Russian Season

You should never reveal your talents or skills at work if you want to reserve some time for your hobbies. Your boss and colleagues will immediately find a way to apply them. I don’t belong to that type of people for whom career is synonym of happiness; I do my job for a living. That’s why I panic every time I get included in a new project, a working group or in a brainstorming team. I wish I had never said I could edit web pages or make banners. I wish I had never said I could use the computer. I wish I were tiny and invisible. But you cannot be invisible if you’re a press officer and it’s the pre-election period. You must be optimistic, fresh and bursting with energy and ideas. Which eventually brings me to a state of complete stupor, so when I come home from work, all I want is hide under my blanket, sleep, and dream about being invisible to co-workers. Over the last weeks, I’ve been eating frozen string beans and other type of meals you can prepare in 10-15 minutes. I haven’t even opened my last issue of Bon Appetit. I haven’t been checking Tastespotting and Foodgawker…

This is just a recipe for a simple cottage cheese cake my Mum makes. It’s good fresh from the oven or cooled, with crème fraiche or berry jam. One of its main advantages is that it’s very simple to make.

I’m thinking of making lemon&lime sorbet tomorrow – that’s the most complicated dish for me to handle at this time. Wish me luck.

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I couldn’t imagine my life without cereals, porridge, and this mousse. I love it for its almost Barbie-pink colour, its airy texture and mild flavour. I love it because it’s another reason to have some milk for lunch or dessert, which is so healthy. Cranberry Semolina Mousse is especially good with baked milk. It’s a type of milk with a sweeter, creamier taste and a warmer colour, yet the same fat percentage as plain milk. “In rural areas, baked milk has been produced by leaving a jug of boiled milk in an oven for a day or for a night until it is coated with a brown crust” (Wikipedia), but nowadays it can be found in any large supermarket - in this part of the world, at least.

Semolina mousse can be as well made with fresh black or red currants, sour cherries, or any other berries or fruits that have a strong sharp taste. Latvians call this dessert Debesmanna, which means Manna from Heaven. I’ve also seen Latvian recipes for Debesmanna made with fresh pureed apples.

With no connection to this mousse, I’m posting a couple of shots of wilting tulips. They were so beautiful as they were dying that I couldn’t resist photographing this transformation of humble tulips into strange and exotic paper-like flowers!

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This is the recipe for those exclusive Tsar blinis that I promised you a week ago :) We had never made them before, but, since it was my Mum who kept things under control, the pancakes came out perfect from the very first attempt. (Compare to my miserable first-time experience with homemade tortillas!)

Of course these are not everday or every weekend pancakes. They are meant for special occasions only (unless you’re a Tsar or a Tsarina *cough*). To begin with, despite all myths, Russians do not eat red caviar every day. I’d rather say, being a Russian myself, I wouldn’t discuss recipes involving caviar with most of my friends, just as I wouldn’t parade a shampoo I bought for 30 EUR or anything else that costs above average. I haven’t bought 30 EUR shampoos ever since I got my first job and wanted to try what it feels like to spend money, but I still do like caviar… I’m a foodie after all! Besides, it’s more about the „public image” of caviar as a luxury product, rather than the price (at least here in Latvia). Anyway, with these pancakes we had one small can of red caviar (about 140g net I believe) plus other fillings, such as jam and sour cream. And nobody complained :)

Another important thing about Russian blinis (and I think myths say the truth here), is that nobody would bother to make 2 blinis per person. On Maslenitsa, you eat as much as you like/can, not to mention that pancakes look best when stacked in tall towers ;-) This recipe made with 1 litre milk and 600g flour is given for 6 persons. I think you can easily reduce the ingredients by half and it still will be enough for a normal meal. In both cases, it’s wise to bake the blinis on two skillets. Or else you might never meet your guests as you’ll be stuck in the kitchen until the end of the day. It’s a common problem with pancakes – you need to be paaatieeent - yet I would like to note that these pancakes are slow to prepare, but extremely quick to cook – maybe that’s because they’re so airy. Why wouldn’t they be airy – with whipped cream and whipped egg whites in the batter?!

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I haven’t written anything for ages - in fact we haven’t cooked any new dishes either, because I’ve been swamped with work and minor (yet annoying) troubles. Sometimes I feel like I’m a type of person who-does-everything-in-the-wrong-time. I mean, one and the same thing can be considered good or bad, depending on the time when it happened. Say, you recieved a gift - a piece of jewellery you’d been dreaming of. That’s good. But if you received it the next day after you finally bought it yourself… that’s bad! So I feel like I need to synchronize my chaotic activities with the flow of time. And then I’ll be back to my Tao :)

Anyways, I’ll be certainly cooking this weekend. In the meantime, I’m excited to tell you about the Honest Scrap Award I received from Spicie Foodie! Nancy is Mexican, currently living in Europe - I guess somewhere in the Eastern part of it, as she wrote a perfect recipe for Czech Knedliky, and recently she posted a wonderful recipe for Beef Pepper and Mushroom Barley. Thank you so much for the award Nancy! And I enjoyed reading your 10 honest things - I actually share your 1st one! ;-)

According to the award rules, I now have to tell you 10 honest things about myself and pass on the award to 10 fellow food bloggers who are honest in their approach to blogging.
So,

10 honest things about myself

1) I work as a Press Officer, and Mum is a graphic artist.
2) I am the only person in the family who does a 10 to 18 job. Everyone else is self-employed or has a flexible schedule. Well, my schedule is not that strict anyway ;-)
3) I’ve always brought foods from all my overseas trips, instead of “normal souvenirs”.
4) When I read a book and a book character eats an apple, I rush to the kitchen and grab myself an apple too.
5) My favourite sweets are Italian. I love them all!
6) Coffee means absolutely nothing to me.
7) I strongly prefer milk chocolate to dark (which is probably mauvais ton?)
8) I have eaten fermented shark in Iceland. The trick is to eat it outdoors, in the frost, and wash it down with Icelandic vodka.
9) Mum and me like to hum to ourselves while cooking.
10) I’m always worried about my English, so Cambridge Dictionaries Online is one of my Top-10 resources.

And I would like to pass on this award to bloggers behind the following blogs:

Sunny-Side Up Recipes
Cooking With Thas
Vegetable Matter
Newly Nutritional Britt
The Colors of Indian Cooking
P.Tsaldari
J. Christina Huh
My Fabulous Recipes

Of course I understand if, for some reasons, you cannot accept the award. But I really do think you deserve it!

Update: Okay I found out some of the bloggers I mentioned have already received this award, and some don’t participate in awards, so I listed 8 bloggers instead of 10!

Doesn’t this salad look like a work of abstract art?

The name Mimosa (wattle) comes from the colour and texture of this salad. Bright orange carrots and egg whites with mayonnaise are topped with small yellow grains of egg yolk, which look exactly like fluffy mimosa flowers. Yes, yes, I know mayo would put off many of you. But, there are solutions. Use light mayonnaise that is low in fat, or make your own! I haven’t tried preparing my own mayonnaise yet, but I’ve seen the process of making it and that didn’t look like anything too complicated!

We also like our Mimosa salad with canned saury fish instead of tuna. It’s not as fancy as tuna, but it has a richer, smoky flavour and it’s more salty.

Oh and I am already thinking of a menu for my birthday, which is at the end of the month (I wonder how many Aquarians are reading me by the way?!). I’ve found these Italian White Wine cookies which I might try – they look very simple and light and airy. I don’t feel like baking any great pies or cakes (like we did for New Year’s), rather something petite and feminine. But I really don’t know what… I mean I can’t choose. I have so many bookmarks of fantastic recipes I’ve found online, that I guess I’ll have to close my eyes and click on two or three random recipes!

Speaking about bookmarking recipes, how do you manage your online culinary archives/discoveries? Do you use your RSS reader, or your browser bookmarking system, or an external social bookmarking service? I’m curious as it’s been only half a year and I’m already desperate to keep my favourites in order…

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I’ve always loved burnt sugar. I love the simplicity and rusticity of those hard, translucent lollipops that you can make by chilling burnt sugar syrup; they’re golden-brown like amber and smooth like ice. We found this recipe of burnt sugar sauce in our old Rumanian cookbook (I’ve mentioned it before). I’m used to trusting their recipes, but the first attempt with the sauce resulted in a very runny, thin substance, so we had to considerably reduce the amount of water and milk. Also, I found out that the sauce needed to be cooled well before serving: it’s still too runny when warm. The sauce tasted of milky caramel with a hint of bitterness – that mild kind of bitterness that you find in, say, coffee.

I’ve always loved apples as well. Tart or honey-sweet, green or red, almost any kind, as long they are hard (can’t stand those mushy sorts) and as long as they smell like apples. Not like apple candy, apple shampoo or apple bubble gum, but like real, organic apples! The smell of fresh apples is charming and modest, it’s delicate like silk and melancholic like autumn; it’s one of Nature’s greatest, basic perfumes.

These pancakes are made with local apples that smell of rainy days, and kefir* – sour fermented milk drink. That’s why the pancakes are pleasantly sour-ish.
*If you cannot find kefir, try using buttermilk or a sour thin yogurt instead!

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