Russian Season

Welcome to RussianSeason.net - a food blog run by a mother and a daughter living in Latvia. We cook together most of the dishes presented on the website, while Alina takes notes, writes the posts and replies to comments.

We love to explore national cuisines from all corners of the world, with a focus on foods from Russia, Eastern Europe, the Baltics, the Caucasus, former USSR… you know what we’re talking about! Being Russians ourselves, we’d love to share some of our favourite recipes with the rest of the world. We’d love to spread some knowledge about Eastern European cuisine, which is, sadly, quite underestimated and unexplored by most home cooks, as well as professionals. While you can browse through thousands of delicious-looking, highly-refined and favourited recipes of Mediterranean, Asian, Caribbean and other world cuisines, information about Russian, Ukrainian, Polish, Georgian etc etc cooking traditions and styles is extremely limited, and those recipes that can be found online  are sometimes altered to such extent that they no longer have anything in common with the originals.

Of course, we tweak our recipes as well. Sometimes we change them a lot - to add a more “modern” touch, for example. Some of the recipes we invent from scratch. I’m sure that none of you blindly follows any cooking instructions if you find you can improve a recipe or adjust it to your family’s taste. But it’s very important to draw a borderline between creativity and ignorance. And I hope we manage this! We also keep in mind that our overseas visitors might not have all the ingredients we have here, so we try to adapt the ingredient list and suggest substitutes.

We’ve been running this blog since summer 2009, so there’s a huge to-do list yet. The area we’d like to cover is so vast that we can never decide what to cook today. If you’re interested in learning more about Slavic/ex-USSR cooking, it’s a good idea to subscribe to RussianSeason and follow the updates :) We’ll try our best to publish new recipes as often as possible.

We’ve made the FoodBuzz Top9 3 times. Our latest recipe which made the Top9 was New Year’s Cake with walnut meringues and chocolate butter mousse.

In January 2010, we launched a Slovak version of our blog. All recipes are translated by Stano. He also provides us with yummy Slovak recipes!

We love to receive comments and emails. If you are looking for a particular Eastern European recipe, feel free to drop us a line and we’ll try to help or put that recipe on our great waiting list.

We can also be found and followed on Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, and FoodBuzz.