Russian Season

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.

When I was pregnant, I often thought about how my mind would change after I’d become a mother. I wondered if I would become wiser, more patient and tolerant, more thoughtful and conscientious… more grown-up. A mother is a person you look up to, after all. So what does it take to become a mother? After I gave birth to Ivanka, I realized that nothing had changed. There certainly are external signs such as tired look or imperfect waistline, but the inner me… it hasn’t changed. It’s just like when my Mom says “I still feel like 30″ or when my Grandmother recalls anecdotes from her school years (well, Stano says she sometimes behaves as if she were 16). Because she hasn’t changed inside since she was 16. So, I’m a mother and yet I’m still the same. And for the first two months, it was as strange and hard to say “I’m a Mom” as it is to say “I love you” for the first time.

Why am I talking about this? Just because I feel like I’m still interested in my former activities like food blogging or running my other website, and sometimes it’s hard to juggle all this while staying sane. I am very attached to our daughter (to such extent that I’ve cried a few times when someone from the family went for a walk with her and I stayed home), but I’ll never become a parent obsessed with natural parenting, or any other parenting trend, or just parenting as such. It’s just a (huge and significant) part of our life, isn’t it?! I want to keep in touch with my friends, and we usually have someone to visit us on weekends, but most times I feel tired afterwards. I’ve also noticed that whenever we make a plan of watching a movie after the baby goes to bed, she won’t fall asleep for hours, so we usually end up watching the movie in bed, sharing a pair of earphones, with happy Ivanka sleeping between us.

I haven’t had the energy to bake or cook a lot of new things recently; besides, I’ve decided to eat more healthfully (seems like after 4 months of breastfeeding, I’m finally starting to lose my hair - I need vitamins badly). Thanks to Healthy Mamma, I’ve found a collection of fabulous smoothies - I want to try them all, well maybe except for those with veggies, I’m still not used to drinking vegetables. I made a Banana-Oat smoothie this morning and it rocked!! Why have I never added rolled oats to my smoothies before?!

So now I finally have the time to write about Parižske rožky (Paris Horns), which are my favourite variety of baked goodies Stano’s Mom makes for Christmas. These tiny cakes are a true masterpiece. There’s a generous triple swirl of luxuriant chocolate buttercream on top of a fragile walnut meringue, and each cake is glazed with dark, glossy chocolate. It’s a heavenly combination of three textures - the brittleness of meringue, the silkiness of buttercream, and the subtle crisp of chocolate glaze. It takes a while to make them though - bake the meringues, make the buttercream, decorate each cake and dip each one in melted chocolate - so I am not sure I’ll be able to recreate them in near future. But if you have a free evening, they’re really worth it. And here’s the recipe.

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I really wanted to bake something Russian for Orthodox Christmas, but I couldn’t think of anything simple enough. I knew I’d be alone with Ivanka all day and I just couldn’t make yeast dough AND make dinner AND then bake. Mom is making her traditional cabbage Pirozhki for our family dinner, while I had no other choice than think Scandinavian. Why Scandinavian? Because their recipes are always simple and precise, focused on convenience, time-saving, and often thrifty. Lagom är bäst. This cookie recipe can be found on any Dansukker pearl sugar package. I only altered the cookie shape - I had absolutely no time to make four baking sheets of pretzels, so I armed myself with a heart-shaped cookie cutter and soon I had 200 crispy hearts sprinkled with beautiful snow-white sugar. They’re lightweight, they’re flaky inside, they’re lagom sweet and they’re utterly easy to make! Margarine, flour, sugar, and some whipping cream are four ingredients that are always at hand. In fact these are shortbread cookies with margarine in place of butter.

Now I’m wondering why I had never visited Dansukker page before to see their recipes?! Just have a look at their collection of citrus marmalades for example. They’re minimalist and economic, and they’re all about pure, bright, basic flavours - flavours of our childhood, of a sunny winter morning, of a grandmother’s pantry. They’re inspiring!

Last but not least, I would like to wish a happy Christmas to anyone Orthodox who’s reading our blog, and I will also try my best to finally write about those Slovak cookies soon. I couldn’t have a more supportive baby than Ivanka, but still - a baby is a baby :)

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For the New Year’s Eve, I wanted to make choux puffs. I have to say I had never made them before, but I googled for the recipe and it sounded like something pretty easy to make. Choux puffs are so beautiful and perfect on a New Year’s table! So, I decided to go for it and asked my sister to come over and babysit for a couple of hours (while Stano was chilling out at their corporate NYE party). I made vanilla cream filling with one of my precious vanilla beans. The filling came out flawless - fluffy, glossy, and richly flavoured with vanilla, but that was apparently the last thing I made right. Every recipe I found called for 4 eggs in the batter, but I felt like my batter was too loose already after the third egg, so I didn’t beat in the fourth. The batter didn’t hold its shape at all, but I still decided to pipe it onto the baking sheet and see how it would behave in the oven. I had read that the batter balls (or in my case - batter blobs) had to be around 1 inch in diameter. So I placed my tiny blobs into the oven and waited. After 7 minutes the blobs got pretty brown in colour and puffed up a little bit, but they still were tiny. They looked like real choux pastry inside, though. Ugly little brown dwarfs :) I still had some batter left and thought I’d make larger blobs and see what would happen. This time I got a batch of small flying saucers… I was devastated! But that was hilarious too - all those baking sheets with miserably flat “puffs” stacked around the kitchen..

Now can anybody tell me what I did wrong? What didn’t I read between the lines when I was reading the recipe? It looked very simple at a first glance. I need to learn to make choux puffs!!

So, as you could have guessed, we had no choux puffs for New Year. Which actually didn’t make our family get-together any worse - it was still very generous and very international, you could hear Russian and Slovak and English and Italian and Spanish languages, there were Italian and Latvian sweets on the table, and the jewel in the crown - Mom’s cranberry and whipped cream trifle cake, decorated with Christmas trees of kiwi and fireworks of coloured sugar.

Aaaand I know I’m late as always (this year I have an excuse though), but I’d like to wish all my fellow bloggers a very happy, cheerful and delicious New Year. Cin cin!

To sum up things, our Christmas was wonderful. It was a very white Christmas, yet not too cold; we had a delightful dinner with my and Stano’s parents; our Christmas tree was beautiful; we all got great presents (Ivanka got the most - she’s now supplied with clothes for years ahead). Of course about one half of my gifts were food-related. I got another two Slovak cookbooks (one of which is solely about desserts and baking, wahoo), a pastry tube, funky muffin liners, and Stano gave me… maple syrup! I was in seventh heaven, because I had never seen maple syrup in Riga. And I’ve been craving crepes with maple syrup!! Well, Stano also gave me a much valuable gift, but I guess I was most emotional about the syrup… haha.

My humble collection of Slovak cookbooks

And here’s our perfect holiday morning treat: cottage cheese and apricot rolls, served warm for Christmas breakfast. We made tons of these, so we had to freeze the excess rolls - you can thaw them and easily re-heat them any time later. I loved the combination of cottage cheese and vanilla pudding in the filling - it made the filling very smooth and creamy. There’s a belief in our countries that you have to be in a good mood while baking; you could even try singing as you knead your dough… Apparently we felt very happy while kneading, because our dough kept rising and rising and rising…

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Merry Christmas to everyone! We are enjoying the second day of Christmas, watching Morozko - a Russian fairytale, known as Mrazik and shown on TV every Christmas in Slovakia. We had a Slovak-style Christmas this year, with all the authentic foods and traditions. In the beginning of our Christmas meal, there was just an apple, garlic, and honey on the table, and Oblatky - very thin, lightweight Christmas waffles. We cut the apple crosswise to see if it was clean and white inside, which meant we’d be healthy during the next year, and then we rubbed our Oblatky with garlic to be even healthier, and drizzled them with honey to have a sweet life. Then we could begin our meal.

Kapustnica is a traditional Slovak soup made with sauerkraut, ham, spiced sausage, and dried porcini. If the sauerkraut is very sour, it can be balanced by a spoonful of raisins or prune jam. The soup  resembles Russian Shchi, but is much spicier. I love the sour, sweet and spicy Kapustnica! Last winter Stano’s Mom made a vegetarian version of this soup specially for me, but this year I tried it with ham and sausage. I have to say that it tastes great also without meat! Just add more porcini and don’t ignore the prune jam. I’m sure you would enjoy the intense, spicy flavour and the beautiful brick-red colour of Kapustnica. Serve is with Garlic Rolls, and you couldn’t think of a winter treat more comforting and warming! Read the rest of this entry »