In the kitchen

Any respectable Russian knows that the kitchen is the heart of the home. Soviet kitchens back in the 1980’s were nothing like the modern day American kitchens you admire on Instagram. There was no football stadium sized kitchen island complete with enough seating for a soccer team, no dishwasher, no double ovens and the microwave was a late addition which only created some temporary confusion as it turned out to be a useless accessory. Despite that, my childhood kitchen is where my immediate family, my extended family and all of my friends found themselves gathering to cook, bake, make jam, kombucha, sauerkraut, pickles and anything else that was missing from the grocery store shelves of that era. The grocery stores had only the bare necessities such as the dry good (buckwheat, rice, pasta), fresh bread and dairy products. Everything else either came from our large garden or the farmers’ market where we bought fresh meat, fish, eggs and anything that we did not grow ourselves. The garden (or “dacha”) was a plot of land with a small cabin that was a few miles away from our apartment building near the river. Most summer days were spent there working in the garden, swimming in the river and having barbeques. It was basically a small farm, considering everything we grew that fed our entire family: potatoes, cucumbers, tomatoes, cauliflower, zucchini, cabbage, strawberries, onions, carrots, any herb you can name as well as apples, black currants, gooseberries, plums and more. All of that produce was turned into something we could eat immediately or preserved to eat later. Cabbage and carrots turned into vats of sauerkraut to last through the long winter months. I remember my dad coming home from the store with a sack of cabbage which was shredded on a huge mandolin, mixed with shredded carrots and lots of salt. The sauerkraut was stored in large jars in the cellar and made an appearance at almost every meal sometimes mixed with cranberries and a touch of sugar; all before the kraut became popular here in the States for it’s amazing gut health benefits. You can say we were the pioneers in the “health food” category with all of the probiotic rich foods we made and consumed including kombucha (“kvas”), kefir (a fermented yogurt-like drink) and pickles. Growing up eating farm-to-table definitely set a great foundation for the way I cook and eat to this day. My parents, probably unbeknownst to them, taught me to cook and bake at a very young age because cooking and hosting large family dinners was a family activity. I remember baking a Napoleon cake with my mom that involved making several layers of thin pastry than cutting them into even thinner layers and covering each with buttercream. The cake was set overnight on a window ledge in the kitchen with a heavy weight on top to make sure each layer would get soaked with buttercream. My dad had his own “specialty” desert, which was a waffle cake with chocolate buttercream. The waffle maker we had, made thin rectangular waffles which were soft in the middle and crispy on the outside. I wish I still had some of those old kitchen appliances and gadgets today, but I am guessing they were long ago relinquished to the attic or thrown away…What I do have are memories of long evenings in the kitchen with my family rolling out the dough to make dumplings (“pelmeni”), paging through an old cook book for new cookie recipes, smelling dill or horseradish or something savory stewing on the stove. Those memories turned into a lifetime of love and appreciation of good food, best enjoyed in the company of friends and family.