Pirozhki

So on Sunday I made pirozhki. I woke up early in the morning and started doing chores, including cleaning the kitchen to make sure I would have enough space to work. Then I trekked down to the local grocery store (along with 80% of the population of this little French town ... not much else to do on Sunday) to buy cream, and a chicken. I bought the chicken because I read on Yulinka's blog that pirozhki are best eaten with chicken broth. I decided, "What the hell, I'm already going to be in the kitchen all day, might as well do it right."

I decided to follow the dough recipe here, but my little cube of yeast was 42 grams, not the prescribed 30 grams. So, I followed the recipe roughly and ad libbed a little. Here's the dough that I ended up making:

Pirozhki Dough

Ingredients:

1 42 g cube of yeast (I got mine in the refrigerated section, so I'm pretty sure it wasn't dehydrated)
2 t sugar
2 t flour
4 T water
1 kg flour (I used type T45, which I think is pastry flour)
1 c sunflower oil, + a little extra (1 T?) that was left in the bottle
2 c water, + a little extra (about 1 T)
4 t salt

Method:

Combine the first 4 ingredients in a (large!) bowl, mix well. Cover with a dish towel and allow to rest for 10-15 minutes. It'll be noticeably more puffy when it's ready. Now, carefully mix with the rest of the ingredients to form a soft, moist (wonderful smelling) dough. If it's too sticky, add a bit of flour. Don't let it be dry though. You will probably have to use your hands to get it thoroughly mixed. Cover with a dish towel, let sit in a warm place to rise for at least 2 hours. My BF says his mom often makes dough the night before, and leaves it to rise over night, so I'm sure you can leave it longer than 2 hours with no ill effects. The dough will roughly triple in size! That's some kind of magic, in my opinion. And did I mention that it smells great? When you're ready to use it, knead the dough a little, then cut into small-ish pieces. I actually didn't cut it, just tore off balls of dough roughly 2"-2.5" in diameter. To make pirozhki, roll out a ball on a lightly floured surface, not too thin, but until the rolled out circle is about the size of a small salad plate. Place 2-3 spoons of stuffing in the center and close well. Arrange the pies on a baking sheet covered with parchment paper, leaving a couple inches between them. Let them rise again for 20 minutes. Then bake or fry in oil.

Notes: I had planned on baking the pies. My boyfriend had been hinting (he knew I was going to be making them) that he likes them fried. Well, I thought that I would bake them and have them done before he came home, but he came home early, just as I was about to start baking. He pouted. I fried. They were tasty, but a little too rich. I really do think I'd prefer them baked. Next time, I'll bake them, and I may try to use at least some whole wheat flour to make them a little healthier.

On to the fillings. I had originally settled on a ground beef and mushroom filling, as depicted here. At the last minute, I decided to make a second filling with carrot, onion and egg; it's pictured on the site I got the dough recipe from.

Pirozhki Filling: Carrot, Onion and Egg

Ingredients:

1 very large carrot, or 2 medium, peeled and grated
1 small onion, chopped
1 egg, hard boiled
1 T sunflower oil
Salt and (lots of) pepper to taste

Method:

Sautee the carrot and onion in oil until onion is translucent. Remove from heat. Allow to cool, and mix with the egg, peeled and chopped. Season to taste. That's it! Simple, right?

Notes: I was surprised, I have to admit, but the carrot ones were my favorite. The picture of the meat ones looked so good, and they were tasty, but the carrot ones were something special. I really recommend trying this! This filling can be used with the dough to make vegetarian pirozhki; leave out the egg, and you even have vegan ones (or use firm tofu cubes).

Pirozhki Filling: Beef, Onion and Mushroom

Ingredients:

400 g ground beef
2 small onions, chopped
3 medium mushrooms, chopped
Salt and pepper to taste

Method:

Brown meat with onions and mushrooms, stirring constantly so that meat remains in small pieces. When there is no pink left, salt and pepper to taste, and let cool before stuffing pirozhki.

Notes: Like I said, this was good, but not amazing like the carrot ones. I did like the texture of the mushrooms, though.

Overall Impressions: First of all, I'm in love with yeast. It was so fun making the dough. And I know I said it already, but that stuff smells great. I will forever think of yeast as magic in the form of a cakey, grey little cube. By the way, that cube yields to pressure really easily. When you try to crumble it into your bowl, don't push hard, lest to you want yeast everywhere. My mission now is to make a healthy pirozhok. Next time I'm going to make the carrot filling, a cabbage one, and maybe a mushroom and green onion one. Oh, and I'll give them different shapes so I can know what's inside each one. It's cheating, but so what? By the way, this recipe, fillings and dough, made 17 pirozhki (6 carrot, 11 beef) and 6 donuts. Basically I just split remaining dough into balls studded with raisins, fried and sprinkled with powdered sugar. Tasty, but not quite like Dutch oliebollen.

Mushroom Soup

I've made several impromptu variations of mushroom soup, but this one was really tasty. We had it last night for dinner and today for breakfast. Only I'm worried that in a couple of days we'll be completely mushroomed out, since today I'm going to attempt pierozhki and I've decided on a mushroom based filling.

Oh well. Is it even POSSIBLE to be mushroomed out? I don't think so. At least, I've never gotten there.

Mushroom Soup

Ingredients:

15 g dried mushrooms (I used a variety)
6 medium white mushrooms
About 2 cups fresh oyster mushrooms
1 leek, white and light green parts, washed carefully
1 small onion
1 carrot
1 T butter
1 T oil
Water (I don't really measure, but I'm using my trusty 3 Qt pot if that helps)
Salt and pepper to taste
Bay leaf

Method:

First, place the dried mushrooms in a small pot or bowl, and cover with a couple of cups of hot water. They will need to sit for some time. Meanwhile, chop the onion and sautee in a mix of oil and butter (use only oil to make the recipe vegan). Peel and grate the carrot. When the onion is golden but not at all brown, turn the heat down, add the carrot and sprinkle salt over them. Let the veggies cook on extremely low heat and the salt will pull the water out of them. I don't know if it's the official term, but it's what I call "sweating" the carrots. That sounds kind of gross, actually, maybe I should think of a different word for it. Later. Chop the leek and add to the pot, stirring everything together and adding a little more salt. Chop the mushrooms, add them in, sprinkle with salt again. This routine of add a veggie to the pot, then sprinkle with salt helps take the water out, it also helps make sure the soup is salty enough. I've never once over salted a soup, and using this method I under salt them much less frequently. You can add pepper to taste at this point, too. You want to stir every so often to make sure all the veggies get cooked. By now the dried mushrooms should be soft enough to chop. Remove them from the liquid and add the liquid to the pot of veggies. It's a good idea to pour the liquid through a sieve to remove any grit. Chop the formerly dried mushrooms very finely, and add them to the pot. At this point, I add enough water to fill my 3 Qt pot almost to the top. A measurement doesn't really matter, you can add more or less liquid as your texture preference warrants. Add a bay leaf, stir well and check the taste. If it's good, allow it to come to a boil, and then you can serve it.

Serving Suggestion: This broth is really rich on it's own. BF added cream (goes without saying). I tried it and it was good but I preferred it without. Chopped dill and parsley sprinkled on top is tasty.

Notes: If you have a food processor, the longest part of this is sweating the veggies and soaking the mushrooms (at least 30 minutes, I would say). I guess it's not really a "fast" recipe, but it tastes so good!

Apricot Sharlotka

Lately I've been crazy about canned peach and apricot halves. I'm not sure why, but I'm nuts about 'em. They're so juicy, and they remind me of summer. So yesterday, I got the idea to make a sharlotka using apricot halves instead of apples. This is what I did:

Apricot Sharlotka

Ingredients:

1 860 g can apricot halves
3 eggs
1 c sugar
1 c flour
1/4 t ground clove
1/4 t ground cinnamon
1/4 c whole almonds
Oil + flour to grease and flour a cake pan

Method:

Preheat the oven to 325 Fahrenheit. Grease and flour a cake pan. Drain the fruit halves from their syrup or juice; discard or save for other use. Beat eggs with sugar until well combined (I just use a wooden spoon for this). Stir in flour and spices carefully (or you'll make a mess). Resulting batter will be quite thick. Arrange apricot halves along the bottom and sides of the cake pan. Sprinkle almonds over the halves. Spread batter onto the halves that are on the bottom of the pan. Bake at 325 for 50 minutes to 1 hour.

Notes: This sharlotka is much wetter than the apple one, so I decided to bake it for a longer time at a lower temperature. It came out done nicely, the very bottom was a tiny bit gooey. It wasn't gross though; reminded me of peach cobbler. I had to place a piece of aluminum foil under the cake mid way through baking, because syrup from the halves was leaking over the sides, spilling onto the oven and making a mess (and smelling like burning stuff). Next time I will drain the fruit better. I think that will make the bottom more cakey and will prevent mess. Some other things I'll try will be to put a small layer of batter before the fruit goes in, or to just grease the pan instead of grease + flour. Like I said, the slight gooey-ness wasn't gross, but I would have preferred it be more like a cake texture than a cobbler one. That's what I had had in mind, really. My boyfriend and I both liked it, though. It would be good with a nice hot cup of tea! Another idea I have is to grease the pan and then coat it with roughly ground nuts instead of flour. I think I'm not finished experimenting with this recipe.

Serving Suggestion: I waited for the cake to cool, slid a butter knife around the edges, and then carefully tipped it onto a plate so that the fruit side was facing up. It was very easy to cut this way and keep the cake more intact. Then when I put an individual slice on a plate, I turned it so you could see the crunchy top side and the fruity bottom.

Spicy Beef Soup

Last night I found myself confronted with a situation: I had about 1.5 quarts of an exceptionally rich and flavorful homemade beef broth, and no idea what to do with it. It's not that I don't have any soup recipes. I've got LOTS of them, but they're all ones I've tried before. And this broth was so good, I wanted to do something special with it. (How did it get so good, you may ask? Well, the answer to that is that I wasn't in a rush. I put it on the stove and forgot about it for 3 hours.)

This recipe is the result of that event.

Spicy Beef Soup

Ingredients:

Approximately 4 cups good beef broth, chilled, fat NOT discarded
Beef from the broth
Fat from the broth
1 carrot, grated
2 small onions, cut into semi-rings
About 1/4 c chopped pickled zucchini (you can use pickles if you don't have these)
1 c of the brine from the zucchini
2 T tomato paste
2 T ajvar (this is the brand I'm using, but any will work)
1.5 T dried parsley
Salt as needed
1 small potato, chopped into small cubes (I chopped mine to have about 1/4" sides)

Method:

While the broth is still cool and the hardened fat is sitting at the top, remove it and place in a skillet. Add the beef, removed and chopped before chilling, the parsley, and start to simmer the broth. Melt the fat in the skillet, and fry the onion and carrot until they are soft and slightly golden. Stir in the zucchini and the tomato paste. Allow it to cook gently for a couple of minutes, then add to the broth. Add the brine and stir in the ajvar. Salt to taste. You can add more brine and ajvar as your taste warrants. Add the potato, and serve when it's soft.

Notes: Vegetarians can use vegetable broth and omit the beef, of course. Actually, I don't like meat in soup and avoided it. It was still really good. If you don't have ajvar, experiment with paprika, or baba ghanosh, or chopped roasted red peppers ... whatever you've got.

Serving Suggestion: I think it would have tasted good with a little dill as well, but we didn't have any. I liked mine plain, my boyfriend (of course) ate his with a spoon of creme fraiche on top.

Cheap but Good: Grow your own Victory Garden

Lately I've been planning how to plant a garden (my first!) when it gets a little warmer. I don't want to grow flowers, rather, I'm dreaming of beets, spinach, kale, onions, potatoes, and--later on--tomatoes, peppers, zucchini and eggplant. I also want to grow several different herbs that I use often. I want to do this not only because many of those foods are tasty yet expensive, but also because I'm seeking a satisfaction that I can't get from my job. I want to do something physical, to make something, to be able to see results come from my work. I also want the joy of knowing that I am eating produce that has been grown in a way that is kind to my body and the earth.

The problem for me is that I don't have a very suitable space. Our shared yard is not very well taken care of, so it will be hard work to clear a space, if the landlord even lets me do so. On top of that, it doesn't get a whole lot of sun.

I'm hoping to overcome this by creating a container garden. I found a site that is great for gardeners who live in small places that don't really have a yard--apartments, condos, etc. I'm especially interested in the portion of the site devoted to growing vegetables.

I'm going to add the site to the list of blogs I follow. If anyone reading has successfully planted a container garden, I'd love to have your tips as well.

The title of this post refers to the Victory gardens planted during World War II. As Michael Pollan says in his letter to Barack Obama, who he calls the new "Farmer in Cheif", today such a garden could be part of "a new Victory Garden movement, this one seeking “victory” over three critical challenges we face today: high food prices, poor diets and a sedentary population." The article/letter is quite long, but is WELL worth the read. I also heartily recommend Michael Pollan's books.