Russian Recipe Reviews: Edition Two

It’s been a couple of weeks now since I last commented on what I’ve been cooking. Today I’ll start with another traditional dish from Maslenitsa.

1- Pancakes/Blini (Блини)

Like in England on Shrove Tuesday, here in the week before lent many pancakes are cooked. The following recipe is another simple one from UofT’s Slavic Department.

• 1 litre of milk
• 2 eggs
• ½ teaspoon salt
• 2 sugar cubes
• 1/3 of cup of oil
• 2 ½ cups of flour

Add dry ingredients first then milk and eggs. Set burner on medium high heat and grease the pan. Almost one spoonful of mix per pancake – the thinner the better . Best served with honey, although sour cream plus herbs is good too. Apparently red caviar is also popular. Makes about 16 pancakes.

2- Armenian Lentil Soups

In order to use up some ingredients in my fridge I decided to make some more soups this time from an e-cookbook called Adventures in Armenian Cooking. The first variant (pictured) was thicker and only made about 3 servings. The second soup tasted more like chicken noodles soup.

3-  Compote (Компот)

In order to master Russian cooking by the end of my year in Russia I downloaded another e-cookbook called Cooking the Russian Way. It has many traditional Russian recipes and from which the next three recipes are taken from. However after doing a few of these recipes I have come to realize that this book was designed for people cooking ‘Russian way’ in North America. Because I had a surprisingly hard time finding some of the ingredients here.

The first recipe I tried was compote which was easy to make and easy to buy for. It’s a very flexible recipe where in you can use any fruit you want and you can be creative and add your own spices. I used apples, cinnamon  and cloves. The result was a very sweet-tasting apple cider.

4- Vinaigrette (Винигрет)

This is my third traditional Russian salad and so far my soups have turned out much better than the salads. The vinagrette was ok, but I think the pieces need to be cut much smaller (which my new set of knives may help with!) The best part of making this salad was making the dressing. It gave me an opportunity to practice making various emulsions. Next time I have an empty squeeze bottle, I’m going to try to make more of my own salad dressing rather than buying it!

5- Beef Stroganoff (Бефстроганов)

The last  recipe and perhaps the piece de resistance of my cooking adventures so far is the beef stroganoff. The creamy sauce made from sour cream, beef broth and mustard is to die for! If you buy a better cut of meat than I did, the whole ensemble would melt in your mouth. Accompanying this rich dish was straw potatoes (featured in the picture on the right)

Because of my difficulties in procuring some the ingredients for the dishes from Cooking The Russian Way, my next reviews will be of recipes from Russian sources. Stay tuned for more recipe reviews from Russia!