Every once in a while, I get a hankering for the common, traditional foods I ate in Moscow. Not all of these were Russian, for the record. Georgian food rocks, and it rocks hard. Uzbek food I simply love (and I’m really excited that I will be having Uzbek food next weekend in Los Angeles!) And, some Russian staples will always have a place in my heart.
One of my favorite cookbooks is this wafer thin, barely paperback tome I got at a Russian Orthodox church here in the ‘States. It was a ladies auxilliary-type cookbook, with recipes typed in Courier font. It had the most wonderful borscht recipe, among others, but, sadly, I appear to have lost it. I think I may have loaned it to someone who never returned it. That borscht recipe was a favorite of my mother’s in her later years. It’s funny - she decided she liked borscht when she came to visit me in Moscow, and, I swear, she’d ask me to make it whenever I came home to visit Moline. “Are you going to be making borscht?” Words I never figured I’d hear my mother willingly say. Of course, she also really liked my eggplant and garlic pizza in Moscow, too - made on a fresh Georgian lavosh bread dough crust. And she normally hated eggplant. Go figure. I remember at one point, in the last year before she died, I came to visit and one of my sisters said that she really wasn’t eating anything. I made a pot of borsht, and damned if she didn’t eat some. (As did my sister’s teenage son!)
Last weekend, I had dinner at the home of two dear friends, Ben and Natasha. Natasha made some kick-ass borscht for our first course, made even better, of course, with Russian brown bread and a dollup of smetana - sour cream - on top. Man, it was good. She followed that up with homemade pelmeni, or, as I call them, Russian ravioli, also served with smetana and a dusting of dill. Yeah, you can buy bags of frozen pelmeni at the Russian grocery store, but it’s just not the same as homemade.
I remember my first night living in Krasnodar as a student, back in 1987. Our group had just arrived in the southern Russian town, jet lagged, culture shocked. Local people had been enlisted to be our “friends.” (I imagine that they had orders to do some reporting back on us, but they also seemed genuinely interested in hangin’ with the foreigners.) I ended up in a small group with the leaders of the local youth theater. They took us down the street to see the theater, and, backstage, they brought out an industrial-sized mixing bowl of fresh, hot pelmeni. There were no plates. We were just given forks, little bowls of smetana, and, god help us, shot after shot of samogon. Hootch. Moonshine. Seriously bad-ass, make you go blind, homemade jet fuel. We spent hours drinking and eating pelmeni out of this huge bowl.
I have a vague recollection of getting home late that night. I have a less vague recollection of being hideously hungover and bloated on the tour bus the next morning. Ah, college memories!
Regardless of that inauspicious evening, I still love me some darn tasty pelmeni. My friend Rachel and I used to go a kafeteria down the street from the embassy in Moscow (across the street from the really sad Moscow Zoo) and get a plate of pelmeni and a really sugary coffee for about 5 cents. There were no seats, and you were always shoulder to shoulder with soldiers grabbing a quick meal, AK-47s slung over their shoulders. (It’s a little disconcerting to have someone’s high-powered weapon bumping you as you slam your coffee and ravioli lunch…)
I actually bought a pelmennitsa at GUM (the massive department store on Red Square.) It’s this crosshatched, hinged metal framework on which you lay out the pelmeni dough. You put little spoonfuls of the meat mixture in between the metal lines and then close the device. Voila! You have a pile of little tasty pelmeni, just waiting to be dropped into boiling water.
Except I can’t make dough to save my life. So, the pelmennitsa sits unused on a kitchen shelf. (Shame on me.) But, man, was it ever nice to have some homemade guys last week. Thank you, Natasha!
Natasha also loaned me a cookbook she picked up on a recent trip to Russia. It has a chapter on borscht. We started laughing going through it, as there are probably 50 different recipes for that damn soup. Each one might have one tiny difference in ingredients. Very silly. If I find one that looks close to the church ladies’ recipe, I’ll share it here. I made borscht all the time in Moscow, and I’m astounded that I can’t remember a thing. What can I say? My brain is like a sieve these days.
I used to make plov in Moscow, too. Plov is Uzbek pilaf - the national dish of Uzbekistan. It’s a lovely, hearty mix of rice and garlic and carrots with tender pieces of lamb throughout. 
It’s incredibly tasty, and that’s what I’m planning to have for lunch this coming Friday at the stripmall Uzbek restaurant next to our hotel in Hollywood. My friends will simply have to humor me. Uzbeks make their own variation on the ravioli theme (helps that they were on the Silk Road from China, eh?) The Uzbek ravioli are called manti (that’s pronounced mahn-TEE), and, manti are really big and seasoned very differently from their Russian cousins. Very, very tasty, although the spices really catch you off guard the first time you taste one.
Again, as the preparation of manti requires a mastery of dough, I have never made them. So, there will be an order of manti on our Uzbek table on Friday, too. (I hope my traveling companions are ready to EAT!)
Another thing that requires the mastery of dough - and baking in this case - is the traditional Georgian cheese pastry, or khachapuri. 
There have to be at least 20 varieties of khachapuri, and they are all incredibly tasty. (Okay, the ones with the goat cheese are a wee bit on the salty side, but you can always make adjustments.) One small khachapuri - or a big one shared - with a bowl of soup makes for a great meal. There used to be this little bakery in a horrid industrial area of Moscow that made the most wonderful khachapuri. They sold five different types, and they all cost something around a penny a piece. I’d stop and buy a bagful and bring them back to the office. (Thank you, embassy, for giving me a job that granted me access to a car all the time!)
I would kill for a Georgian cafe to open up in DC. I understand that there are a couple of Georgian places in the Chicago area, and, if I’m not mistaken, there’s at least one in Los Angeles. (Although, time will be too short for a visit this trip.) Of course, I’m willing to bet that there are a dozen Armenian places in the L.A. area, but I can’t visit them. There is, I have recently been told, still a price on my head in Glendale, California (aka, Little Yerevan.)
But that’s a story for another time, and another blog.
Dang it. Now I’m hungry, and I haven’t been out to the store for a week. Guess ye olde bowl of Honey Nut Cheerios gets the vote today. Never mind. Less than a week to Uzbek yumminess!
