Over the Caucasus into Central Asia... Part 1

Over the Caucasus into Central Asia... Part 1

AN UNEXPECTED LAnd...

I'm way behind in keeping this blog up to where we've actually cooked through at this point, so I'll try to update how the last couple months have been.

Catching up where we left off--drinking plenty of Vodka and eating Russian food--the next countries we were cooking and eating through were the unique mix of the Caucasus into Central Asia.  Sort of a mix of the Russian/Turkish/Persian cultures in a way. 

As there were some regions of the world in this experiment that I knew were going to be exceptionally fun to cook for and that we were already familiar with, there were other areas that were sort of a mystery.  But to properly complete the project we'd need to be adventurous and try recipes for regions that we've never had an opportunity to sample--which in itself was part of the reason for this.

Georgia

“I have a lot to say," said the fish, "But my mouth is full of water.” 

― Old Georgian Proverb

Georgia--the former Soviet republic and anchor of the northern Caucasus region, not the southern US state--was going to be one of the countries.  Not only have I no real familiarity with the dishes I'd be cooking--but I've never been to a Georgian restaurant in my life.  We had an opportunity while in Prague last year, but I relented finding it in a more confusing and less tourist friendly neighborhood of that Czech city on an especially cold December evening.

The Moscow Mule in the back really rounds out the picture.

Furthermore, the night we were going to cook this dish I was a little tired from the previous night celebrating my friend Sean's birthday at a standup comedy show.  So while I sort of picked the recipes, Laura did most of the cooking.  What we cooked was interesting--a selection of meatballs with a sour cherry and pine nut filling and a lentil and feta salad with sour cream pesto.  The results were interesting--I enjoyed the meatballs, though the salad had a less pleasing texture.  In part this was due to a difficulty finding good Georgian recipes to cook on short notice, though a month later I'd find a long article in Saveur Magazine highlighting the wide range of Georgian cooking (along with many good recipes).  If only we'd known at the time.

Armenia

“Another Armenia, Belgium...The weak innocents who always seem to be located on a natural invasion route.” 

― James T Kirk, some old Star Trek episode

Armenia was another interesting choice on the route.  It's a nation that exists despite being a victim of some of the worst atrocities of the 20th Century--and the actual nation-state itself only survived because it was under  Russian control through the Cold War--the actual heartland of Armenia remains free mostly of Armenians--there's actually more Armenians in Los Angeles and Southern California these days.

The food itself though is reminiscent of a lot of Greek or Turkish food--as well as countries just over the border from the traditional areas like Syria.  So in some ways, once again Laura could bring up how "this meal tastes just like my dad's Syrian food."  There's a lot of commonalities between the former domains of the Ottoman Empire and the Syrian/Lebanese dishes of the Levant--and some of those exist all the way towards India as well.

Maybe the second best meal on this trip at that point.

The dish we chose this time turned out excellent.  It was a Armenian moussaka--similar to a Greek moussaka though with layers of potatoes instead of eggplant and a good amount of ground lamb and topped with ricotta salata cheese.  The bechamel sauce with a taste of nutmeg was a reminder that we were still solidly in the "Yogurt Belt"  a region that basically stretches from the Balkans until Northern India.  It was a hearty meal--as good or better than the thick Greek moussaka I remember eating as a kid in Canada.  It was also sort of familiar dish for an unfamiliar area--Armenia is sort of peppered in my head as being similar to Greece in some ways.

Move over Napa and Burgundy...

To finish it off Laura made a wilted spinach and pomegranate seed salad that was a nice contrast to the first dish.  To further complement our Georgian feast I had obtained two bottles of regional wine from the Barbur World Foods market in SW Portland.  One was an Armenian pomegranate wine--a sweet fruity concoction that like a lot of things in this region seemed to be about pomegranates   It was alright--decent for a desert or summer wine, but not something I'd go back to.  The other wine was actually Georgian wine.  Apparently the Georgians are somewhat known for their wine production--though the export industry is relatively young and unrenowned.  The bottle we got was of the Mukuzani appellation--apparently the most famous wine in the Georgian region.  Though honestly, it was not among our favorite wines sampled.  It had a heavy fruity flavor to it--though almost a dark aftertaste of well, charcoal.  I kept waiting for the wine to open up a little, but it really was a little much.  Though I'm willing to give another Georgian wine a try, but I'm doubting they'll be competing with Oregon pinots anytime soon.

Iran

“When the cat and the mouse agree, the grocer is ruined.” 

― Old Persian proverb

Ben Affleck would like to thank the people of Iran and Canada for this meal.

Iran was the next country--or Persia as it has been known throughout history.  It's one of those cuisines that I've tried before--there's a restaurant in downtown Portland with a lunch buffet--but never truly dove headfirst into the extent of what the culinary region might entail.  For our dinner, we cooked khoresh bademjan--a saucy chicken and eggplant stew in a tomato sauce with a lemon and cinnamon.  To complement it we cooked Persian rice along with kuku sabzi--an egg and herb dish apparently cooked for New Year in Iran(according to the cookbook).  It was a good natured sort of meal--delicious in it's own way--with just enough of herbs and flavor to be interesting.  The kuku sabzi in some ways was basically a Persian frittata.  It was enough to whet my appetite for Iranian/Persian cooking--from what I've tried there's something simple yet refreshing about the food there--none of the heavy curries you find to the east towards India, yet a little more interesting than some of lamb and yogurt staples you find in the rest of the region

I'll continue the rest next time as we get into the food of Afghanistan and Pakistan and make out way toward the Indian subcontinent which will prove to be a whole different ballgame...

Into Poland and the land of the Czars...

Back on the trail...

Sorry for the delay in keeping up with tales of our trip.  When I last wrote about our journey of food we had just finished our Hungarian goulash.  Our next stops on the itinerary would be through Poland, the Ukraine, and then into the dark heart of the Russian Empire itself.

Poland and the Ukraine 

“A soldier lives always for the next battle, because he knows that before it arrives impossible changes can occur in his favor.” 

― James A. Michener, Poland

Poland was a special country for me, due to my maternal heritage of 100 percent Polish blood (as far as we know, though who knows, we could be part Lithuanian or Ukrainian somewhere down the line).  And it's next to impossible to find good Polish food in most cities west of Milwaukee, though Portland used to have a good Polish cafe two night as week at Grandpa's Cafe (now a private club only for Polish Library members) and now has a good new place at Bar Dobre on Hawthorne.  But nonetheless, finding the good stuff is a challenge for the most part--but luckily Polish food is fairly easy to cook.  

Because Laura wanted to cook her favorite Ukrainian borscht recipe and technically from Hungary(our last stop) we'd have to go through the Ukraine to get to Poland (at least the route we were theoretically taking) we decided to combine the two the first night.  I decided to make pierogies for the first time.

Ukrainian borscht on the left, pierogies on the right and Polish vodka in the back.

 Pierogies aren't difficult to make, though I'm not much of a baker--or much of any sort of cook for anything that involves dough or kneading or those sorts of things.  I'm one to cook a long simmering stew or grill a piece of perfectly marinated meat, but I ain't running a bakery over here.  But the pierogi recipe was fairly easy and we had a good mix already of sauerkraut with meat and mushrooms for the filling.  The hard part however was the arduous task of actually rolling up all the pierogies by hand.  I remember speaking to the proprietor of Grandpa's Cafe a few years ago and having him mention how the Portland Polish Festival no longer could make by hand the thousands of pierogies for the weekend long festival with the rise in popularity--and was forced to order frozen pre-made pierogies from Chicago.  But my handmade pierogies -after a quick boil turned out fine--and with a topping of sour cream and dried chives was suitable Polish/Ukrainian meal.  Laura's Ukrainian borscht, which features crumbled sausage and shredded garlic on top of a hearty base of beets was as good as it usually was.  And we finished the rest of my high end Pravda Polish vodka, which would kick off about a week of Polish and Russia vodka drinking.

More Poland (or possibly Lithuania)

Goblacki or cabbage rolls or "pigs in a blanket" or guluptsies or  balandėliai.

Before moving onto Russia, Laura requested I make cabbage rolls.

Goblaki, the traditional Polish dish of cabbage stuffed with meat in a tomato sauce are fairly easy to cook--and common to much of the region including Poland's neighbors in Lithuania where they are called guluptsie or balandėliai.  My mom claims that growing up in Milwaukee in a Polish neighborhood they called them pigs in a blanket.  So the next meal could have been considered  for either of these nations and  fit into the itinerary.  I used a recipe from a book I got at the Polish Festival a few years ago that was produced by a bunch of old Polish grandmas at the Polish church itself--which was fitting since goblaki are reminiscent of something you'd eat a dinner in the basement of a Polish church.  The dish turned out fine--I added a little chili pepper flakes to give it some spice, though Laura commented it could have used more tomato sauce to which I agreed.

Russia

"I took a speed-reading course and read War and Peace in twenty minutes. It involves Russia."

―  New York Knicks fan Woody Allen

 A meal fit for a Czar, Secretary General, or Russian Mafiya boss.

Our first night with Russian cuisine I decided to cook beef Stroganoff and Olivier Salad both of which are from an interesting era of Russian history. Beef Stroganoff is among the most, if not THE most, recognized and cliched Russian dish.  The name comes from some important member of the royal Stroganov family in the mid-1800s.  Olivier salad is a dish developed by the Belgian chef at the Hermitage--on of the top restaurant in Moscow in the 1860s.  It's almost a more French or Western European seeming dish, but both dishes are sort of reminiscent of the time in the 1800s when Russia's imperial dreams of the Czars were slowly rolling towards their inevitable sunset.  It was an era where Russia looked to France and the Western European world instead of their brutal historic past to the east along the steppes.

Yes, that vodka has a hammer and sickle on it.

The real Beef Stroganoff is a simple enough recipe, slightly floured beef strips cooked in a sour cream and mustard and lemon sauce.  The real version uses potatoes or fries as a side dish instead of the noodles that became ubiquitous in the US once the dish was introduced in the 40s by war of American GIs and surprisingly enough Chinese immigrants (the dish was big in Chinese restaurants after the fall of the Czars). It's delicious and in a way it's sort of a refreshing throwback--something along the lines of what would've been considered a night out in the age of Roger Sterling and the heyday of the martini in the early 1960s.  The Olivier Salad was a fairly average tasting mix of a potato and egg salad on a bed of lettuce with a mustard and mayonnaise dressing seemed alright, though it wouldn't feel out of place in any Best Western room service menu.  The original recipe--which I wanted to follow actually called for a grouse or partridge to be served in the salad--but try finding a grouse or partridge at the last minute in Portland these days--Trader Joe's doesn't carry that sort of thing.

Of course, being Russia we continued our vodka tasting experience.  This time trying the Russian "Hammer and Sickle" brand vodka, which I assume is sort of a nostalgic throwback for the Russians or a joke for the western export market.  Nonetheless, it's a good high end vodka, smooth and a with enough of a bite that it's good enough to drink on the rocks like water--as the Russian tend to do.  The other vodka was Bak's Vodka Zubrowka--a flavored vodka  made from the bison-grazed grass of Eastern Poland.  It's got more of a sweeter taste to it, which made it an easy drink as well.

Further into Russia...

A lot of beets died to bring you this meal.

We followed up with another night in Russia, this time focusing on the sort of food that one might eat in the cold recesses of Russia while enjoying more and more glasses of vodka.  I picked a cured salmon recipe which involved marinating the fillet in a mix of beets, dill, and vodka. Apparently it was a recipe prized by one of the royal chefs of the Romanovs.  The downside was that the recipe called for burying the salmon under a literal mountain of chopped beets and dill and vodka for over a day.  Proceeding along this path before Laura got back from work--I started chopping the beets--getting half way through the recipe I looked like the ending of the horror film "Carrie."  My hands and shirt were covered in beets, the kitchen was covered in beets, the cats covered in blood red beets.  Funny enough, we didn't even need that massive amount of beets for the taste and texture to be evident.  It had a nice rich blend that distinguished it from typical smoked or cured salmon dishes.

Это была хорошая еда.

We consumed the a salmon the next night, serving it on buckwheat blini--which are sort of tiny buckwheat pancakes.  Along with the salmon we topped them off with sour cream and caviar.  On the side we served a simple Russian mushroom soup recipe.  It was the sort of meal you could imagine being eaten as sort of an afterthought to bottle after bottle over vodka in a cold Russian bar.  And it was good as leftovers for several more days.

Taking the Pepsi Challenge--but with Vodka!

As we finished up Russia by drinking more and more vodka, we decided to test the argument that all vodka basically tastes alike.  We had a short vodka tasting flight between three of the vodkas we had on hand.  First off, the Dutch Ketel One--a staple of cheaper/mid-range vodkas around here--the high end Hammer and Sickle brand from Russia, and an vodka from California--Tahoe Moonshine--flavored with both honey and made with real Lake Tahoe water.  Ketel One is good, decent for anything you might need it for, but I mean it basically tastes like vodka.  Hammer & Sickle has a very smooth taste to it--so it's almost easier to sip for hours until you realize you've been drinking vodka instead of water.  The Tahoe Moonshine had a harsher taste to it--a little more charcoal flavored in a way, though the honey taste doesn't do as much as just make it seem stronger in terms of a bite to the aftertaste.  I think Laura and I both liked the Hammer and Sickle the best--the Tahoe vodka seemed a little too strong of a taste whether drunk on the rocks or mixed into a drink.

The Next Episode--- Into the Caucasus

I'm going to try to post more regularly to catch up this blog to the countries we tasted so far--so next time I'll explain what we cooked for the surprising region of Central Asia featuring Georgia, Iran, Afghanistan--and why Armenian food is basically just the same as Syrian food which is the same as Turkish food which is pretty close to Greek food...

Around the World in 80 Days(or Meals)?

As it started...

I think it started the night I cooked bucatini l'amatriciana just after New Years.  I didn't have time to go get the good pancetta from the Italian deli downtown and just settled on the overpriced packaged meat and a bottle of cheap Chianti from QFC.  I made it extra spicy with fresh Fresno peppers rather than just dried chili flakes.   The sauce of this specific dish has a way of getting more flavorful as it bunches up towards the bottom of the dish.  By day two it's even better than the night you made it.

I think around the second or third glass of wine this particular night, I had a notion.  I told Laura I had an idea--that as usual--I prefaced by saying "You're going to think this is stupid, but..."(This is a frequent prologue to many of my somewhat quixotic ideas that don't go very far).

"What, just say it..." replied Laura...

"What if we just cooked a different dish from a different country every night, but did it in geographic order.  Like we'd start in Italy right now and just plot an itinerary and keep going all the way around the world until we returned to our original destination..."

"Actually, that's not dumb at all, that sounds sort of interesting."

"Alright, we'll start in Rome, and just go from there..."

Ecstatic that my lady shared my enthusiasm for my new course of action, I quickly set about finding a proper meal of Roman origin to begin our culinary odyssey.

So to cut to the chase, we started in Italy--though we could have counted the meal a few night prior as the proper start to our journey.

Switzerland 

"In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock." Orson Welles as Harry Lime in the Third Man...

Though we hadn't had the idea of making the dish part of a round-the-world trip, we had served up a somewhat Swiss fondue dish as an unofficial start. 

Laura recieved a fondue pot for a birthday present a couple months prior to this.  It was basically an easy dinner for both of us--though Trader Joe's was out of their own fondue cheese mix, so we basically bought a combination of pre-packaged Fred Meyers and some French gruyere and other cheese along with a white white from Alsace.  Laura made an excellent Savoy salad with raspberry vinaigrette and walnuts.

 A good choice, as pre-made Fred Meyer's fondue is always an enjoyable way to watch a Blazers game on a winter night.

Italy 

"Esse nufesso qui dice male di macaroni" - Old Italian proverb translated as "One has to be an idiot to speak badly of macaroni."


We started with an Italian dish and I felt it appropriate to be something from Rome.  Abbachio all Romana or Roman-style lamb, is a fairly simple dish.  But it's a dish I remember eating in Rome at a restaurant near the Pantheon.  The flavor from the dish comes from vinegar, white wine, and anchovies--which gives it a slightly salty, rich taste to it.  It's a very hearty sort of lamb dish, cooked until tender. We served it was roasted rosemary potatoes, an Italian salad, and a bottle of Barbara D'Alba--a Piedmontese wine, that Laura found a little too intense after the easy-going Chianti we drank a couple nights before.  The meal all in all was a success, a proper start, and as always Italian food and wine is an easy combination.

The lamb is on the right--we didn't eat the cat however.

Greece 

"Well begun is half done." - Aristotle

The second official stop on the journey was Greece, and unfortunately Greece was a little rushed on busy middle-of-the-week worknight and just like the Greek economy, sort hit a bump in the road and required some austerity on our part.  The soup Laura made was good--it was a Greek lemon and egg chicken soup that I enjoyed though she didn't seem enthused about.  We also had some leftover spanokopita that we re-heated on the side.  The bigger problem was that this meal came right at the start of a nasty stomach illness that Laura caught--meaning that we skipped cooking for a few days.  A shame, as well, since we usually enjoy cooking Greek food.  But alas, that's how travel sometimes goes...

This is obviously Greek food.

Bulgaria 

"If you call one wolf, you invite the pack." Bulgarian proverb.

.

Bulgaria was our return to cooking and I picked another relatively simple dish--Bulgarian potted chicken, which is a traditional way of cooking chicken.  I used fresh tomatoes with mix of paprika and a chili pepper that gave it a good flavorful mix.  I topped it with fresh parsley and a yogurt sauce--which was appropriate since Bulgaria is specifically known for it's yogurt.  I couldn't get Bulgarian yogurt, but we used some Greek yogurt, which was really close enough.  In fact though, the Bulgarians actually claim to have invented yogurt, the production of which in the region goes back to 3000 BC.  Did you know that?  Well, now you do.  That's how you win Jeopardy and make big money, knowing facts about Bulgarian yogurt.  

All in all though I thought the dish was good, if not particularly unique--but tasty in a familiar way.  Laura compared it to Syrian food, which would be an idea repeated several more times.  Apparently the Syrian food that Laura's father and family cook has a lot of commonalities with much of the surrounding region including the parts of the Balkans the Ottomans ruled over.

 Romania

"Calul bun se vinde în grajd." Romanian proverb meaning "Good wine needs no bush."

 Back in the game after Bulgaria, we made another recipe from the giant Eastern European cookbook I bought at the Polish Festival over a year ago.  This time we made Bessarabian pancakes stuffed with spinach and feta(Bessarbia was the historical name region of Romania that is now mostly part of the country of Moldova).  Along with that we had a shopska salad or in Romanian, Salata bulgărească, which is actually a Bulgarian recipe that's popular in adjacent countries, that's a tasty tomato and onion and cucumber salad with a yogurt and vinegar dressing with a couple chili peppers to give it some kick.  Tasty and we had it on our own trip to the Balkans in Bosnia as well.  All in all a good mix, and we drank it with a bottle of  Grüner Veltliner white wine that Laura had been saving. Again it was a simple meal that was enjoyable for it's simple familiarity--though I think in some ways we sold Romania and Bulgaria short with our choice of recipes.  But we were both getting over winter illness, so just getting back to cooking was essential.

Hungary

"I'm really Hungary, when is the goulash going to be done..." Laura Daye, waiting for goulash to be ready.

One bowl of many of our lamb goulash.

Hungary will be the final stop on this leg of our journey--and for me it was a good one.  Mainly because it involved a giant stewing pot of lamb goulash and lots of wine.  Any time I get to drink wine while staring into a giant cauldron of stewing lamb and dumplings cooking in a rich broth, I'm fairly content.  I made a couple other goulash recipes--one was more a Czech-style goulash and the other more a spicy Balkan one--and on our trip to Austria, Prague, and Germany last year, we each tried a couple different styles of goulash as it's a fairly ubiquitous dish in all of Central Europe.  However, this was a real traditional Hungarian goulash with bell peppers and potatoes--along with the giant egg and flour dumplings.  I added a ton of paprika, more peppers, both green and red, and a little of the Côtes du Rhône red wine we were drinking with dinner.  We finished off the rest of the Grüner Veltliner as well--which was appropriate since the white wine was Hungarian.  It was another rich dish that in some ways almost reminded me of Hungarian chili combined with the familiar flavors of a Eastern European beef stew.  Central and Eastern European food however is best as a heary mid-winter meal--it's designed to stick to the insides of your ribcages.

The Journey Continues...

As we travel on, next we head onto the Ukraine and Poland before diving into the depths of Russia and then onto the Caucasus.  Expect tales of the surprising amount of effort it take to make pierogis, how Beef Stroganoff was invented, along with Polish vodka--and Russian vodka, and probably even more vodka!

New Contributor

Photo above was taken our first night in Dubrovnik, September 12, 2010 enjoying octopus salad, steamed mussels, and Croatian wine at a restaurant that, I will fully admit, Rick Steves recommended. Dubrovnik was lovely.

I sort of forgot about this blog, even though people actually read it. Apparently, the last time I wrote was in April. But now, hopefully, it will be updated more often, because it will have a second contributor: my boyfriend Derek.

Derek is a renowned eater, and, more recently, cook. He has always loved to eat, but never really cooked anything of substance until approximately 2 years ago (I believe his first adventurous recipe was Sukiyaki), but now he cooks ambitious recipes from all over the world nearly every day, and takes pictures of EVERY SINGLE THING HE COOKS.  But up until this point, the food photos stayed mainly on his iPhone, with the rare posting to Facebook. What a waste. So I came up with the brilliant idea that he should become a co-contributor to Kitchen Kat and resuscitate this dying blog, while simultaneously providing a venue for exhibiting his daily cooking photos. This is very exciting!

Another element to add to the excitement is that we started this project, challenge, adventure, whatever you want to call it, where we cook our way around the world: each night (or two if we feel particularly inspired by the cuisine) we cook dishes from a particular country, in a mostly linear progression around the globe. We started in Italy, I believe, and last night made it to Russia with a fantastic beef stroganoff, Olivier Salad, and Soviet Cocktails made with Russian Vodka, naturally. 

Here is the recipe for a Soviet, courtesy of the Mr. Boston Platinum Edition Drink Mixing Guide (the best and most comprehensive cocktail book, in my opinion):

                       1 1/2 oz. Vodka

                       1/2 oz. Amontillado Sherry

                       1/2 oz Dry Vermouth

                       Shake with ice and strain into ice-filled old-fashioned glass. Add a twist of lemon peel.

So please welcome Derek, and I hope you enjoy his posts!