This is how to win his heart - and the world's bellies

He said I was a goddess.

I perform all the tricks that domestic goddesses are supposed to be able to do: move well, raise one eyebrow suggestively and engage in pseudo-intellectual conversations. But, as we all know, to really touch the heart of a man - of either divine and earthly nature, you have to appeal to his belly. The seemingly unexpected and effortless appearance of these gooey, sticky, the colour of mud things had swayed the celestial balance.

Chocolate brownies.



These are days, and particularly nights, of depressing, matter-of-factely mid-winter, when despite all the calls to austerity, one yearns for something ridiculously rich, extravagant, and in big quantities. What the goddess does is she smiles gently, strokes a feverish forehead and lightly strikes her magic wand...

It is surprising to realise that the Brownie, so un-Russian in its origin, so both exotic, because of all the chocolate and dark sugars, and teen-American, because of its current association, has in fact become the most treasured dessert in this household. Come to think of it, perhaps it is precisely because of the Brownie's Americanist, straight-forward appeal, its capitalist ability to adapt to all tastes and cultures and its strumpet skill to appeal to both most basic and most sublime, that it has earned its place. A kind of Cold War victory on the ground, in the sexy James Bond and Natasha with a choker on her throat type of way.

Chocolate and chestnut brownies:

100g butter
200g dark chocolate
150g cooked chestnuts, chopped
200g sugar, a mixture of caster and dark brown
100g plain flour
1tsp baking powder
3-4 large eggs, lightly whisked

1. preheat the over to 180C and line a baking tray, about 20-30 cm

2. melt chocolate with butter over a pan of simmering water; let it cool down for a couple of minutes

3. transfer the chocolate/butter mixture into a bigger bowl if necessary, add chestnuts, sugar, sifted flour, powder and eggs

4. enjoy the unhurried mixing of the heavy load

5. pour into the baking tray, make sure the surface is roughly even and bake for about 20 minutes

6. the Brownie mixture should be taken out of the oven when still looks a bit uncooked, it will give it that gooey centre

7. let the mixture cool a bit, cut into squares and enjoy the almost delirious combination of bitter chocolate, earthy chestnuts and American superpower:) . Great with unsweetened Turkish coffee, black Russian tea or, indeed, a strawberry milkshake.

'As the hedgehog and a bear cub met New Year' eve'

And a little gift from me - an old Russian cartoon on a 'proper' way to meet a new year! Shockingly unusual for me, it's not related to food, however note the yumis on the tables - no getting away from it all!

(No subtitles, but the language of cute little bears, Christmas trees and friendship is universal!)

S nastupayushim!

More parsnip New Year treats

Amongst all the post-Christmas wilderness (partying, snowing and otherwise), here's a little bit of curiosity to amuse you.


My cockle-warming Parsnip and Parmezan soup has been a hit with a number of friends, and so whilst looking for another parsnip inspiring idea, I came across Elizabeth David's collection of Christmas recipes. One of them particularly caught my eye...

Pastenak and cress soupOr parsnip and cress soup - pastenak, according to David, is the medieval English word for parsnip , a corruption of the Latin word pastinaca. Now, the association I mentioned in my earlier soup post between the Russian word for parsnip - pasternak - and the famous Nobel-prize winner (yes, yes, Dr Zivago) doesn't seem all that laughable!

Did I completely confuse you? What I'm trying to say very pre New Year's Eve inarticulately, is that I just loved the feeling of discovering this little, unimportant linguistic link, which kind of felt fitting. In Italian the word is pastinache, in French panais - what is parsnip in your language??:):)

Back to the soup though...

To make the pastenak and cress soup you follow the same recipe as for my parsnip and parmezan soup, but omit the cheese and add a couple of handfuls of cress at the end, which makes the dish a whole lotta lighter and fresher. To me, this is a spring recipe really, so here's something that will work very nicely as your New Year's even starter - very a la Russe;)

Egg mayonnaise with parsnip cream
(taken from E. David's 'Christmas' edited by Jill Norman)

500 g parsnips, peeled or well scrubbed
3-4 tbsp of home-made mayonnaise (it needs to be rather acidic, so don't be shrewd with your lemon)
4-6 hard-boiled, organic, eggs
parsley

1. Chop parsnips into big chunks, bring to boil, simmer until cooked (some 20 mins), then puree and season with salt and plenty of pepper
2. Stir in your mayo, spread on a fanciful dish (I'd say a Soviet kitsch of a crystal dish in shape of a egg or a fish will work well here)
3. Cup eggs in half and arrange on top of the parsnip puree
4. Scatter shopped parsley

Nemirov honey coloured pepper vodka will work wonders here - match by taste, match by colour!

Thank you all my dear readers for a wonderfully food-laden year!

Shrooms

Mushroom picking in a popular past time in many parts of the world (just think Italy with its astronomically priced truffles or the Japanese with their sleek oyster mushrooms), but I feel in Russia 'going for mushrooms' is elevated to a different level. Shroom picking is a mysterious, fairy-tale-like endeavour that is closely linked to the folk traditions of Russia's country-side and the power of its beech and pine woods. Mushroom collection is to this day an encompassing activity that gets excited all ages and classes; a sight of cars pulled up by roads bordering thick forests and of big and serious men carrying heavy baskets full of glorious fungi are far from being trendy in the Russ land (and probably quite the opposite for the urbanised new Russians).

In Britain mushroom picking is gaining the momentum, in tandem with the general foodie movement. More and more of the trendy and middle-class yearn to re-connect with the nature and start baking bread, grow their own veg - and go mushroom picking. Mr J and I finally succumbed to the lure of the shroom last Saturday - after years of me melancholicly reminiscing of my childhood 'po-griby' memories and wet and mossy Estonian forests, we got out the basket that we had optimistically bought in Suzdal, near Moscow, one fine summer morning a few years back....but we needed a guide.

Andy with his years of mushrooming experience and a fun 'Fungi to be with' website was to be the one. He met us and 20 or 30 other shroom-hopefuls in the car park in Hampstead on a sparklingly beautiful November morning. The mixture of us was young (ish), cosmopolitan (ish with me the Russian and a Spanish couple showing our eagerness by bringing big woven baskets) and surprisingly short on kiddies. Andy is clearly bonkers about mushrooms and has spent years learning the tantalising Latin names of various toadstools - how about Laccaria amethystea, or a 'common' Amethyst Deceiver or Coprinus comatos for a wonderfully smelling Shaggy Ink Cup?

Apparently there are some 4000-5000 types of mushrooms in the UK and, according to Andy, about 20 of them are popular edible species and about the same are seriously poisonous; many more are in the in-between state of being tasteless and/or mildly diarrhea inducing. The best way to start learning about species is to memorize 2-3 types that are highly distinctive - I hurriedly jotted down 'red tinted gills - bad', but really rules are impossible since for every 'good' white gill there is a 'bad white gill and, anyway, for an untrained eye so many mushrooms look so similar!

Ceps are the best known and highly prized (a 'white' or belyj grip in Russian) - sturdy and off-white pretty fungi who like beeches and sandy soils; they are not too rare but my childhood memories are full of what felt like unrealistic dreams of finding a big Cep, which in fact matched the moods of the English woods...The Funnel Cap (Andy is showing on the left) is more common - they remind me Russian lisichki, or foxies, although bigger and floppier.

The search started very slowly, with most of us not spotting anything at all, but with time (we spent about three hours in the park darting around) we started seeing shapes and colours all of the place, dragging the toads out, showing them to Andy who, 2 out of 3, would thoughtfully say a convoluted Latin name and eventually a dismissive 'no good'...

The deeper we went into bushes and trees, the more things we started to see...it felt like a Treasure Hunt! First you are in a complete unknown, but as your eye and head get accustomed to the patterns of the surroundings you begin spotting more and more...the more inaccessible, thorny and wet the place is, the more likely we were to uncover shrooms. Fungi obviously like co-habiting with trees - it's a cosy cross-system whereby one helps the other - but you are more likely to spot a little glossy cap a few meters away from a tree - tree's roots can be as long as its height, and since mushrooms are often living off these roots you need to look further afield. And a stick does help.

At the end we managed to gather a good half a basket: a few Wood blewits - gorgeous lilac-y and floppy, a handful of the Deceivers - cute little orange round caps and lots and lots of Buttercaps - unattractive spindly things, the lenght of your palm, with shiny dark brown tops. Oh, the red one above is a lucky find of one of our shroom-comrades - Fly Agaric, in Russian matchingly called Mukhomor, the one that exhausts or starves flies. You get a fantastic image of this half plant, half animal creature seducing flies to approach and stay...

I have intense memories of coming back home with my parents after a day's of mushroom gathering, sitting next to a fireplace, laying the found treasures carefully on a newspaper, sorting them, carefully cleaning them..I remember some mushroom always the types that had to be de-skinned before being fried with lots of onions and sourcream - does
anyone Russian know or remember why these mushroom had to be cleaned?

Mr J and I followed the same cosy tradition - with an addition of a newly purchased mushroom cleaner. An adorable and extremely useful gadget that sweeps dirt off mushrooms (washing them in water is a big no, since they'll become all soggy and waterlogged). From the handful of what was left I cooked up an autumnal treat of shrooms stewed briefly in a little garlic, butter and cream, piled up on clouds of creamy mustardy mash - a truly warm-your-cockles feast.

The beauty of pig trotters

Arent’ they fun?! A test to an omnivore kinda dish, I say. Yes, not only did I buy these pink creatures quite on purpose (the all organic tootsies of a - hopefully! - happy piggy), but cleaned them, boiled them until no more, dismantle them and put them all together into a glorious Soviet grandmotherly dish of kholodets, or pork in aspic, or ham and chicken terrine.

The name Kholodets stems from a Russian word meaning cold, frozen or chilled. The dish basically consists of shredded boiled meat (which can be anything from chicken to rabbit to beef), jellified by the means of a pork stock, made out of pig trotters (the bones and other tissue in the feet make the liquid go jelly-like when chilled. In fact – read closely, my vegetarian friend - all jelly like treats are made with at least some use of a pig essence). I believe the must have it roots in the Fresh obsession with everything jellied in the 18-19 centuries (and as everyone knows Russians were bonkers about the Fresh in those far away days). The wobbly and transparent texture must have signified something bizarrely sophisticated and - yes - fun.

I'd been dreaming of re-creating this dish of my childhood for years, battling the seeming impossibility of sourcing the named tootsies from local butchers. Kholodets could in the past be found in any canteen or restaurant throughout the Communist kingdom - in different shapes and disguises; but I always remember the long evenings at home, in our kitchen, when my mum would slowly go through buckets of just-boiled meat, carefully separating the edible tasty bits from not so. Her utilizing all the possible plates, cups, bowls and saucers in our house to make the little individual portions of kholodets - a bit of meat on the bottom of a plate, some crushed garlic, then goes the stock and in the fridge for 12-24 hours. My mum almost always used chicken meat and put lots of garlic, so the result was incredibly tender, delicate and flavoursome at the same time. We ate out little kholodets (ki?) out of the bowls where it’d been chilling, with some nose-bitingly Russian mustard or grated horseradish and, of course, black Russian rye bread.

Well, I repeated the experiment the other night, freakily enjoying the sweet and meaty smell of chicken and trotters boiling my kitchen away for good 4 hours (take the trotters and bony joints of chicken, add cold water, a few spoons of vinegar, onion, carrots, lots f salt and spices - basically chuck the ‘left overs procedure’). And this is the initial result:



I felt like a villain – a wonderful, life-affirming feeling!

My kholodets was more of a fresh terrine - an ample amount of meat in each bowl (with added parsley, cracked pepper and garlic, which I mistakenly omitted) and only enough stock to cover the filling (no more than a cm or so).


Voila! (sorry about the amateur-ish photo)

Have your pig trotter concossion with some pickled cucumbers (mine were very spicy with lots of chillies), a lovely fresh salad, soughdour (home-made in my case, but this may be optional) and - an absolute requirement which was refused to me in my years of pioneer youth - a shot of very, very cold vodka.
Na zdaravye, tovarishi.

Gnawing on London bones

It was still dark and bitterly cold when we arrived in Canary Wharf two days before the New Year's eve celebrations. I had worked in Canary Wharf before for several long years, but have not been back in the area for over four years now. Lifting up my head to see the top of - until very recently - the tallest building in Europe, surrounded by gleaming beauty of otherworldly architecture, gave me the same sense of awe as some 10 years ago, when I arrived at newly opened Canary Wharf station for my job interview. I felt like I'd been miraculously transported to another country, somewhere very stylish, powerful and rich; somewhere like New York or Paris. It was difficult to imagine that only some 20 years ago the area of Canary Wharf (the site of the old West India Docks and Isle of Dogs) was an all-forgotten, derelict district of docks. What brought me here on this bitingly cold December morning, however, was something that would not make me a million before the age of 30, but would plunge me straight back into the years when the presence of the river was the raison d'etre for the activities in this area. Fish.

'We have a tradition that every 31 of December we go to...' - the phrase known to every Russian from the legendary 70s film on saunas, vodka and melodramatic soviet realities. Transported into the 21 century East London a few days before the New Year's eve, I realised this phrase should end with 'we go to a..fish market'. In fact, not just any old market, but the biggest and oldest fish market in the UK, located in Canary Wharf - the Billingsgate. The market has been in this area since the 16th century and is still bringing here everyone from a simple deli owner to celebrity chefs. Being mainly a wholesale market, it is also open to public; and at the end of December the market swells up with many Eastern Europeans coming down here to stock up for the all important New Year's eve dinner.

The market itself is unsurprisingly bright, all EU-approved white tiles and overcoats. There are nearly 100 traders here selling all possible types of fish in one big space. Apparently, about 60% of the fish here come from the UK seas, with 40% arriving from foreign waters. It may be that we arrived a bit too late for the proper trade (mere 7am instead of the expected 5am), but a lot of what we saw was entitled either Asian or Exotic. Natasha - my big fish loving friend (a big lover, not a big Natasha!:) - took a particular liking to a stall that had a lively crowd of the Chinese and Koreans around it. I am not able to list the fish they have on sale for the simple reason that the sellers themselves didn't know. After several attempts addressed to four people, we got a name of one fish (which was not the one on the left unfortunately, which I think should just be called a pointy sprat) - it was obviously a kind of place where people who knew came. We were not in the know, so we moved on.

Since better deals can be gotten by buying in bulk, we wanted to find a box of fish that is fairly versatile and inexpensive. Natasha laid her eye on a stall that was only selling sea bream in boxes for a tenner. It was almost the end of trading, so I was convinced we could bargain. We approached the stall holder, in our most pink-cheekily and eye-flatteringly, and asked to give us 6 pieces of fish for 10 quid, one more than was already in the box. The guy looked at us blankly and replied, how about 4 fish for £10. At first we thought he was joking, but soon realised that he was dead serious - he was not happy with us daring to bargain! piss off, we thought, and walked to the central part of the market where we could see another crowd of people.

I am far from being an expert in fish (my expertise starts and finishes with looking admiringly at the shiny fish eyes), but the fish we saw next was clearly of a higher rank: a pale white turbot, a bright red mullet, a fat and lustrous sea bass. Maybe I was also impressed with the quantities of fish on offer (limited) and the advice given by the seller (assertive, but friendly), which made me think immediately 'good stuff'. The charming stall holder with a reassuring American (don't ask why) accent told us about the difficulties in the sea over the last few days (the weather had been icy and windy), and explained why the fishermen may be reluctant to do deals (not much fish in winter generally). Natasha went on to question him about the fish with 'eggs' inside. The American didn't grasp what she was after at first, but eventually told us to come back in spring, when caviar is more likely to be found. The decadent Russian ways, eh? Natasha and I made a mental 'wyll by bahck'.

Having made another three circles around the market, and seeing how most stalls were already packing up, we settled on three bags of frozen seafood (for Natasha's famed paella), five individually sold sea basses and breams, and a bag of enormous raw prawns. I also bought three fresh cuttlefish from the mysterious Asian stall. I had never bought, let alone prepared, the cuttlefish, so was anticipating and slightly dreading the prospect of cleaning the fish to get rid of its ink. The de-inking operation would work well later, transforming the slimy things into cute and neat rings. But for now we needed breakfast.

The market has three cafs, proper East London joints with men having big mugs of PG tips with milk, scoffing economy Tesco toasts with mounts of baked beans, making loud, dirty, but innocent jokes. I loved the atmosphere the moment I walked in.

There were black and white pictures on the walls, big steaming kettles of water for drinks, a curious smell of baconfish (ie fried bacon and fried fish, smelled unanimously, eaten separately) and - something very rare and almost politically incorrect these days - a rumble of pure Cockney speak, with no additions of Eastern European voices. As you can imagine, Natasha and I were a hit.

We quickly made friends with several breakfasting fishermen, thanks to Natasha's long blond hair and me ordering a Kippers breakfast. One of our new friends, having fished out from Natasha that she was from St Petersbourg, proceeded to telling us that he had a neighbour from Tomsk, north of Russia, and that was the most important, and evidently the only, piece of information he had about Russia. Fair enough, we knew just as much about cockney London .

Back to my breakfast. Well, it was spectacularly awful. But those who think that I am a food snob (you know who you are!) will be glad to know that I loved every bit of my scarily bony fish, plasticy scrambled eggs, melting bread and sugary instant coffee. The atmosphere made the meal so right and memorable. I could really imagine myself some 50 years ago, having come back from the cold sea, all smelling of fish and ocean breeze, be ravenously hungry having got up at ungodly hour to earn the bacon (or fish?) for the family...

We came out of the market into the sunny winter morning. It was barely 9am, but the working day of the market and all its inhabitants was already over. Smelling unashamedly fishy, we went shopping into the fabulousness of Canary Wharf, which felt very decadent, almost revolutionary, remembering the years I had spend labouring away just a mile away from there. I then walked all the way to Limehouse,breathing in the sights and smells of nostalgic East London. It was a great way to celebrate the last few days of the year. I felt at one with the city, with my city, enjoying its newness and its oldness - and the exhilarating aroma of defrosting fish in my bag.