Pitchforks, Babushkas and a Bowl of Dead Bees: All about Russian Food

I have trouble with butter when I live in Russia.  I don’t like margarine.  You can’t use margarine in a rich tart pastry - it just doesn’t work.   Butter exists in Russia, but you have to know people who know things in order to find it.  Sometimes I come home with margarine and my hopes are crushed and I get angry.  When I get angry in Siberia and think about butter I think of the peasants Dave read about in the archive, who in 1899 pitchforked a new milk separator machine to death because they thought there were devils inside taking the cream out of the milk.  Other times I come home hopeful, sure that this foil package with the word for butter on it and a picture of a cow had to be butter.  Then my anger boils up once again when I open the package and find something brown and chunky.  It turns out to be “forced meat,” a.k.a. ground beef.  People who know things will tell you, you can’t buy Russian butter because it’s not butter, it’s margarine.  And, yes, the word for oil, butter, margarine and fat is all the same, but you just have to accept that.  You have to buy Finnish butter if you want the good stuff.

Now, I thought I had this problem all ironed out.  This time around I was gung-ho to prove to the rest of the neighborhood, “hey, I’m a local, I know you have to go Finnish” (insert cocky snap of the finger and wink here).   I did find the Finnish butter the first week we were here, but the store abruptly stopped selling it.  It has not returned.  Milk separator devils.  The search continues.  Where’s the pitchfork?

Really, though, I enjoy the quest.  I like the mystery and newness, the adventure of finding and experiencing food in Russia.  There is a huge variety of yogurts with pick-your-own fat percentages, same goes for sour cream, milk, kefir (sour milk), yogurt drinks.  It puzzles me that in the cheese aisle there are probably 50 different white cheeses all neatly lined up, each priced and marked accordingly, but all taste exactly the same.  When I asked my Russian friend how she shops for cheese she just shrugged her shoulders and said, “I just feel it.  If it’s too soft I don’t buy.” This really gets me excited.  Why?  Why put each cheese in its own spot with its own price when it tastes just like its milky white neighbor?

We (Dave) have to go to the grocery store at least four times a week because for one thing you have to carry all your groceries home using back strength, and for another, milk is only sold by the liter and… we’re Americans, we love milk.  All of this is exhausting and takes some re-orienting when it comes to meal planning.  The nice thing is that I can get from my front door all the way into our grocery store, through the check-out line, and back home without ever having to unbuckle Gretchen from the stroller.  When it comes to Russia, this is out-of-control convenience.  I never would have dreamed it could be so easy!
 
















Another great place to buy food is at our local rynok (REEnok).  This is basically a Russian-style farmer’s market.  If you’ve never experienced a true garden-fresh carrot, one that has very recently been dug up and only wiped (not washed) clean of the soil, you really need to give it a try.  It’s a simple pleasure of mine, probably harking back to my childhood growing up bare-footed in Oregon.  Garden carrots are so different from store bought ones.  They have the spice of life in them and you can’t really find this in any other place except the garden.  I can buy garden fresh carrots in Russia.  They are dirty – and most of you know how I feel about dirt.

Every Saturday morning about 30 vendors gather together and set up booths at the rynok. You can buy carrots, wild mushrooms, Siberian berries, fresh eggs and honey.  You can also buy cow hooves, but I’m just not there yet.  Then there’s the guy leaning on his table smoking a cigarette holding a meat cleaver in front of a massive side of beef.  I’m not there yet either.

The other day I was down at the rynok with the girls.  As we were walking, Hazel stopped in her tracks and said, “Mom, look at that giant bowl of dead bees!”  Now, I wish I had some medicinal explanation for this, (and I wish I had a picture to prove I’m not making this up).  Even after consulting our Russian friends, however, exactly what was going on remains a mystery.   Why would anyone pay good rubles for a plastic scoop-full from the giant bowl of dead bees?  Sasha thought they were hibernating.  We can only hope, Sasha.

I love the mystery.  One week we saw a crowd of (mostly) babushkas gathered around a beat up old van with its back door open.  Now, when you see a crowd of babushkas you have to check out what’s getting their attention.  It’s bound to be worth your while – maybe not good, but definitely worth your while.  The first time I felt the pressure of the babushka was back in 2007 during a trip to Moscow.  I noticed a group of ladies all huddled around what looked like a huge gas tank on wheels with a small spout coming out of the end.  A man sat under an orange and red umbrella diligently filling bottle after bottle with brown liquid.  I figured it must be some sort of home brew and had to wait my turn to find out what this stuff was like.  Maybe I was extra thirsty that hot day, or maybe I just got caught up in the flurry of excited babushkas all around me, but I’ll never forget that icy cold kvas.  Kvas, it turns out, is a slightly sweet, sort of carbonated, and barely fermented drink made from black bread.  It was and still is the best cold drink I’ve ever had.  Another babushka moment happened a couple weeks ago.  I was at Ikea and noticed a group of them buzzing around a bin of felt slippers that were really cheap.  Naturally, I had to get a pair for Dave and me.

So, back at the rynok and the beat up old van: I swam through the crowd to see what was in the back of the van.  Sure enough, another gas tank with a spout.  I got in line.  This time it was filled with fresh milk, sold by the liter.  They couldn’t fill the bottles fast enough.  I waited my turn and bought one, along with a bag of berries all for two bucks. 

Our Russian Life

Okay, it’s getting out of hand now. Whenever I leave our apartment building and run into this one babushka, she instantly insists that I put a shapka on Gretchen’s head and zip up both girls’ jackets. It’s like, she sees me coming and goes into grandma-mode and must remedy my maternal instincts, otherwise the girls will, no doubt, get sick. At first this was endearing. Now it’s just annoying because it happens even on days that are like 60 degrees, and when I don’t do what she says, she walks away mumbling something under her breath. I smile and nod and say, “da, ya znayou,” and continue on my way.

So, what have we been up to? Well, we’re not in Germany any more. You gathered that from my last post. My runs are not quite as surreal these days, but I finally found a good route that takes me by a beautiful orthodox church each morning and I could always brave the “60 Years of Victory Bridge” that crosses the Irtysh if I’m bundled enough.

David has been busy already.   He spends his days in the archives, library or at the university. He’s in Moscow now for a few days hanging with embassy diplomats and feeling out the archives for what he needs. He’s lucky and I’m jealous because he gets to stay in a nice hotel and have filet mignon without us. Yevgeny, David’s Russian counterpart here in Omsk, recently took us all on a historical tour of the city ending with a lovely embankment walk along the river Om.

The girls and I have been exploring the city as much as we can. Last week we went to a wonderful Russian puppet show which was somehow about road signs and how to be cautious when you see one…I think. Hazel has started going to Russian school twice a week for 3 hours. She’s busy learning Russian and is using it at home already. Between that and our home school lessons, we’re busy. And Greta is just happy following Hazel around. Her heart breaks when she can’t go to school too. But she may start in a toddler group soon and then I’ll have some free time to visit some museums on my own.

I’m finally at the point in my language learning where I don’t have to look at the cash register when the cashier rattles off the total for my groceries.  Instead of bearing her fiery glare while I sheepishly look at the machine to read the digits, I can now pull my rubles out almost as fast as the next Russian mom.  And I'm buying veggies and fruits like a mad veggie fruit woman out here because this stuff is so good.  I think I'll do a separate post just on Russian foods.  Surprise!  It is worth writing home about.

You’d never guess this, but when you live in Russia, and the cold weather arrives, you better plan on getting out your shorts and tank tops and opening the windows in your flat. Whether you want it or not, apartments are heated by hot water beginning on a set date in the fall and then stopping in the spring. The cold weather has been trickling in and just last week our heat was turned on, and now we’re sweltering… again.

We were invited to spend an evening speaking to a group of Russians in an English club that meets at the Pushkin library where Dave has been working.  Various questions were asked about life in the USA: How does health care work?  How do we shop?  What don't we like about Russia?  Everyone was waiting with baited breath for our answers.  Very few people have actually heard English spoken in person out here and so, when they hear it, they tend to perk up.  In St. Petersburg we felt more like outcasts.  In Omsk, we feel like English speaking celebs.  It got hairy when someone asked a very philosophical, "so what is truth and do you think there is truth even when you are told one thing and then told the opposite thereafter..." She was, of course, referring to her Soviet experience.  I let Dave answer that one.

Russian Life

When I take the girls out to play, I can’t help but notice Russian life bustling all around me: An old babushka carries her groceries home every day. She walks on filthy streets for blocks on end, cold or warm weather, to buy them and then lugs them all the way home herself in the plastic bags she has brought from home. Some days she gets up early and rides a bus way out of town to her dacha and brings back what she can carry and then sits on an upside-down crate in front of a cell phone store and sells a few sprigs of parsley and a couple of cucumbers that day. Dave and I like buying berries this way. We’ve tried getting into wild mushrooms, but we simply don’t know how to fix them, so we refrain from buying those.

A mother in stiletto shoes carries her baby blocks upon blocks on these same filthy streets in order to get on a fumy bus and ride 45 minutes across town and then walks a few more dusty blocks to drop him off at grandma’s house. She then gets back on a bus, this time standing-room only, and goes to her job which pays her very little. Another mom and her teenage daughter carry home a bag of vegetables, each of them holding one handle of the bag, and then, to balance the weight, they each hold a bucket full of tomatoes with their outside hands. They stop just outside our apartment building to rest their buckets on the ground and then start up again.

At the playground, a mother holds her child’s hand as she scours the ground because it is covered with millions of shards of glass. You can’t just search out a better playground - every playground is like this. This is life in Russia.

Most children in Russia are raised by grandparents because both parents have to work to make ends meet. As a result, kids are disconnected from a home life and left to fend for themselves. The population in Russia is diminishing because people continue to choose not to have children, or to have just one child, because it’s simply too hard to live here with more (low birth rate is a problem Putin addressed a few years ago by giving people a substantial monetary incentive if they have a baby, which, by the way, has helped for the most part.) Everything is shoddy, muddy, gloomy, and bureaucratically depressing. Of the few Russians I’ve met so far, most of them have out-and-out stated that their life is difficult, that Russia is like a prison, or that they don’t like their city and dream of living elsewhere. And then… Hazel comes up to me and says:

         “Mom, aren’t we so blessed to have a home and food and all these Russian playgrounds around us?” And I look at her and almost cry because I know she's right. I’ve got to remember her words.

Some days Hazel and Gretchen and I get up and walk out to our bus stop. It’s not too far for us luckily. We ride the number 109 down to Universam grocery store a few blocks away and get out, cross the street and then wait for the Mega bus to arrive and sweep us off to Ikea for free. This bus has very comfortable seats. When we get to Ikea, which is part of a larger shopping complex akin to a western style mall complete with indoor playground and coffee shops, we sit down and just breathe. This place is clean, light, and airy. You can let your guard down and just relax, have a cup of coffee, or even read. It’s a nice break.

Adventures in a German Forest (aka Before the Exile)

It crossed my mind that I might get shot at, or at the very least yelled at by an angry German peasant with pitchfork, but I just couldn’t stop myself.  I knew that we only had five days in the Black Forest of Germany, that there were only so many forks in the road one could come to during such a short visit, and that I would just have to make the decision: should I keep jogging to the right, along a road lined with uniformly stacked moss-covered firewood sure to meet up with Hansel and Gretal’s wood-chopping dad; or should I jog left, up through a path lined with apple trees, wild blackberry bushes, ferns and some other magical character?  Each fork brought me such joy and such stress.  You can’t stop just because you don’t know whose farm you’ll run into or because you don’t know where the road leads.  I mean, what if you miss the unicorn?
 I saw some beautiful sights those mornings when I kept on running: villages on the hillsides across the valley with their church steeples keeping watch over it all; dark woods covered in moss, mist, and sunlight cutting through the tree trunks; and lonely apple trees bursting forth with fruit.  Jogging in these woods lifted me out of this world and then set me back down on a page of Grimm’s Fairy Tales.  I’ll never forget those misty mornings in Germany. 
     We arrived on September 2 and after the drive of insanity on the autobahn, topping speeds of 140mph with our German friend calm-as-can-be at the wheel, we spent these short five days in a beautiful cabin in the Black Forest with our friends.  We met these friends in Saint Petersburg during our stay there four years ago.  They have two daughters now, both our girls’ ages. T and H spent their learning-to-walk days together in Saint Petersburg as their parents talked.  The girls picked up right where they left off, holding hands within a day during our visit to the Hohenzollern castle – the castle in the clouds situated on the highest peak of a mountain. Google it.  It’s amazing. After we had our fill of Swabian Sp”atzle, real Swiss fondue, German riesling, Italian coffee with the beans ground on-the-spot, and the best chocolate in the world (this was verified by our friend, a true connoisseur of fine chocolates-if you don’t believe him prepare yourself to be laughed at heartily), we left for Omsk.
   

We have a two bedroom spacious, warm, and clean apartment just outside the city center, complete with internet.  D’s advisor at the university is kind and helpful, along with the rest of the faculty at the international office.  We both begin on Monday: D will be starting research, and H, G and I will begin school at home.  D and I will also begin private Russian lessons at home with a teacher from the university.  I’m very surprised at how much Russian I understand.  I don’t remember leaving Petersburg with as much knowledge, but it seems it has melded since being away.
We wore short sleeves and sandals the day we arrived in Omsk.  The next day we were in down coats.  So, we have a long winter ahead but I feel strangely at home here.  It is not so foreign this time around.   We’re enjoying the food once again.  We’re enjoying the 25 cent bus rides to anywhere. And we’re enjoying the prospect of site-seeing very soon. H & G are adjusting beautifully to their bright bedroom that they share and are already busy situating their books and crayons accordingly.  They both enjoy the soviet-era playground outside our apartment building, “especially,” says H, “the painted tires sticking out of the ground.” 
    We’re looking forward to attending a protestant church this Sunday and seeing a bit more of the city.  So this is where we’re at now.  More to come.  P.S. No, the background of this blog is not a photo of our apartment.  Just a cool scene I liked.