Book 14 - Chapter 12 - Khndzorov Tolma, Nigvziani Badrijani, and a Few Insights on Happiness and Suffering

"While imprisoned in the shed Pierre had learned not with his intellect but with his whole being, by life itself, that man is created for happiness, that happiness is within him, in the satisfaction of simple human needs, and that all unhappiness arises not from privation but from superfluity. And now during these last three weeks of the march he had learned still another new, consolatory truth—that nothing in this world is terrible. He had learned that as there is no condition in which man can be happy and entirely free, so there is no condition in which he need be unhappy and lack freedom."

Book: War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
Recipes: Culinaria: Russia by Marian Trutter

Khndzorov Tolma

(Apples stuffed with Ground Beef)

8 medium apples
3-4 tbsp butter
2 onions finely chopped
1/4 cups ground beef
1 bunch each parsley and cilantro
Sweet paprika, salt, and pepper to taste
2 cups boiled rice (I used cooked pearled barley)
2 very ripe tomatoes
1 cup vegetable broth

Carefully cut the tops off the apples, and using a spoon, core them, and scrape out some of the apple flesh to make room for the stuffing.  Reserve the apple flesh.

  

Melt the butter in a skillet over medium high heat.  Saute the onions until they start to become translucent.  Add the ground beef, herbs and spices and cook through, adding the reserved apple at the end.  Mix with the rice or barley.  Use the mixture to fill the apples and replace the apple tops.

Puree the tomatoes in a food processor and run through a sieve to remove seeds.  Arrange the apples in a saucepan with their tops on and pour the tomato puree and broth over them.  Bring to a boil, reduce heat to low and simmer for 30 minutes or until the apples become tender but do not fall apart. 

Nigvziani Badrijani

1 large eggplant
Salt
Oil for frying (I actually roasted mine in the oven)
11/2 cups of finely chopped walnuts
2-3 cloves of garlic
Khmeli Suneli (spice mixture of saffron, fenugreek, and corriander - I didn't have anything even approximately close to this mixture)
2-3 tbsp red wine vinegar
2 tbsp finely chopped cilantro

Cut the eggplant lengthwise into thin slices.  salt each slice and cover it for an hour to draw out the moisture.  Drain and press the remaining liquid from the eggplant (I made this recipe after work and skipped this step).  Fry teh eggplant in hot oil on both sides, remove from the pan and leave to cool (or you could just roast it in the oven).  Dump the rest of the ingredients into a food processor and run it until you have a thick paste.  I didn't have most of the spices for this, so I used a lot of extra cilantro, which made my paste a rather pleasant green color; in the cookbook, the saffron made it a rather pleasant yellow color.  Spread the paste on the eggplant slices and fold them in half so the skin is on the outside.  Let them sit at room temperature for about an hour to let the flavors blend (I skipped this part too, but the leftovers did taste better than the ones I ate right away.)

I was a little hesitant about apples and tomato broth, but in fact it was delicious.  After the uncooked garlic yogurt experience, I was also a bit hesitant of the eggplant, so for the second batch, I put the spread on first, then roasted it.  It didn't make a very appreciable difference except that the pleasing green color turned brown.  These were both good recipes, it was a lot of work to core the apples so carefully, which is why there are only 4 of them in the photo.  The rest of the filling is in my fridge waiting to be steamed into the rest of the apples, which are in my fruit bowl.

About the book:

Pierre has finally been rescued!  By our lost friend Denisov!  But while a prisoner of the French he has learned some powerful insights about his own choices in life; he thinks, "that suffering and freedom have their limits and that those limits are very near together; that the person in a bed of roses with one crumpled petal suffered as keenly as he now, sleeping on the bare damp earth with one side growing chilled while the other was warming; and that when he had put on tight dancing shoes he had suffered just as he did now when he walked with bare feet that were covered with sores—his footgear having long since fallen to pieces."  He has even learned to cope with his sore feet, much in the same way that young Rostov has learned to cope with his fear of death during a battle, Pierre simply thinks about other things.  


Rostov's younger brother, Petya, did not learn his older brother's discipline in war.  He did not listen to Denisov before engaging in a mercenary, pointles battle against the French troops, not to defeat them, but to take supplies from them which they were wholly ready to surrender.  He rushed into a token resistence and was shot through the head.  This episode, of course, will be used to highlight my next post where I will take up Kutuzov and his experience of the "glory" of war.  Look for that blog post later this afternoon.

Book 11 - Chapter 22 - Piroshki, Yablonchna Babka, and A Few More Words About War

Book: War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
Recipes: Culinaria: Russia by Marian Trutter

Music:  War and Peace - Prokofiev

Piroshki

Russian Yeast Dough


1 1/2 oz dry yeast
1 cup milk
2 tsp sugar
Generous 1 lb flour (the internet claims this is about 3 1/2 cups)
2 egg yolks
8 1/2 tbsp butter
1 pinch salt
Beaten egg for sealing and glazing


Dissolve the yeast into 7 tablespoons of lukewarm milk (this is most important, if the milk is cold it will clump up and probably damage the whole process).  Add the sugar, cover and leave for 15 minutes.  Stir half the flour into the yeast mixture with a wooden spoon to make a "pre-dough"; mine came out more or less dry after this.  Cover and leave in a warm place for about an hour or until it has doubled in size.  Beat the egg and butter until frothy, add salt and remaining milk and work into a smooth mass.  Add the remaining flour and knead on a floured surface until the dough no longer sticks.  


Once the dough is ready, you can roll it out until it's about 1/4 in thick and cut it into rounds using a glass cup.  I think I make mine a bit too thin...

For the fillings, the book has a super long list of things that people bake into piroshki.  I opted for the following 4, the "recipes" for which I more or less made up. I'm just going to list ingredients and leave the proportions up to your imagination.

Mushroom and Onion - Brown onions in butter then add mushrooms and cook until almost all the liquid is removed.   

Potato and Curd Cheese - for this I once again squeezed all the liquid out of the American cottage cheese and mixed it in roughly equal proportions with the mashed potatoes.  I added just a tiny bit of cream to make it a bit easier to manage.  An important note about the potato filled piroshki, they need to have some kind of holes poked into them, or decorative slashes added to their tops, otherwise all the yummy potato cheese filling explodes out of them. 

Sauerkraut and Onion - I browned onion in butter and added slightly more sauerkraut than onion. 

Ground Chicken - kitchen helper Jay browned onions, garlic and ground chicken in a frying pan and I ran it through the food processor.

Fill each round with about a tablespoon (or less) of filling, brush the edges with beaten egg and seal.  Brush the sealed piroshki with beaten egg and bake at 425 degrees for about 10 minutes or until golden brown.  Serve hot with sour cream and sauteed onions.  The dough will make about 60 piroshki.

This was the first batch; I forgot to brush them with egg, and they were a tiny bit over cooked (the original recipe said 20 minutes - I took these out after about 13 minutes) but they were very tasty - and you can see what I meant about the potato filling coming out.  The second batch came out beautifully and I was too busy eating to remember to take any pictures of it.

Another note about making piroshki, at first I was sealing them by hand, which I'm not very good at, then I remembered that years ago, I'd bought a dumpling press at a market in Chinatown.  That made my life much easier and made piroshki production a lot faster. I also suggest making the fillings ahead.  It's exhausting trying to do it all in one night - so exhausting that I shoved everything in the fridge and put it all together the next day.

Yablonchna Babka

 (Apple Bake)

1 1/3 lb apples, peeled, cored, and chopped into small pieces
Lemon juice
9 tbsp sugar
4 eggs separated
1/2 cup sour cream
1 cup flour
1 tsp cinnamon
Pinch of Salt
Butter for greasing the pan
Confectioners' sugar and fresh apple slices for garnish (optional)


Preheat oven to 340 degrees and grease a small baking dish with butter  Coat the apples with a bit of lemon juice immediately to prevent browning.  Beat the sugar, egg yolks, and sour cream in a bowl until frothy.  Beat in the flour, cinnamon, and salt.  Hand mix in the apples.  Beat the egg whites until stiff peaks form and gently fold into the rest of the batter.  Bake for 25 minutes or until golden brown.

This recipe has so much egg in it, it's almost a custard.  I didn't have any extra apples left for garnish and I don't like confectioners' sugar, so I just ate mine plain.  Rich and delicious.

About the book:
At one point in the novel, Pierre starts to feel as though he must "do something." So he goes off to watch the battle of Borodino.  Thinking he will be out of the way, he lands himself smack in the middle of the target for the heaviest French fire.  He nearly dies there, is almost captured by the French, almost kills his would-be captor, and isn't heard from by anybody for many days after.  He feels himself an utter coward for running away, remembering how earlier he had seen soldiers marching toward the battle exchanging witty banter with the wounded being carted back.  He wonders (as do I) how they can continue marching forward when they see the mirror image of their future selves in the wounded and dying.  Another of the many ways in which war makes no sense to me.