This weekend was spent slaving away in the kitchen to prepare a feast for my brother, dad, his wife and her cousin and wife. Unlike the laughable idea of only giving up chocolate for Lent, the Russian great fast is an exclusion of all animal products. For weeks my family has been lurking around, peering at supermarket shelves with hungry eyes and subsisting on sad little stews and toast with nothing on it, so I wanted to make their return to a balanced diet as decadent as possible.
Or rather as decadent as possible within their every day dietary constraints. My stepmother doesn't eat pork and her cousin's wife is allergic to garlic and onions.
Cooking without onions and garlic is very difficult. Here is what I ended up making:
Borodinsky bread - I've been making this using this recipe for a while and it's never let me down. A delicious malty, rye with coriander. Very difficult to find here, and when you do it's always always stale. My jar of rye starter is about 6 months old now, definitely thinking of writing it into my will.
Olive bread - from Veggiestan. Old friend, so delicious. Should really explore this book further.
French Style bread - from Cookwise. Horrible. I should have listened to Jennifer Reese when she warns (despite her book being called Make the Bread, Buy the Butter) that you will never approximate the standards of a professional bakery and should always buy baguettes. But I had to try and fly too close to the sun! You start with fiddling about with the dough for a nice cozy 7 hours. Coaxing it to rise, adding strange things like ice, vitamin C tablets and lentil flour. It dutifully rises, then there about a page of instructions on how to shape it which I tried very hard to follow, but couldn't (I don't blame Cookwise entirely for this, I can barely tie my own shoelaces). And the baking is really the anticlimax of the whole operation. The crust is almost impenetrably hard, the crumb is an off putting opaque hue and it's extraordinarily bland. As a vehicle for canapes it's ok, but I'm convinced that baguette baking is probably not for me.
Seared Beef with Roast Tomato Salsa - from Marie Claire Food and Drink. This is definitely my favorite party food book. All of the recipes are just on the right side of elaborate and on the whole the food I have made from this book so far has been superb. Incidentally I also made the simple architchoke spread canape from the book, topped with black pudding, and then realized that the marinade for the chokes had garlic in it and black pudding contains onion. It was horrible to realise that I was potentially going to make someone sick though my own ignorance. And not to trivialize it, but I'll take a nut allergy over onions and garlic any day. On the side is bean puree with smoked mackerel.
Aspic - this is a family recipe, you take some veal bones and boil them with aromatics for a couple of hours, then strain, pick off the meat and cover it with the liquid which should set into a thick meaty jelly overnight. You have to use veal because it contains a lot more natural gelatine than say ox tail, but if you can't find any just use a could of sheets of gelatine in the stock. I almost ran into trouble with this as well, after a few hours of cooking the stock still tasted a little thin and watery so I reached for a stock cube and only thought to read the ingredients at the last minute. Seriously onions are in everything!
Olivier salad - Every Russian person makes this, it's a heavy, rich, mayonnaise based salad that is also incidentally served in Spanish restaurants under the name of 'Russian Salad'. You boil some potatoes, carrots and eggs, dice and mix with diced gherkins, tinned peas and cubes or mortadella and cover with mayonnaise. So bad and yet so good. Some people also add apples, but I'm not friends with any of those.
Uzska - with a filling of beef and mushroom
Roast Chicken with Fruit and Nut Stuffing - from Rotis. Boning out a leg joint is exactly the kind of laborious, stressful precision work I like. Stuffed with chicken breast, mushrooms, dates, apricots and hazlenuts and rolled in parma ham. This is then roasted on a bed of peppers. Very flavourful, I omitted the onion from the stuffing with no adverse effect
Marrow with caramelized butter and yoghurt with cumin sauce - from Moro East. Sam and Sam Clark promise than anyone who doesn't like marrow will be converted with this reciepe, and they're right! May it's because butter makes everything more delicious, maybe it's the tangy punchy sauce, but this is incredibly good. Still, marrow hatred runs deep and my brother refused to even try it
Pannetone - Gino D'Acampo's recipe from Cook Vegetarian Christmas magazine 2011. I used far too big a tin for this so instead of rising into a puffy bun this spread out and looked and felt like a dense fruitcake. We were all far too full to try it so I actually have no idea how it turned out. All I can say is that it used up the egg yolks left over from the meringues and smelled really nice.
Pashka - from Elena Molokhovets' Gift to Young Housewives. The Russian Mrs Beeton. Pashka means Easter in Russian and it's basically a dome of dairy. You combine ricotta with sour cream butter and sugar (I also threw in some raisins), then weigh down in a muslin lined colander overnight and you get an extraordinarily creamy, and again, tangy, dessert that will hold it's shape on a plate. In olden times they were weighed down in special molds with the cross and XB (which stands for Christ has risen) carved on the inside, so that when you unmold it it's already decorated. After weeks of depriving yourself of dairy this would probably give you all the calcium you missed out on in one go.
Madeleines and Mini Nutty Meringues - from Coffee Time Treats by Jose Marechal. This is a cute little book, I don't usually buy books with less than 100 recipes but this one can stay. Madeleines are very quick and easy to make, these ones are flavoured with orange and lemon zest. And the meringues are surprisingly easy too. The book calls for walnuts but I used pistachios and freeze dried strawberry powder.
Victor and Oksana, the stepmother's cousin and his wife, live in Chamonix and rather hilariously meringues happen to be his favorite snacks but it's impossible to make them at their altitude, so he has to do without. They just disintegrate into puddles on the baking sheet. Beans won't cook either, apparently. Anyway I had not such problems and they came out just fine (here's a recipe for high altitude meringues, cornstarch is apparently the answer)
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