Before my parents left the states, they asked if there was anything that I missed from home that they could bring. Before I knew it, I had written an e-mail detailing an entire jet full of things I wanted: Tabasco Sauce, Worchestshire Sauce, vanilla, tortilla chips, salsa, candies, mac-and-cheese, taco seasoning, Frank’s Hot Sauce. The list had no end and was completely edible. A few weeks after they left, and I started eating the spoils of American visitors, I realized that I spend almost half of my free-time in the kitchen trying to recreate American dishes.
I think the first of my adventures came during training. My cluster decided that we had enough of the typical Ukrainian lunch, sausage and cheese on bread, and made spaghetti. We went to the store and bought everything we needed. Tomato paste, garlic and olive oil were really the best we could do. I excitedly opened the jar of tomato paste and dumped it into the pot. It simmered and bubbled like tomato paste, but it wasn’t. It was closer to ketchup than paste and someone had added sugar during the canning process. I tried to compensate by adding salt, too much garlic and oil, but that was no use. I tried cooking it longer to get some of the acid out of the tomatoes. It just got worse. We ate it and everyone was even kind enough to say it tasted good. I knew the truth though. It would have been better to just eat our sandwiches.
I’ve learned a lot since then. Pickled tomatoes have a much better sauce flavor and are available in winter when the fresh ones are out of the question. Also, any small store in almost every small town sells oregano and basil. I even have a mix of Italian spices that make spaghetti one of my standard winter meals.
After my Italian craving, I needed to travel south of the border for some Mexican. After a few weeks at site, I discovered that there are dried beans for sale everywhere and they are really cheap. Since I had found some chili powder, and curry (I know not really Mexican) the week before, I decided that I would make some good south-western rice and beans. I had never, ever worked with dried beans before. It turns out that, unless you want to be in your kitchen for hours, you have to soak them in water for an entire day. I just started cooking. After half an hour, I assumed there couldn’t be much time left, so I added the rice. I’m not really a rice eater, so I was basically following a recipe for disaster. Somehow, half an hour later, I ended up with something that looked a lot like rice. I threw in some spices and tried to chow down. It was the crunchiest rice and beans ever made. The rice was mostly cooked. The beans were barely moist all the way through. I did learn a lesson from this experience too though. Don’t make rice and beans.
Pizza didn’t prove to be very difficult, but Rob and I had a lot of fun trying to figure out what to do with the leftover dough. Our first creation was pretzel dogs. We wrapped the dough around hot dogs and baked. We also made regular pretzels, which is not as quick and easy as the people at Antie Ann’s make it look. Our favorite new creation, however, was something we called “walruses.”
Rob said that we could make something like a chocolate croissant if we rolled the dough, cut it into thin strips, sprinkled chocolate on them and rolled them up. At first it looked like he might have been right. Once I bent them in the classic U shape they did look a lot like croissants. We popped them into the oven and were shocked with what came out. They grew to triple their size and, with chocolate oozing out to give them a lovely brown color, they resembled little, baked walruses. They did taste pretty good and we’ve made them a few times since. They worked really well with Nutella and we’re experimenting with a fudge sauce to try.
Most recently, Rob and I decided to make tacos for the first time using the taco seasoning that my family gave me. We couldn’t find tortillas, so we decided that it would be a taco salad. Shortly after, we discovered that we couldn’t even find lettuce. Lest we eat only meat, tomatoes, cheese and onion from a spoon, we decided to wait until later. That is when inspiration hit. We could use macaroni instead of tortillas. We made macaroni and cheese, from a mix, and essentially made hamburger helper. At the table we added fresh tomatoes, onions and olives. It was my best taco night in Ukraine by far.
The funniest food adventure had to be the day we decided to make hamburgers. I had seen a tiny grill in the supermarket for a few weeks so I was itching for some barbecue. It was Flag Day and there were three other Americans at my site for camp, so I decided that it was finally time to give it a try. We got the grill, ground meat, real American cheese, everything we would need to make amazing hamburgers. We set the grill up outside my apartment building and started cooking. Unfortunately, the charcoals that we bought were wood and almost impossible to light. After half a bottle of lighter fluid, all we had managed were some smoke signals. I was so impatient to finish, that as soon as we managed a flame I insisted that we put the burgers on right away. It turns out there is a really good reason that you usually wait for the fire to die down. As the grease melted off the burgers, the flames roared higher and caught them on fire. It wasn’t a huge fire and we managed to get them most of the way cooked before a babusia started yelling at us. She had a point. We were a bunch of young adults standing around a barbecue that was shooting foot high flames out the top with no apparent intention of making it stop. As she yelled more and more about burning the building down and killing us all, I decided the burgers were done and we had to make a quick exit. With no other solution apparent, I dumped two liters of water onto the grill, burgers and all. We scooped it up with a couple of hot pads and scurried up to my apartment balcony. Surprisingly, the water had little effect on the burgers and they tasted incredible. The grill has been sitting, abandoned on my balcony ever since.
Sometimes I wonder where all my free-time goes. I’ve heard so many times that PCV’s have tons of time to learn new hobbies and play instruments. I guess I spend most of my time in the kitchen engaging in what I would like to call “extreme cooking.” There is never a dull moment in my kitchen, except maybe the days I only eat oatmeal because I’m just too tired to cook.
Posted on August 28, 2010
0