West of East

Having munched my way through many Eastern cuisines of late, I recently had a hankering to move westwards; but where to venture?

Europe has some interesting offerings (think Sardinia’s maggot cheese, or Iceland’s rotten shark) but I suspect New Zealand’s food police have probably banned them. And you’re hardly going to get excited if I blog about spaghetti bolognaise or coq au vin.

Inspiration recently struck when friends told me about an Eastern European delicatessen they’d discovered tucked away in a Newmarket back street, so off Kieran and I went to check it out.

I know little about Eastern European cuisine apart from Croatian food (thanks to my Croatian heritage). Don and I spent three days in Moscow in 1990 and my memories of Soviet food were of very long, exotic menus, with virtually everything unavailable. I was a vegetarian at the time and recall canned peas featuring fairly heavily in the meals I was served.

We also spent a week in Bulgaria, which had great cheese and bread, foul wine and really cheap ice cream. But I don’t remember much about the food otherwise.

So I leapt at the chance to discover more. Skazka sells an interesting array of Russian, Polish and Bulgarian products that range from fresh rye bread and pastries, to frozen dumplings and filled pancakes, through to canned and bottled goods and sweets.

Predictably, Kieran zeroed in on Skazka's chocolate and sweet aisles, and I honed in on the weirdest thing I could find: a jar of pine cone elixir. Apparently it’s used on pancakes, in much the same way one would use maple syrup. It sounded intriguing, so into my shopping basket it went, along with a jar of rose elixir.

I've been too busy lately to make breakfast pancakes,
so I had to resort to tasting these au natural.  The rose elixer is
very sweet and subtly rosewater tasting.  Disappointingly, I
couldn't even detect a hint of conifer in the pine elixer; just
a sweet, slightly golden syrupy taste.  Ho hum.

I also bought some sweet cottage cheese pastries, frozen beef-filled pancakes, frozen sweet dumplings, and these treasures:

This home-style cottage cheese was fabulous.  The curds
were far firmer, less watery and more flavoursome
than the cottage cheese one gets in the supermarket. 
I'll be back for more.



Bottled boletus.  Far too cute to eat.

Inspired, I got Googling as soon as I got home and the ensuing cooking blizzard covered the length and breadth of the former Soviet Union:

Here's what became of the cottage cheese - Siberian vatrushki. 
Home-made sweet pastry, filled with a sweet cottage cheese / rum soaked
raisin / lemon rind / egg filling.  The cherry reduction was my own touch.
They tasted as good as they looked, and my lucky sons had
vatrushki in their lunch boxes for days afterwards.

The ultimate rib-sticker: Mashhurda (Uzbek mung bean soup
topped with sour cream).   In addition to mung beans, the
soup contained cubed beef, veges, bay leaves, peppercorns
and rice.  I'll add more liquid next time.  Delete the meat and it
would make a nutritious vegetarian meal. 

Yet another hearty dinner: Holushki (Russian cabbage and sour cream with home made
noodles). And yes, I really did make the noodles.

Two more recipes remain high on my list of things to try ‘Chakhokhbili’ – a Georgian chicken stew that’s chock full of fresh herbs (apparently it absolutely MUST include fresh coriander, dill, tarragon, basil and parsley or the flavour will not be authentic) and Medovie – a complicated Russian recipe for honey cake layered with a filling comprising unbelievable quantities of butter, condensed milk and - you guessed it - sour cream.

While it has been interesting trying Soviet food, the things I've tried have been pretty stodgy fare. Which is fine in the depths of a Russian winter when it’s minus thirty, but not quite so great on a warm Auckland spring evening.

Skazka
16 Kingdon Street
Newmarket
Auckland
http://www.skazka.co.nz/