Food

With some inspiration from home, I thought I would do a quick post on what I have been eating here so far. I think the best way to describe Russian food is take any regular meal, say steak and potatoes, fry it, and add a lot of butter and you’ll have a typical Russian meal. That is not as much of an exaggeration as you may think. A good example would be the nice lump of butter I get in my oatmeal every morning. But all this does seem to be balanced by the fact that Russians work a lot. The second thing about the Russian diet is that you eat a lot, and I mean really a lot! I remember one morning, waking up to the biggest fried egg I had ever seen. It was bigger than the frying pan, and we have a big frying pan. I really don’t think I can describe this well enough, oh well, the point is most days I barely finish my plate, not to mention all the side dishes. Needless to say, I am eating well.

Ok so what do I eat? Well, the usual breakfast dish is oatmeal, well its actually called каща, which is porridge in general. This can be an oatmeal type, or a cream of wheat mixture, or a rice and milk mixture (my favorite), or milk and this brown grain type thing. All of this is pretty good. Of course, there are also eggs and these little fried dumpling things filled with cream cheese, oh man those are so good! I can’t leave breakfast with out mentioning Blini, Блыни. These are like pancakes, only thinner and more delicious. You can eat them with just about anything, jams, cheese, meats, anything.

Lunch is mainly soups, either Щи, “Shii,” or Borsch. I love borsch, it’s made from beets and its delicious, especially with Сметана, “smetana.” Ok I think here I should try to explain smetana. Basically, it’s like sour cream and Russian’s put it on everything. Seriously everything, in soups, on blini, for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Not my favorite thing, but still good with certain foods. By the way the kalbaca, sausage, sandwiches are really good here; I eat them a lot.

Dinner can be many things. Usually it is meat, with a side dish and salad. The side dish can be various rice dishes or potato dishes, or brown casha. The salads here have no lettuce. Actually, I’m not even sure it exists in Russia. They don’t use lettuce for anything here. I miss lettuce. It was always my favorite part of a salad. This one time I order a sandwich and it actually came with a piece of lettuce on it, oh man I was so happy! Well, anyways, that’s what I have been eating, along with a lot of tea, really a lot of tea, every meal and then some. But that’s ok, cause I like tea, tea is good.