Vatrushky Night...Fun with Food!

A Lovely Vatrushka

Vatrushky, (the plural of vatrushka, much like kolache is the plural of kolach), are Russian cheese tarts that are savory instead of sweet. These tarts are very popular in the Ukraine and often served with dishes such as borscht.

I was doodling around one night, looking in a cookbook when I ran across a recipe for vatrushky. Had to try it out, of course.

The recipe called for cottage cheese which had to be drained for a few hours. For those interested, I used the entire tub of cottage cheese (16 ounces), and ended up with 2/3 of a cup of cottage cheese swill. (Which would have been great to use in another recipe, but alas! I didn't save it.)

These tarts are rolled out by hand but if you have some of those nifty mini-tart pans, those would do, too. Heck, you could get away with using a pie pan and just making one big one. But in the interest of making them the traditional way, I rolled them out.

These tarts are gooooood. The dough is superb. I think that it would be great in place of regular pie dough to make pies. I'm telling you, this is the closest recipe I've had where the dough tasted like communion wafers. If it was rolled thin enough, it would almost be spot on.

Anyhoo, I'm sure it was the sour cream in the recipe that made the dough so heavenly. Here's a link to a good vatrushky recipe if you're interested: Ukrainian Classic Kitchen. This is not the same recipe I used when I made my vatrushky, but it's close enough for a handshake.

Please enjoy my pictorial vatrushky adventure:

Roll out the dough: 4" circles

Crimp the sides

Add the filling

Glaze the whole tart with egg wash

The finished vatrushka!!

Happy Eating, Boys & Girls! :) 



Beef Stroganov

This is a dish that I hadn't made from scratch in at least 10 years, until last night. I used to live with someone who didn't like "wet dishes," that is--any dishes that were a "one-pot" meal with meat, veggies & gravy. The only exceptions were chili, soup, stew and even "Hamburger Helper" once in a while.

Even so, I made "wet dishes" on occasion and they were eaten and enjoyed. Some of them were even accepted into the house menu. Unfortunately, Beef Stroganov (or, if you prefer, Stroganoff), wasn't one of them.

There are a lot of variations for this recipe. Most of them contain beef, onions and sour cream. That's usually where the similarity ends. Some recipes have mushrooms and tomato sauce, but not all. Some recipes call for service with egg noodles; some call for rice.

I found a recipe that was shared with a traveler and it's supposed to be authentic. The preparation is a bit unusual. The onions are placed in the pan and the meat is placed on top of them and cooked on top of the onions until it has a "gloss." Only then are the sauce ingredients added. Then everything is mixed together and served with a Russian version of fried potatoes. There are no mushrooms in the authentic recipe.

The recipe, (and some history regarding Beef Stroganov), can be found here: "Vikalinka." 

I'm planning on trying the Vikalinka's recipe very soon. The recipe I used last night was a lot less labor intensive than the recipe I used over 10 years ago. It calls for beef, mushrooms, onions, wine, butter, powdered mustard, a touch of sugar and only 1/2 cup of sour cream. It's a good recipe, and we had our Stroganov served over fusilli. It's not a very colorful dish, but it's damn good.

Beef Stroganov
Fresh Green Beans
Fresh Kale with Bacon & Onions

 

I found another Russian recipe I'll be making in a few days or so. I like to make these recipes not just for eating, but because it's fun to shout out the recipe in Russian when someone asks what I'm making. Almost as fun as it is shouting in German. :)

Have a great day, great adventures in your kitchen and happy eating! :)

Peaches 'n' Cream Pie

I love it in the laboratory and this pie was cobbled together on the fly with leftover dough and leftover pastry cream. I guess it should have been a cobbler instead, ha ha ha!

I didn't have quite enough dough to make a fancy, fluted crust for the edges so I studded the crust with some ground pecans. It didn't need a long baking time so the pecans were perfectly safe without one of those crust protectors.

The peaches were organic frozen peaches poached in organic peach preserves + their own juices. No other sugar was needed. Trust me on this! This particlar jar of peach preserves is very lovely but the preserves are so sweet they knock you right on your butt! We've been searching for alternative uses for these insanely sweet preserves besides using them for glazing fruit. I even added some to the leftover pastry cream (mixing well).

So I guess this is a "Frankenstein" pie...but we'll call it a "Frazier-stein" pie. Because...well, why not? Making things fun in the kitchen always brings great results! I know that there are people who are nervous in the kitchen and afraid of messing up but you just have to relax and have fun. Get in "THE ZONE." That's when you'll kick some serious butt! :)

Peaches-n-Cream Pie

Chicken Picatta--I Love It a Lotta!!

Yeah, yeah, go ahead and laugh at my lame title, ha ha! ;)

My cousin never had the pleasure of eating Chicken Picatta. (Is it picatta or piccata? There seems to be no universal agreement about this. Not even all Italians agree on the spelling.)

I decided to make some Chicken Picatta for supper and my cousin--(who can be like "Mikey" on occasion...remember that commercial?)--was dining with us. I have learned to emphasize certain items for certain people, if I'm asked to list ingredients in a recipe, and to downplay other ingredients. It's not to be mean or cruel. Sometimes ingredients just can't be substituted. Oh, they can be substituted and the dish will still be edible but it won't have the same classic taste.

Well, I didn't have capers for the dish last night so I threw in some fresh mushrooms. It was good and still had a ghostly flavor of "traditional" picatta. It didn't have the delightful explosion of flavor that the capers provide, though.

My cousin liked it, though, and she enjoyed the orzo as well. (She'd never had that, either.) She went back for seconds and all we had left to put away in the fridge later was a little smidge of chicken and a few mushrooms. A big WIN! WOO-HOO! :)

My next goal is to make sure I get some capers so I can see how well she likes the classic recipe.

Side View: 

 

 

Chicken Picatta w/Mushrooms, Orzo & Fresh Green Beans


Top View:

 





Chicken Picatta with Mushrooms, Orzo & Fresh Green Beans

 

Bitter Cucumbers--Does Cutting & Rubbing Remove Bitterness?

Old Wives' Tale?

We had a very lengthy discussion about bitter cucumbers last night. This was a big practice in our family, at least on the Czech side. Mom doesn't remember Great-Grandma Hintz (the German side) doing this, and neither do I. (I remember Great-Grandma Hintz's "cottage of tomatoes," though...that's definitely a story all its own and I'll have to remember to cover it in another post).

E.J. remembers her mom doing this (her mom was my great-aunt, Albina). My Czech grandma, Nan and Aunt Albina swore that this helped remove the bitterness in cucumbers. Their parents told them so, and so they continued the practice unfailingly.

The consensus as of last night is this: E.J. still faithfully executes the practice of rubbing. Mom does it only once in a while. I don't do it at all any more because I stopped being a believer some years ago.

This doesn't mean I am shaming my ancestors or being unloyal to them, as the tone in E.J.'s voice suggested when I told her that I don't do it anymore.

I don't do it anymore because I don't believe it works. There. I said it. I don't believe it works because some years back when we had a bountiful explosion of cucumbers in the garden, I did some experimenting on my own.

I noticed that the bitterness was at the stem end most of the time. Sometimes it did travel farther or was even in other areas but for the most part--the stem end was the problem. So I just started cutting off the stem end (and farther up if necessary).

I noticed that when there was bitterness in the cuke, there was usually an area that looked drier and spongey. I thought it might be related. (I also noticed that if I forgot to water the garden and the cucumber vines got too dry, the cukes were almost always bitter).

We didn't have the internet back then and I didn't go tearing off to the library to get into the reference books. I had plenty of cucumbers to study.

Cucumber Pickin' on the World Wide Web

After our lengthy discussion last night, I decided to do a little research and see if I could find some definitive answers about rubbing the cut end of the cucumber to the other end in order to remove bitterness.

It was an interesting search. I found that the practice is not limited to the South. It's all over the U.S. It's not limited to Czechoslovakians, either. There are Germans who engage in this practice. Some Canadians do it. I found some British practitioners, too. I found practitioners in India as well, but in that instance, I found that the family rubbed the cut end on the cuke to get rid of "latex." (Is the word latex in India exchangeable for the English word for bitter? I don't think so but I didn't look into that little tidbit in depth).

There were variations in the way to do it, and different explanations as to why it worked. Some Canadian practitioners said you must cut both ends off and make notches on the ends before rubbing. An American variation stated that you must sprinkle salt on the end before rubbing.

All of the practitioners that I discovered while I was searching were doing this because it had been passed down the family line. I couldn't find any hard scientific data about this practice. (Yes, I even checked "Snopes," but the only discussion about it was limited to the message boards.)

Am I lookin' for cukes in all the wrong places?

I did find some information at Washington State University about removing bitterness from cucumbers. Cut off the stem end and/or peel the cucumber. You can also slice it, salt it and let it sit for a while, then rinse and prepare as normal. No mention of rubbing.

So Does it Work or Not?

I noticed that many people who engage in this practice either claim that the bitterness is the foaming that is produced by the rubbing or that the bitterness is removed by the "capillary effect." The "capillary effect" subscribers claim that the bitterness always runs underneath the skin of the cuke.

Everyone has explanations about why this practice supposedly works and variations of the practice.

Well, I vote no. It doesn't work. I apologize to any ancestors or anyone else that I may be offending or if it seems like I am blaspheming to make this admission, (I guess E.J. thinks I am nothing but a Benedict Arnold), but I just don't believe in this anymore. That doesn't mean that I don't believe in magic, especially "Kitchen Magic," but this? No.

Show me some definite, hard facts and I will change my mind. Find me a white-haired scientist with bushy eyebrows that conducted actual physical experiments on cucumbers and then measured the results with delicate instruments.

Oh, and I have to add: the bitter cukes are most common if you raise them yourself or buy them at farmer's markets and such. The variety used for pickling seem to be the most susceptible. Another "official" site claimed that commercially grown cukes are bred so that the amount of bitter compounds are reduced. (I can't find the site now but I'm sure that this is probably true since we live in a world of "Frankenfood.")

I would love to know the origin of this practice. Does your family do it? Please leave me some feedback. It really is one of those great mysteries. We'll call it: "The Cucumber X-Files." I think this mystery would leave Mulder and Scully in a pickle. Ha ha ha! ;)

Have a great day! :)

                                                   Hot Dog! He's a Pickle Pickin' Puppy!   

 

                                               (Photo courtesy of Electron at Wikimedia Commons).