All my stories are about food...

For at least a week I had salo cravings—we’re talking slices of cured pig’s fat, eaten on bread with garlic. My fellow volunteers were appalled by my treason of our unspoken American understanding (we don’t eat chunks of fat if we know it’s fat, only when it’s melted and disguised in all our other foods), but what’s the difference from spreading butter on bread, or eating a slice of bacon?

Sunday May 2nd was my first shashlik experience, and the food was well worth not-so-subtly inviting myself to my counterpart’s daughter’s 15th birthday party. (“So, Natasha, what are you doing on Sunday?” “Oh, it’s Dasha’s birthday, so we are probably going to our dacha to celebrate. If you are around, you should ask her if you can come.”…next day in class…“Dasha, I hear it’s your birthday on Sunday; am I invited to your party?” I’m her English teacher, poor girl, what could she say?) But it was a gorgeous day: all the flowers and fruit trees were in bloom, the alcohol was chilling in buckets of ice cold water drawn from the well, and the shish-kebabs were rotating on their skewers over the campfire in the woods. We had consecutive rounds of tender juicy meat, heavenly whole fish stuffed with onion and garlic and tomato, eaten by breaking it in half (to answer the age old question WWJD), plus a special soup that had stewed for hours in a cast-iron cauldron over the fire. My neighbors were also there. Luda and I went on a walk around the block and talked about corruption in Ukraine; even though in theory they have free national health care, you must pay for even the smallest service in hospitals (and elsewhere), such as ensuring a nurse goes on her rounds to check on your sick daughter. I sat at the grown-up table, though I didn’t contribute much to the adult conversation. Every so often a train would be visible/audible through the thin strip of woods, and the adults would remark, “There goes the 5:15 to Moscow.” I earned my keep by helping Natasha wash the dishes with a weed she pulled from the lawn; it has soap-like, fat-dissolving properties, which makes it a totally bad-ass plant! The kids attempted s’mores after dinner (introduced as a novel American dessert, but here they don’t have the right marshmallows or graham crackers, and they forgot the chocolate!)

The next day at the bazaar I went crazy and bought every green thing in sight, so excited after a winter where the only green vegetables were pickles. I made super salads for a week: chervil (why have I never discovered this before?—it’s amazing!), lettuce, tomato, cucumber, onion, green onion, parsley, dill, salt, pepper, oil, vinegar, garlic, hardboiled eggs, chicken, raisins, apples, domashniy syr, carrots, walnuts, pumpkin seeds, buckwheat…and then sat on my balcony and ate them out of the giant mixing bowl. I also did some laundry (sigh, moan, sigh) and other chores around the house that I tend to let slide. My run was fantastic, partly because I stumbled upon another hour-long loop that took me down dirt roads with quaint cottages and beautiful gardens, through a few fields, and past a little lake.

On Friday April 23rd, I made enchiladas (homemade tortillas and everything—as Sebastian the crab says, “If you want something done, you’ve got to do it yourself!”) with Kamilia at my house, and then later watched “Forest Gump” and slept over at her house. She had to take her son to the doctor’s in another town early in the morning, so she left the keys with me and I slept in and had her house to myself for a bit (I put a few things a right angles and did the dishes) before walking home, running into Sasha in a tux on his way to a friend’s wedding, and taking the train to Vinnytsia for The Collaborative, since the bus had no more seats. Abbey gave some good tips on teaching writing, and we talked about organizing summer camps before heading to an Italian restaurant to get pizza for dinner. I was going to the theatre with Matt and Anya though, so by the time my pizza came I had 5 minutes to eat it—I gave it a valiant effort and shoved as much down my throat as I could before running to catch “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” in Ukrainian, about 10% of which I understood. It was still really cool to be in a theatre at a cultural performance, since PCVs usually “slum” it, so to speak.

On Sunday I made Chocolate Mayonnaise Cake (intrigued by the recipe’s title, I had to try it out, and it was surprisingly moist and delicious) and hosted my friends for a planning session on their HIV/AIDS prevention lectures; my contribution was limited to cooking, as I had a very difficult time following the rapid, technical conversation in mixed Russian and Ukrainian (in brief: “AIDS prevention=yay—ok now eat cake!) I also skyped with my family and found out my brother was going to Bowdoin!

Last week, I made green borshch according to the Babuysia’s Cookbook, but mine turned out red. Tasty, but not quite right. This week I tried again, but added so much rice (substituting for potatoes) that the wooden spoon actually stood up in the pot. It’s a work in progress.

Saturday I went to a café with Luda and Anya, a friend of hers who came to English club for the first time this week. They had bought a liter of orange juice and sunflower seeds, which I thought an interesting combo for a bar, but I diligently worked each individual seed free from its shell as we talked about wedding traditions. I also managed to stick my elbow into the birthday cake sitting on the bar, getting yellow frosting all over my sleeve. I loaded up on vegetables the next day at the bazaar, and had only just walked in the door when it started to pour. So I did some afternoon yoga, enjoying the sounds of the storm. Then I met up with Anya and Matt, and Anya’s friend Sasha from Kiev joined us as well. At the entrance to the café we ran into Lena’s sister and her husband, who I haven’t seen in forever, but I keep hoping they will invite me back to their house (eventually I’ll just invite myself over, as I resort to from time to time). The conversation covered world religions, American attitudes toward food, and growing up in the 90s (which meant something very different in Ukraine than in America). We walked by the town square later, and a religious “concert” was just finishing, so I said hello to all my Nazarene friends (and detected strong judgment on their part for my having been in a café, which I shrugged off but did not appreciate, since it goes back to my earlier discussion on issues of tolerance). I went home to have a salad, and then hung out on a park bench with Pasha and a bunch of teenage girls for a bit (a drunk man who had clearly spent the day fishing asked us for cigarettes, and kept repeating, “There are no more fish in Kozyatyn,” which perhaps in and of itself is not that amusing, but the delivery was hilarious). Later I wanted to make hot milk to dip my chocolate bar into while I watched “Love in the Time of Cholera,” but I ended up making cheese. Or so I thought, since the milk turned all lumpy, but Larissa said that meant it wasn’t fresh, because no matter how long you heat really fresh milk it won’t curdle, whereas to make domashniy syr you have to start from kefir. And if you want sour cream, you just let fresh milk sit out for a few days and scoop the fat off the top. Then you use the sour milk to make cheese! Brilliant. It keeps bringing Laura Ingalls to my mind.

Monday was lasagna day! Luda’s relatives work in Italy, and they sent her lasagna noodles (which you can’t find in Ukraine, except if you want to spend a lot of money in Kiev). We also substituted a type of cream cheese for mozzarella, but the end resulted tasted good to me (then again, when it comes to food, I’m pretty easy to please—I even ate some of that lumpy milk I heated the other day)! Luda’s mother is the music teacher at my school, but it didn’t feel odd to be friends with my colleague’s daughter and hang out in their apartment. They made delicious tea from berry bush leaves they themselves had gathered and dried. Anya and Luda had gone to the village to visit Luda’s boyfriend, and they were still marveling over how much nicer and more attentive village boys were to the “city girls,” so we decided next time we’d kick it up a notch with an American girl.

Food for thought: Tell me about your wildest food adventure.