs. Hotdogs and omelets. With strange solidified cheese sauce taken from McDonalds on the side (because that’s a thing at Russian McDonalds).
• Blini/Blinchiki. In Russian, blin means pancake (among other things), but these are a lot more like crepes and they can be served with pretty much any kind of topping. My favorite were blinchiki s tvorogom, which is kind of like a crepe burrito filled with this kind of cheese that we just don’t really have an equivalent of in the States. It’s usually translated as cottage or farmer’s cheese, but it’s more of a mix between that and ricotta cheese, maybe. It’s really creamy and kind of sweet. It’s way too good. And they top that off with sour cream, of course. Blini in general though, are culturally a very important food in Russia. As a tradition from the pagan times that extends to the present day, blini are used to symbolize the sun during the pre-Lent celebration Maslenitsa. Because they’re round. Like the sun. You get it. 
• Pirozhki translates as ‘little pies.’ They’re these fantastic little fried buns stuffed with anything from meat and cheese and vegetables to fish or fruits or jams. The best part is they’re sold in little kiosks along the streets everywhere. Passing by these things was one of the highlights of my morning walk to school. Like a beacon of hope, you knew whenever you neared one that soon the street would cease smelling like sweaty old men and your senses would be overtaken by the sweet scent of freshly baked bread. But only for an instant. And then it was back to BO street.

Blinchiki!

My host momma's heavenly cotletti

Cotletti, potato, and delicious mushroom mixture

The Third: 

This is the beverage course! Russians, much like Americans, drink beverages! Who knew?! There are a lot of things I could talk about here, but this post is getting a lil lengthy. So here are my favorite Russian liquids:

I need to find a way to import
 this back into my life

• WATER. Holy crap I was thirsty all the time and whenever I had water it was gone because I drank it in like eight seconds. I actually remember buying a 1.5 liter bottle of water and it being gone ten minutes later. Russians, for some reason, just don’t drink that much water. Unless its…
• TEA! Russki chai. I probably drank more tea than anything else. All day err day like uh Russian.
• LAIMON FRESH. Russians are like obsessed. I mean OBSESSED. With mojitos. At first I was skeptical. But then this drink came into my life and made me a believer. It’s nonalcoholic (although goes nicely with russkaya vodka too if you know what I mean) and delicious! Lemon, lime, and mint! All in one sugar packed drink! 
• Instant coffee/Americano/espresso. Russians do not understand good coffee. It’s a tragedy, it really is. I did hear at one point though, that regular bag o bean coffee has always been really expensive there, especially during the War, so it’s still seen as a delicacy by the older crowd. But still, you ask for a coffee at a Starbucks and they look at you like you’re an idiot and slowly say (at this point probably in English), “What kind of coffee?” THERE’S ONLY ONE KIND GAHHHHH. I drink regular drip brew coffee now that I’m home everyday just to spite them. What kind of coffee my butt. Also I’m never drinking instant coffee again.
• Kvass. This is a fermented beverage made from rye bread. Sounds super good right? By Russian standards, it’s a non-alcoholic beverage since the content after fermentation is usually less than 1.2%. It can be flavored and it can be super sugary, but is usually none of the above. I know a lot of people who do not like it, but I think it’s pretty good. Except my friend bought some from a lady on the street one time, which should maybe tip you off that it’s a bit sketch to begin with, and it was just too intensely intense and awful. There are random vendors with a tap of kvass on the streets and they sold it bottled in the vending machines in our university.
• Beer. Of course.
• Vodka? What’s vodka? Definitely didn’t see any of that in Russia…

Not Vodka

I wasn't kidding about the mojitos

My heart beats for Bacon chips!

The Fourth
Dessert! Review descriptions of pirozhki and blinchiki. And then only imagine the sweet sounding ones. Dessert should never be meat-filled. The stolovaya ladies used to play a mean prank on us where they'd put croissant delicious looking type buns out at the end of the line. Most days these were fruit filled and fantastic. Other days, prank days as I call em, they were filled with ham and cheese. Not funny, stolobitches, not funny at all. Also chocolate. I ate LOADS of chocolate. And cake. And pie. And dessert. I'm not even gonna elaborate. Except I should mention that Russian ice cream is amazing and super cheap and sold on practically every corner. I may have given into that temptation more often than I should have. Also there was this really delicious cheesecake that was like not sweet and had raisins in it. Sounds not good, but it was SO good. slathered in sour cream (As if I even have to say that. At this point that should be your first assumption). CLASS DISMISSED.