Greetings All:
My lovely wife is giving me grief about not contributing to our blog. Since I really only “know” several things, I decided to write about one of them…FOOD.
Since we’ve been here, we have eaten a variety of different dishes. A good many of them have a specific ingredient, meat. And what I mean by this is that it could be any kind of meat and we do not exactly know what kind we are eating at that particular time; beef/horse/chicken/duck/goose, who knows.
Our translators {as well as my lovely wife} do a wonderful job everyday of making sure we are fed, and for this, I am grateful. One of the Russian dishes we have had is a cabbage roll stuffed with “meat” and vegetables. It really is quite good. They typically use onions, carrots and rice mixed in with the meat. Also at this same type of cafeteria is a meat pie. It is a slab of meat, (see ingredients mentioned above) covered with mashed potatoes and cheese. Of course they have burgers and fries here too, but they don’t taste the same. The bread here though, is fantastic. Russians also greatly enjoy mayonnaise and ketchup. They apply it vigorously to about everything. Take today; I had what appeared to be like a skirt steak covered with mashed potatoes and an array of mixed veggies. This was covered in cheese and you guessed it: mayonnaise. Needless to say, I scraped the mayo off. All in all, it was very good.
We have also had wonderful varieties of soup and tea. Since there was a foot of snow on the ground and we received another 8-10 inches yesterday, you must keep warm. We had Borscht yesterday, which is a beef broth with cabbage, meat, spuds, and other veggies. Today we had some sort of Beet soup. It was red of course, mixed in with beef broth, meat, rice and veggies. Tonight, we had soup and grilled cheese. The cheese is very good, however when you try to buy it, it just says cheese. You really don’t know what kind or variety you have. The soup had beef broth with rice {kind of a Raman Noodle kind of dish). Coca Cola Light (Diet Coke) is kind of hard to come by so I have been drinking coke or tea in the morning. The residents here like their tea and I think Kelley is looking to bring some tea back home based on how she has been ogling the tea aisle.
We have also tried some Russian and Kaz beers. They are very full bodied and are quite smooth. Much like a lager. One variety has a number system attached to it. One (1) being like a Light Beer and nine (9) being the harshest. Our translator said the 9 beer is a vodka/beer mix. I don’t know whether she was kidding, but I haven’t tried it yet. I had a seven (7) a couple nights ago and really enjoyed it. The alcohol level on it is 5.6%.
One last item, we ate at Pizza Hut yesterday. No they don’t have the Pizza Hut we are all familiar with over here but they do have one named that way. I bet Pepsico would be interested to know this. It was good. They do not use tomato sauce and do not put abundant toppings on but it was still good.
Happy 2007 and we can’t wait to see everyone!!
More to come later…Dave
