Russian Season

You know what? I love presents. I received so many presents for my birthday on Sunday and I’m so happy. And astonished. I’m astonished to be 27. It seems like this is happening to someone else. I just can’t be 27. Ahh!!!

So, I got some beautiful clothes that match each other…

…and some new spring flowers in pots…

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Zephyr is a very common sweet produced in Post-Soviet countries. Outwardly it’s similar to marshmallow, but it’s made with pureed apple (or other fruit), egg white, and pectin. It’s considered to be very healthy, as it contains a lot of pectins and almost no fat (the varieties of Zephyr I’m showing you today contain 0.2% fat). You can see that it’s recommended by the Latvian Dietitian Association:

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Men are strange.
I can spend hours in the kitchen, whisking, mixing, melting, decorating, and when I finally enter the living-room bearing a plate of delicious cookies or cakes, Stano will murmur something like “yes of course, thank you, I’ll try them later, I’m not hungry now” - all this barely raising his eyes from the laptop, by the way. Aaaargh. Seems like he doesn’t share my cake love at all. Then one day, I grab a few sheets of frozen puff pastry, top them with sliced persimmons, brush them with whisked egg and throw the pastry into oven for 10 minutes. And he loves that! He asks me to make persimmon tarts again and again. I agree, they are nice and they can really come to a rescue when you need to bake something very quickly. Slices of persimmon look great on a crispy golden puff pastry, and cinnamon and nutmeg add a spicy twist to the mild sweet flavour of persimmon. But… Stano… what about all the other cakes I’ve baked?!

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“No more expensive foods until the end of the month”, I said to myself after receiving my January bills. I just wasn’t prepared to pay TWICE as much for things like central heating and water; seems like someone’s prosperity is improving in the new year, huh. Then I sat down and started to ponder what those expensive foods of our daily menu could be. I couldn’t think of any luxury foods I had recently bought - dried dates sounded like the most decadent of my latest purchases. It’s just that in a country with 22% VAT, everything is freaking expensive. So I headed off to the supermarket and bought potatoes, cornmeal, oatmeal, some butter (certainly we will have to cut down on that next month, haha) and other staples like milk and flour. If they raise VAT to 23%, we’ll have to rename our blog to “Creative Cooking with Potatoes” or something like that.

Anyway. If you like cornmeal as much as me, and even if you don’t have to think of 10 next ways to cook polenta because your family budget is staggering, you MUST make these cookies. I found them on a blog called 6 Bittersweets - it’s so beautiful and inspiring and fresh, I just can’t take my eyes off those stunning food photos. Xiaolu adapted the recipe from Bon Appetit, and I adapted it from her blog, substituting finely diced dried apricots for cranberries just because that’s what I had at hand. I think I’ll bake polenta cookies again for my birthday, and make both cranberry and apricot versions. They’re so yellow, crumbly, homeopathically salty, and noticeably lemony even though there’s just one teaspoon of fresh lemon zest in the dough. The smell of baking polenta cookies will make your home a million times cozier than the most expensive furniture would do. And with remaining egg whites, I made a small batch of tiny raspberry jam meringues, so we had enough sweets for all weekend.

Oh and it’s snowing again today, all day. How sweet :-/ I decided that no matter what,  we have our own micro spring in our home. I’m terrible at growing flowers, but luckily I have a good relationship with bulbous plants, so I’m going to buy more hyacinths and, hopefully, crocuses.

Lemon Polenta Cranberry Cookie recipe at 6Bittersweets

Along with boiled condensed milk, chocolate butter is one of the simplest - and the most nostalgic - home-made sweet treats of the Soviet period. Under conditions of total deficiency*, you had to be thrifty and creative. You know what we sometimes did with chocolate sweets? We spread some butter on a piece of bread, then cut a chocolate sweet into slices and put it on top of the bread. Or sometimes it was just bread, butter, and sugar on top. These simple pleasures were not as miserable as you might have thought - as everything was organic and natural. You couldn’t store products in the fridge for weeks and weeks and weeks like now: they spoiled. Butter was extremely thick, rich and… yes, buttery: the quintessence of butter. Bread was always crispy on the outside and fluffy on the inside, somewhat similar to ciabatta; the crust was slightly salty and pale golden. Another thing is that sometimes you could notice dirty fingermarks on a loaf of bread, so a common practice was to quickly roast each loaf over a fire in order to disinfect it, hehe.

This morning I spread a spoonful of chocolate butter on a slice of a multigrain bun and meditated about my childhood and all the flavours that are gone for good. But back then, how could I think that I would ever try mascarpone, and wasabi, and arugula?.. And that I would discuss all that with people from all around the globe? All changes are to the good…

*A riddle I invented as a child: “It’s round, green, and grows in Moscow. What is it?” - the right answer is orange, hahaha.

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Eureka! I’ve found out the third food on my Top5 foods/ingredients. Candied oranges! (#1 is chanterelles and #2 is lemon). I love them in cakes or cookies, I love them dipped in chocolate or dusted with powdered sugar, I love them straight. I’ve been making a lot of candied oranges recently, as it’s so easy - you just leave them simmering and do your chores or play with the baby - and then voila, you have a plate of adorable translucent all-natural candies. I’ve even frozen the excesses - I really should learn to make larger batches of foods and freeze them so that I wouldn’t have to panic about dinner every day.

This morning I realized I could add candied oranges to my oatmeal! I cut them in small pieces, mixed them with dried cranberries, and drizzled some maple syrup on top of all that. Mmmm! Those tangy and bitterish flavours of candied orange and cranberry pair perfectly with the slightly smoky aroma of dark maple syrup… in pleasant contrast to the creaminess of oatmeal! I’ve never enjoyed my bowl of oatmeal so much before, and I’m certainly going to repeat this tomorrow.