The Christy & Kpucmuha Russian Cooking Experiment of 2013

I have an alter ego. Call her an evil twin, call her a "soul sister". She has been with me for a long time--ever since I started studying Russian, which was 1989 or 1990, depending on your definition of "studying" (a non-credit before-school class my senior year of high school was my first introduction to the language beyond terms such as 'Glasnost' and 'Perestroika' thrown around on the nightly news broadcasts I watched).

You see: Kpucmuha (or "Kristina" in non-Cyrillic writing) is my Russian name. Or, should I say, it is the lazy representation of my Russian name using my normal keyboard and standard encoding. I know, I know: it looks like my alter ego's name should be pronounced something like "Caw-pook-moo-ha".

If you know me somewhat well, you know that I spent my junior year of college abroad in Siberia. SIBERIA. Doesn't that word make you feel about 30 degrees cooler? (You're welcome, to all my currently-sweltering East Coast friends & family.) But, no, seriously. It's not like I lived in Yakutsk or anything. I lived in Irkutsk, which has a climate closer to Upstate New York (only cooler in the summer... I wish I was there now!)

Irkutsk is a really beautiful city with a rich cultural history, thanks to artists, officers and other nobles getting in trouble for revolting against Tsar Nicholas and being exiled there in the early 19th Century. Anyway, it is located not far from Mongolia, and the epic body of water by the name of Lake Baikal. I have a picture of me fake-meditating along its shores somewhere. I really must get my old Russia photos out and scan them (not the embarrassing ones or any that show me drinking vodka.)

Before I lived in Irkutsk, I knew it only as a section of the Risk Board. Hey, look! Yakutsk is on there too.



So anyway, thanks to the awesome board game of world domination, I had at least heard of where they were sending me before I got there. It was the fall of 1992 when I and my classmate packed our things and made the long journey to... well, SIBERIA (still impressive-sounding, isn't it?) We were lucky... there was food. If we had gone the year before, it might have been a different story.

Long. Story. Short. The year was great (and frustrating, and sad, and anger-inducing, and awesome, and pretty much everything in-between.) We returned home with better Russian skills, first-hand cultural knowledge, and upon walking into American department stores, we wanted to throw up from all the choices of things to buy.

And I, personally, came back with a love of Russian food (but sadly, not a very good grasp of cooking it.)
PIROSHKY! PELMINI! KASHA! BORSCHT! PLOV! CABBAGE, CABBAGE & MORE CABBAGE. I love it all.

I went back to Russia after college (more on that fiasco some other time) and even earned my MA at SUNY Albany's now-defunct Russian Language, Literature and Culture program.

So to sum up: Russia is kind of my thing. I love Dostoevsky beyond belief, and the poems of Anna Akhmatova and other writers who lived (and died) during the Great Purge send me over the moon. The concept that someone could get thrown into prison--or worse--for a work of poetry, is so foreign to me. Of course, Osip Mandelshtam's Stalin Epigram (which got him arrested) wasn't exactly flattering, saying of the dictator: "He rolls the executions on his tongue like berries. He wishes he could hug them like big friends from home."

Don't even get me started on the awesomeness that is cheesy Russian movies from the 1970's. Google "Eldar Ryazanov" and you will be on your way to seeing what I mean.

Coming back to food, I want to do something "Julie & Julia"-esque, and start cooking more Russian food (compared to the amount I am currently cooking, which is none, that should be a relatively easy endeavor.) My brother Don, several years ago, gave me a Russian cookbook called Please To The Table. For years I have read the recipes & drooled, but for the most part have only made Piroshky (and that was a long time ago.) So, I do believe I may have to delve into this book & start cooking some actual Russian (and Soviet) cuisine.  I hereby announce "The Christy & Kpucmuha Russian Cooking Experiment of 2013"!

Hmmmm.... so I guess I should pick a recipe. It's too hot to cook, so I think I will check out the salad section first... Details coming soon to a blog near you.

The Best Cup of Coffee in Town

When I moved from Lake Stevens to Upstate New York, I was blessed enough to be given the opportunity to work from home. My company actually let me continue in their employ, working from my cozy (small) home office. There were a few downsides to my new gig, but mostly big benefits.  For instance, when I became pregnant and experienced rather prolonged morning (every-moment-of-the-day-for-months-on-end) sickness, my working at home was of benefit to everyone because I was completely miserable and who wants to see their colleague running to the restroom 8-10 times in a two-hour period? And I knew whom to blame for unpleasant smells in the kitchen (my husband, of course).

Some other nice things about working from home are:

• I don't have to commute 30-45 minutes each way to and from work (thus maximizing my sleeping and mommy-daughter hours, time with my husband, etc.). Before I moved to New York, I spent easily two hours per day in the car. That would not be easily fit into the schedule at this stage of my life.
• I save a ton of money on gas (see above).
• I am spared work drama and office politics (seriously, the people I work with are the nicest people and there is very little workplace drama or politics, but it is nice to not have to listen to people talking on the phone when I am trying to concentrate on something complicated).
• Since I have no commute, I am not tempted to buy coffee every day.

(I'll write about some of the negative things about working from home some other time. There are a few, of course.)

I will stop my list there, since this post is about the last item on my list: saving money on coffee. I cannot tell you (I seriously have no idea) how much money I have saved on coffee since transitioning to a home-office. I should confess that along my former home to work route (Lake Stevens to Bothell, along Highway 9), there was a Starbucks that during particularly stressful times or busy weeks, I would stop at once, sometimes twice a day. Okay, admittedly, I'm a cheap coffee date (Grande Americano with Cream -- under $2.25 as of my wedding in 2010 -- the price has gone up a bit since then, but compare that with a latte...) but still. It adds up over time. I don't even want to know how much I have spent on coffee over the years. The thought just gives me a headache.

Thanks to my husband's well-timed tax refund gift (received on Valentine's Day of this year -- that Uncle Sam is such a sweetheart) of a Keurig, and the refillable K-cup filter I bought, I can make a great cup of coffee in under 2 minutes for a mere fraction of what I spent in my former life. I usually mix equal parts flavored grounds (this week it is dark chocolate) with plain old medium roast. It tastes delicious, and I don't have to skip paying the mortgage this month if I want a few cups.

Sometimes I do buy coffee still. If I have to run an errand in the morning before work, sometimes there is nothing more wonderful than a Dunkin' Donuts medium-sized cinnamon or hazelnut coffee with cream (again - cheap coffee date - less than $2.25). And I must say that driving through and handing someone my hard-earned money in exchange for hot, caffeinated goodness (instant nice person!) just brings back good memories.

But, in a startling turn of events, I have recently discovered that the best cup of coffee in town is not my own "office" brew, or even Dunkin' Donuts. It actually comes from the little tea pot in my daughter's Disney Princess play kitchen set. Awww, aren't you sighing now? But seriously, it's so cute when G. offers me a cup of coffee. There is nothing better in the entire world and it is worth more to me than the entire Starbucks empire.

Dinner Tonight

Since I promised some sharing of random details from my here & now life, there is nothing like starting with what I cooked for dinner tonight. I decided to reuse some chili that I had made in the crock pot a couple of months ago and froze. I LOVE reusing leftovers (this is not only referring to food, but jewelry parts, fabric, and yarn - pretty much anything lying about, only not for dinner, obviously). I'd been thinking about what to do with that old chili since we took it out of the freezer a few days ago to thaw. It's not really hot soup weather at the moment (the high today was in the upper eighties here in our town on the Hudson River). I needed to find something different, so I searched Google to see what others online are doing with leftover chili.

I stumbled upon this recipe for homemade (and easy) enchilada sauce: http://www.gimmesomeoven.com/red-enchilada-sauce/. I had read about some people using leftover chili to make enchiladas, and was intrigued.

So anyway, I won't go into too much detail on the sauce except to say, it took FOREVER to thicken, which I think was due to the high humidity in my house today. So I simmered the heck out the enchilada-sauce-in-progress until it actually started to resemble a sauce, and it turned out very good (a wee-bit lumpy since I was not as dedicated to whisking as I would have been if I wasn't keeping an eye on G. at the same time as cooking the sauce.)

My real inspiration came when I asked myself how I was going to make the chili mixture thick enough to make the enchilada actually enchilada-like. Eureka! I added grated cheese (a no-brainer) to the chili mixture until it was a nice consistency. Then, in an act of sheer genius, I spread a layer of cream cheese on each tortilla before adding the chili and forming the enchiladas.

Anyway, I had put a thin layer of sauce on the bottom of the pan before I added the enchiladas, then put the remaining sauce over the top. 15 minutes on 350 as-is then another 15 minutes covered in a thick blanket of grated cheddar & it was dinner!

My hunch about the cream cheese paid off and the enchiladas were fabulous. I was excited about my creation because I had taken a recipe I was moderately enthused about and with some creativity and some targeted Google searching, found a way to make leftover chili into something we really enjoyed. This is one of the things that I love about my sister-in-law, Lynn: she will take a recipe and then basically change it to suit her own taste, and it rocks every time. In her honor, I consumed a couple of cups of coffee while I was making dinner, I might add! Although in retrospect I probably should not have chose this hot day to use my oven, forcing the air-conditioner to work even harder.

So I hope you enjoyed my first blog post. I promise they will not all be about food (they will probably all mention coffee at some point, though - ha!), but this one was because, well, we had chili in the freezer!