Recipes: Cooking Around the World: Russian and Polish by Lesley Chamberlain and Catherine Atkinson
Music: Still Nothing New to Report
Cheese Dumplings
1 cup flour
2 tbsp butter
1/3 cup crumbled feta
2 tbsp chopped fresh dill
4 tbsp cold water
Salt and pepper
A pan of salted water (or vegetable broth)
Cut the butter, feta, and dill into the flour using a pastry cutter. Add water by the tbsp until you have a manageable dough. Roll the dough into balls and simmer them for 20 minutes. I used vegetable broth simply because the Galushki had to be boiled in broth and I got confused. The dumplings tasted really good to me anyway, so I suggest it. These dumplings can be served in soup but if you are serving them plain, I recommend drizzling with olive oil to keep them from becoming too sticky as they cool.
Galushki
2 cups flour
1/4 tsp salt
2 tbsp butter
2 eggs beaten
2 cups vegetable stock
4 oz bacon cooked and crumbled
Cut the butter into the flour, mix in the eggs and knead into a smooth dough. Wrap in plastic wrap and rest for 30 minutes. Roll out the dough until it's 1/2 in thick, with your brand new rolling pin (compliments for which were given by no fewer than 2 people in the line at Bed Bath and Beyond - I guess it's a really good one.). Don't roll it out to 1/4 in thick, realize that's too thin and start over. Your dough will pick up too much flour, get dried out and, as it turns out, not cook properly. Once you have it at an optimum 1/2 in on your first try, cut it into 3/4 in squares. Leave these to dry on a floured towel for 30 minutes then drop them into your stock and simmer for 10 minutes. Serve with olive oil and crumbled bacon. If, as mine were, you have overrolled your dough, it will be tasty and bacony on the outside and dry in the middle. The bacon might entice some of your guests to overlook this. Others will steal the bacon from the Galushki and put it on their Cheese Dumplings, which is also tasty.
Pampushki
1/2 lb potatoes peeled and shredded
2 2/3 cup mashed potatoes (don't add anything, just mash the potatoes plain)
1/2 tbsp salt
2 tbsp snipped chives
1/2 cup curd cheese
black pepper
Oil for deep frying
*This recipe uses a lot of cheese cloth*
I have not been able to find curd cheese anywhere. Maybe if I went to Coney Island, but I haven't yet. I looked it up online and discovered that it's close to American cottage cheese, only less watery and that you can get something similar by squeezing the liquid through a cheese cloth. I bought the largest tub of cottage cheese at the Pathmark and tried it. By the end of the experiment, my sink looked like some kind of creamery nightmare scene, but I did have, resting in the cheese cloth, a much reduced but creamier looking cheese.
Mix this with the chives (or scallions if you can't find chives) and set aside.
Again, using your cheesecloth, squeeze out as much liquid as you can from the shredded potatoes. It will be a lot more potato juice than you expect. Mix the shredded potato with the mashed potato and salt and pepper. Taking small rounds of this dough flatten out a circle in your palm, fill it with some of the cheese mixture and wrap the potato around it so it forms a ball. When you are done, don't leave them to await frying, they will eventually turn purple and look less appetizing. Also, don't put them into the fridge to await frying, because they will be so cold, they will bring the temperature of your oil down and dissolve into mush in the pan (tasty, purplish mush, it must be admitted, but mush all the same). Use enough oil to cover the dumplings completely (I didn't quite have enough) and heat your oil to well over 340 degrees and drop the balls in so that they do not touch each other (if this happens, it may also cause mush). Fry them until they are golden brown (or golden purple, as the case may be), remove from the oil, drain them on a paper towel and enjoy.
These were the best snacks of my birthday night. But nobody really got to try them because I've never cooked in oil before and had a slow learning curve. The first batch was fried in oil that wasn't hot enough - super mush. The next single, lonely pampushka was cooked in perfect oil, came out brilliantly and was divided between myself and my 2 kitchen helpers to great applause. The next batch was too cold and lowered the oil temperature - tasty mush that everyone got to nibble on. The third and final batch - photo documented here, was made the following night in super hot oil and was delicious, but purple.
And that wraps up the birthday blogs.
About the book:
Remember Natasha Rostova and her brief, splintered love for Anatole Kuragin while she was still engaged to Andrew Bolkonski? At the battle of Borodino, Andrew was wounded almost to death and brought to the medical tent and who's on the bed next to him having a leg amputated? Anatole Kuragin. And how does Andrew react to seeing this man that he wished to duel to the death? He forgives him in his heart on the eve of what he believes will be his own death. And to whose house do they bring the wounded Andrew? Natasha Rostova's. Oh, Tolstoy, couldn't you have resisted the melodrama?
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