Weekend Cooking Projects

This weekend (tomorrow) I'm going to try and make the delicious kvashennaya kapusta (salted cabbage) that I ate ate my BF's parent's house. I know it involves horseradish, carrot and cabbage, but I'm not sure about the rassol (brine). We're going to call tomorrow and ask. :-)

My hopefully soon-to-be-in-laws have a huge stand alone freezer that is stocked with produce from their piece of land (dacha) and tons of pelmeni. They also have lots of cool stuff in jars: preserved tomatoes, aforementioned cabbage, homemade prunes, plumes in sour-sweet syrup, tomato juice, apricot jam, pickled cucumbers, pickled garlic, cherry jam, jars of kompot (kind of like juice), and honey.

The upshot of this is that half of a meal in the winter consists of simply opening a jar or the freezer. I think that is brilliant, and I want to create the same thing over here. You see, we work, a freaking lot. As some of you may have noticed, the big collider (scariest machine ever, I believe it was called) where we're working is going to be turned back on pretty darned soon. We have to prepare for that, so that we can graduate and continue to be gainfully employed. As such, BF and I are both VERY busy, and we have been living on mostly noodles and fried eggs.

That was fine before, but after a week of being fed the goodies I've described earlier in this post and in the last one, it doesn't sit very well with me. Not only because it's not as tasty, but also because it's kind of demoralizing. It makes me feel not like a grown-up to be eating noodles with fried eggs every night, until we run out of eggs, like we did tonight.

Yeah. So, tomorrow we're gonna be busy. I've decided to make 1) salted cabbage to put in a bunch of jars, 2) pelmeni (meat dumplings) and 3) golubtsy (cabbage rolls) to put in the freezer. Sunday I may make vareniki (cheese filled dumplings) and a bunch of meat broth to also freeze.