Category: Food

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Pelmeni-ravioli

Pelmeni

During the last long weekend, we finally tried a culinary experiment that was on the back of our minds for a while. A friend of ours has an industrial-grade Italian pasta-making machine, and we used it to make Russian-style dumplings called pelmeni. They are similar to Italian ravioli, but stuffed with raw ground meat that is cooked at the same time as its pasta cover.

I always thought that making dumplings by hand was a special social tradition for our family. It turns out that high-output ravioli production line is even more fun and socially engaging. The ravioli machine crunched 5 kg of ingredients into long strips of dumplings. My seven-year-old daughter enormously enjoyed peeling off the dumplings from a fast-moving band and setting them on drying trays.

The verdict is that the result of the culinary experiment was a complete success. The dumplings turned out to be quite different from both Italian ravioli and Russian pelmeni, but both Russians and Italians among us liked them.

Another success was that Bruno, our four-months-old puppy, stayed home alone for more than three hours without a bathroom accident and was completely content when we came back. Small victories are so sweet!

Pasta

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Honey cake

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My mom baked a honey cake for the New Year. It is my childhood favourite. She wanted to write “2018” on it, and I suggested making a paper stencil and shaving chocolate over it. When I was a child, she would decorate the cake with chocolate shavings all over the top. Now, my mom thought that stencil was a great idea, but she understood it so that the chocolate would be inside the digits. Instead, I thought that the image should be inverted – everything but the digits would be chocolate-covered. She went with my design, naturally – the more chocolate the better!

A note for the next time: the dough crumbs on the top are not necessary at all. Having a white cream background would make the writing more contrasty and would make the chocolate shavings stick better. As Winnie the Pooh told Piglet in the Russian version of the cartoon, “Both jam and honey, please, and you can skip the bread!”

My mom’s honey cakes are very close to the top of my sweetest childhood memories, but more recently, my notion what a fantastic honey cake looks and tastes like was re-calibrated when my wife and I travelled in Czech Republic in 2008. I had a conference in Prague, and after that, we travelled around most of the Southern part of the country by car over a two-week period. Two things impressed me in terms of cuisine: beer was cheaper than (bottled) water and honey cakes (called medovik) were served nearly in every cafe. The recipes were slightly different, but they were were all very-very good. Maybe, this is why that trip is one of my all-time favourites? After all, we all have incredibly strong emotional relationships with food one way or another.

Portrait of a young woman on a Charles Bridge in Pargue. Czech Republic
Portrait of a young woman on a Charles Bridge in Pargue. Czech Republic

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Homemade pizza

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Some experienced travelers say that in order to fully experience the benefits of long-term travel, one needs to live in the new country for longer than 3-4 months. This initial period is needed to learn the rhythm of the community android establish new routines. I think we are getting to the point of settling in Milan only now, after living here for five months.

Our daughter’s school has a fantastic lunch program. We are certainly going to miss it when we come back to Canada. The menu, which is catered in from a restaurant, is healthy and diverse, but pizza Margarita is her favorite item. They had it for lunch today, which our daughter told us on the way from school. And then she added perhaps the best compliment my wife could hope for as a cook: “But you know, mum, I like the pizza that we make at home much better.”

Making pizza at home is our daughter’s favorite pastime. She always insists on picking up some pizza dough when we go to a supermarket. Ever since reading Pamela Druckerman’s “Bringing Up Bébé,” I have been convinced that cooking is an excellent educational activity for kids. Apparently, the quantity of our practice is starting to convert to quality, if such a discerning critic as our daughter thinks that our homemade pizza rivals one from a real Italian restaurant.

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Ramen

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In Japan, rituals are important. For example, the proper way of eating food, the order in which it should be eaten, etc. can be very intricate. But the neat thing is that these rules often originate from practical considerations.

With ramen, for example, it’s good to take a few sips of the broth first, before eating the noodles. There are at least two reasons for this:

First, the broth is what makes a ramen bowl distinct. It usually takes hours to make and there are various kinds of it. My favourite, at Kuma Noodles in Victoria, BC, is the miso flavour. Besides the broth, what makes ramen unique to a particular region and to a particular chef is the level of saltiness, the type of noodles and the toppings.

Second, the noodles are still cooking while you are tasting the broth. By the way, it is considered polite to slurp the noodles, and there is a practical reason for this too: slurping actually cools the noodles, which are very hot. Also, because ramen is best eaten while it is hot, it is polite not to talk while eating it and to eat it quickly.

Having said all this about table manners, I was told once by a Japanese friend that the best way to show respect to the chef is to relax, enjoy the food and not be concerned about the rules. …Of course, it might have been just a polite way of making us, the gaijin, not over-think reigi too much. As with many Japanese things, I will never know…