Recipes: Cooking Around the World: Russian and Polish by Polish Lesley Chamberlain and Catherine Atkinson
Music: We've maybe been slacking a bit on the Russian music, but there might have been some Russian guitar at the beginning of the night...
Liver and Bacon Varenyky
For the dough:
1 3/4 cups flour
1/4 tsp salt
2 eggs, beaten
1 tbsp butter
Beaten egg, for sealing
1tbsp sunflower oil
For the filling:
1tbsp sunflower oil
1/2 small onion, finely chopped
4 oz bacon, roughly chopped
8 oz lamb's or chicken liver, roughly chopped
2 tbsp snipped chives
Salt and pepper to taste
Olive oil and capers to serve
Sift the flour and salt into a bowl, make a well in the center, add eggs and butter, mix into a dough and knead on a lightly floured surface. Wrap in clear film and rest for 30 minutes. Roll it out to 1/8 inch thick and press into rounds. Or you could just buy Asian wonton wrappers and skip this whole process. Maybe not authentic, but certainly faster.
For the filling, heat the oil to medium high and cook onions for 5 minutes, add the bacon and cook another 4-5 minutes. Add the liver and cook until browned. Or, add the chicken gizzards and hearts (mostly gizzards) because your local store doesn't carry chicken liver, and after all, viscera is viscera, no? Dump the whole pan into your food processor and blend until it's finely chopped. Add chives (or not, if you can't find any) and lots of salt and blend a bit longer. Do not, under any circumstances, sniff the mixture. But do taste it, and possibly add yet more salt.
Spoon a teaspoon of filling into each dough round or wonton wrapper, if you are using dough, brush the edges with egg and seal in a half-moon shape, if wontons, brush with water and seal into a triangle. You can crimp the edges with a fork to make it pretty, if you want to; I gave up after the first one. Once you have all your dumplings shaped up, if you are using dough, throw them into a pot of vigorously boiling, salted water for 10 minutes, if you are using wontons, oil a steam basket generously and steam them until the wontons turn translucent.
Remove from the heat, douse with a little olive oil to prevent sticking, dare your kitchen helpers to try them, they will agree, it's not that bad. Then douse them liberally with capers and everyone will agree this is the best dish of the night, even after you've told them what the filling is made from. (One of my kitchen helpers almost single-handedly folded all these dumplings together, then steamed each and every batch. All I did was fry up the filling, and that was before helpers arrived as I was somewhat afraid of a general strike on account of the ingredients)
Aubergine "Caviare"
3lb eggplant
1 onion very finely chopped
1 garlic clove, crushed
5 tbsp olive oil
1 lb tomatoes, peeled and chopped
2/3 cup Greek style yogurt
Salt and pepper to taste
Cut your eggplant in half (I used just one eggplant and roughly adjusted everything down, except the garlic, which I probably adjusted up) and grill in the oven at 350 degrees for 30 minutes. Leave to cool. Fry the onion and garlic in 1 tbsp of oil for 10 minutes on medium high heat. Scrape out the eggplant and puree with the remaining oil in a food processor. Mix into a bowl with the remaining ingredients. Cover and chill before serving with bread or crackers. (One of my kitchen helpers completed this whole recipe; she even peeled the tomatoes "because it says you have to," which I most certainly would never have done. As it was, all I did was cook the eggplant. - It was a good night to be me with a kitchen full of helpers!)
Last Saturday we celebrated my birthday. I made a lot of Russian snacks and we drank some vodka. I will be updating this blog in installments to spare you the long array of recipes at once. I contemplated not telling my guests what was in the Varenyky. Feeling unjust, I tried being circumspect and saying, "it's made from parts of the chicken you usually don't eat." When that was too much for their curiosity to stand I simply told them the truth. At the end of the night, I asked everyone to vote on their favorite dish. I think 7 out of 9 people picked the Varenyky first. Let's hear it for hearts and gizzards! These are Jerilyn's hands holding her favorite dish, the eggplant caviare on a cracker (which means spread, by the way, not fish egg).
As a birthday gift, I was given this Russian cookbook:
And these 2 pages prove conclusively that there is Russian wine out there, and now I just have to find it:
Look for more birthday recipe posts in the coming days, as well as Carters' Millet and possibly Chicken Kiev (breast meat this time, not viscera meat!)
Special thanks to my kitchen helpers from Saturday, Katie and Jerilyn! Come to my house, get an apron to wear!
About the book:
When the Grande Armee marched on Smolensk, the retreating citizens burned it to the ground. Though some shopkeepers, at the start of the bombardment, tried to defend their wares, others were throwing them into the streets for the rioters to take, under the belief that it was better to let Russian plunderers profit from it than to let the French army enjoy even a minute of it. It was a last act of desperation, "'Ou-rou-rou!' yelled the crowd, echoing the crash of the collapsing roof of the barn, the burning grain in which diffused a cakelike aroma all around. The flames flared up again, lighting the animated, delighted, exhausted faces of the spectators." That their faces are "delighted" indicates some very human part of human nature which exults in destruction for the sake of perceived salvation. It is the furor aroused when you have willfully destroyed the last thing you can lay claim to. It must bring such freedom and ecstasy... we break so many things in the passion of a moment and spend the rest of our days sifting through the rubble to recapture the lost treasures. But better our most beloved things become rubble than fall into the hands of those we despise.
This is what I thought as I read that chapter.
Sadly, there was no Russian music to review this time.
No comments:
Post a Comment