Russian Food

As promised, I wanted to write a bit about the food we have been eating here, and Russian foods in general.
Restaurants - Firstly, just like anywhere else in the world now, you can find just about any type of food you could imagine here in Russia (just about). We have gone out to eat sushi about four different times now and in different sushi restaurants because it just feels so nice after a few days of starch-heavy Russian food, to eat something fresh and cool. It also helps that sushi here is really cheap. If we go for "business lunch" for example, you can get a sushi combination special for around 300 rubles (about $10 Can.) and it will include a drink, a bowl of soup, and usually between 18-24 pieces of sushi. We have also seen or the city has: Chinese, Indian, Thai (which we will have to find soon because Ross and I have been craving Thai food and unfortunately haven't been able to find the ingredients Ross would need to make his famous Thai dishes), Scandinavian, Italian, etc. in restaurants all over the city. There are also some great options for Caucasian food, already Ross and I have been out for Georgian food which was fantastic. We ate shashlik (they are meat kebabs with either beef, chicken, pork, lamb or goat), a very tasty beet salad, and seasoned potatoes. From what we could determine, Georgian food is a bit like Mediteranean food, the potatoes were boiled but then seasoned in a vinegar like dressing with some spices, and a spieced oil and vinegar sauce was brought out to go with out meat.

Grocery Stores - The grocery stores are a bit of a different story to restaurants, and while there are plenty of options to choose from, we haven't been able to find some of the items we would like. The fruits and vegetables for instance, which are almost entirely imported (from Spain, Italy, even South America) are of poor quality and are often spoiling in the store. We have however found potatoes, onions, an occassional good looking pepper, mushrooms (always! this wouldn't be Russia without mushrooms - will explain), apples, bananas and oranges. Leafy vegetables aside from cabbage are almost completely non-existant and the other fruits and vegetables we avoid as well. This is partly because of the water issues here. Although the water is treated, in many places the pipes are very old and so heavy metals have been found in the drinking water, as well, there is a particular parasite in the water here which Russians have built up immunity to, but would cause us a lot of troubles. Since fruits and vegetables are often laid out on ice, or are rinsed in the grocery stores we have been advised to avoid fruits and vegetables that can't be pealed or aren't going to be cooked.

Mushrooms - Huge deal in Russia! It is considered a national pasttime for people to go out with their families on weekends, etc. into the forested and rural areas to pick mushrooms. Everyone seems to be a mushroom critic, the older women scrutinize the mushrooms in the grocery store forever and I am sure at somepoint one of them will scold me for picking up what seem to me at least, to be perfectly fine mushrooms. We have seen women selling strings of dried mushrooms from around their necks outside of metro stations, and have eaten mushrooms in just about everything. Russians eat mushrooms in soups, on Blini (the little pancake things I described before), in salads, inside verenikii (basically the same thing as a perogii which is the ukranian name), and the even have mushroom flavoured chips.

Chips - Like in England, Russian chips aren't condiment flavoured and so they are infinitely better than Canadian chips. We have been eating mostly Lays Chips just none of these silly Ketchup, Salt and Vinegar, or Barbeque flavors. Instead, Russians eat, White Mushroom, Sour Cream and Leek (ok- this one is a bit similar to our sour cream and onion except that it actually tastes like leek), Shashlik, Crab, and Red Caviar chips. The red caviar ones are actually new, we had been seeing billboards and comercials for them since we got here, and then we could only find them in tiny sample packs attached to Pepsi bottles, but now we can finally find them in larger packages all over the place! I love red caviar chips.

Dairy Products - Russians eat sour cream - "smetanna" on absolutely everything. In borscht and other soups, on varenikii (perogies), pelmeni (similar to ravioli - they are stuffed with meat, cheese, pottato, or mushrooms of course, etc. .) on potatoes but the trouble is that the sour cream here is at the least 15% fat! if not 20 or 30%. Unfortunately that is the reality of dairy products here in general: the average fat percentage of milk is 2.5% or 3.5% and although I have found lactose free skimmed milk, it comes from Finland. There is also something else here called "Kefir" which Russians like to drink, and it is similar in consistency to butter milk but smells as though it is a bit soured with a similar aroma to cottage cheese, it is also very very high in fat. Likewise, yogurhts and cheeses are also have higher percentages of fat than we are used to.

Starch, Starch and More Starch! - Every meal here typically consists of 100% of your recommended daily intake of carbohydrates. For breakfast, Russians eat Kasha - a porridge made from buckwheat. At lunch they eat Pidishki (not sure how it is spelt in english) which is a pastry about the size of a bagel which is stuffed with either meat and rice, egg and rice, or sometimes saurkraut - these are fantastic and a staple of our school's cafeteria but unfortunately they are typically very greasy. Also available for lunch at our cafeteria at lunch are various meat or egg dishes served with, you guessed it more starches - either buckwheat, rice or pureed potatoes. As if this weren't enough, bread is a huge staple here - dark, dense rye bread (actually very similar to the rye that Bedstemor makes) which is eaten with cheese, kolbasa (sausage), etc. . . On top of all these add on varenikii and pelmeni - which I love!! yum. . . and you could eat only starches all day long. A note about varenikii here - Jeana this is for you - we have only been able to find three flavours of prepared varenikii in the stores: 1) mushroom which speaks for itself 2) cherry - don't ask me apparently they like sweet flavoured ones too 3) a cottage cheese type one, I know what you are thinking Jeana yay! just like our favorite ones which you make, but you would be wrong. . . we bought a package of these thinking they would make a fantastic dinner only to be horribly disappointed. Apparently cottage cheese here is sweet! We boiled them up for dinner, put a dob of sour cream next to them on our plate and dove in, only to find out that they taste like a cream puff or something in the middle, very vanilla-y. Needless to say we have only been purchasing the mushroom ones ever since. . . I just can't wrap my head around the idea of eating varenikii for dessert.