In our office in Russia, there’s a little dining room with a table for four right beside the cafeteria. There’s a white tablecloth, big classical-style windows, and two heavy wooden doors – one to the cafeteria and one to the kitchen. As soon as you sit down, an older woman in a blue-and-white checked apron comes through the second door, hands you the day’s menu, and comes back 30 seconds later to take your order. It’s all very cozy and efficient and Russian. I loved the food in that little cafeteria – the meat-potatoes-cabbage-sour cream approach to cuisine definitely appeals to me, and I think traditional Russian cooking is very tasty, despite the bad rap it gets. And every day I ordered kompot, a sort of chilled, sweetened fruit juice. I discovered it on my very first trip to Russia, three years ago, and never looked back. (Three years! Have I really been traveling on this crazy schedule for three entire years?)

I think kompot might be tied with lemonade for the ultimate summer drink. It’s sweet, tangy, cold, and fruity – the perfect thirst-quencher when you’re parched but water won’t quite do the trick. It’s very simple to make. While in Russia I had it made with pretty much every possible combination of summer fruit, so you don’t have to worry too much about the ingredients – you can make it with whatever fruit you have on hand. But my favorite version is made with red currants, a fruit that I will always associate with Russian summers, so that’s what I’ve made here.

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Red Currant Kompot

Makes 10 half-cup servings.

• ½ c. fresh raspberries
• ½ c. fresh blueberries
• 1 c. fresh red currants, removed from stems
• 5 c. water
• ½ c. sugar (or more to taste)

1. Add the berries, currants, and water to a large saucepan. Bring to a gentle simmer over medium heat and simmer for about 5-7 minutes, until the water is deeply colored and the berries have just started to break down but have not lost their shape. Remove from the heat and stir in the sugar until it is dissolved. Taste and add more sugar if desired. Let the mixture cool to room temperature, then pour the juice and approximately half of the fruit into a pitcher and refrigerate until thoroughly chilled. (Reserve the remaining fruit for another use, such as topping ice cream or yogurt). Serve cold.

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At some point I do plan to share some general travel tips for St. Petersburg – I’ve eaten at dozens of restaurants, stayed in four hotels, and made it to a good number of the biggest attractions, and I feel like I can’t let all that experience go to waste! I still have to get my act together and assemble that info, but I do have a really delicious Russian recipe for you right now. So far, my favorite place to eat in Russia is a popular chain called Shtolle (штолле), that serves sweet and savory pies. Russian pie dough is much more like a dinner roll than an American pie crust – it is a yeasted dough with sour cream and butter worked in, making it rich and airy at the same time. To get the good pies at Shtolle you have to go earlier in the day, as they’re often out of the best ones by dinnertime. I’ve tried the cabbage pie, meat pie, green onion and egg pie, and apricot pie, but my favorite by far is the mushroom and rabbit pie. I talked it up so much to Trevor that I knew we’d have to recreate it – so recreate it we did, and pretty successfully as well.

I fully expected to struggle to find a good dough recipe, but I quickly found this recipe and it sounded like just what I was looking for. In fact, the hardest part of this whole process was finding reasonably priced rabbit in Boston. It’s around $13 a pound at Savenor’s, which feels like a lot, and we found one semi-local farm that sells whole rabbits for $6 a pound, but they weren’t going to have any available for the next few weeks. We had almost caved and bought the pricey Savenor’s rabbit, when we found it by chance for $7 a pound at Market Basket in Andover. We stocked up of course, so now we have plenty of rabbit for experimentation. As for the rest of the filling, I made it up based on memory – I knew it should have shredded braised rabbit, finely chopped mushrooms and onion, lots of dill, and a mild, light white sauce, which most likely was made from sour cream. Memory served me well, and the pie came out just like I remembered. I’m happy that I was able to leave Trevor a little taste of Russia while I’m away.

Russian Mushroom and Rabbit Pie

Inspired by Shtolle. Serves 6-8. This recipe makes extra filling, which can be frozen for later use.

• One 2.5 pound rabbit, broken into pieces
• salt and pepper to taste
• 2 TBS canola oil
• 1 1/2 c. chicken stock, divided (1 c. rabbit, 1/2 c. for filling)
• 2 TBS butter
• 1 large white onion, finely chopped
• 12 oz. wild mushrooms, finely chopped
• 1/2 c. fresh dill fronds, finely chopped
• 1/2 c. white wine
• 1/2 c. sour cream
• 1 recipe kulebyaka dough (below)
• 1 egg yolk mixed with 2 TBS water

1. Preheat the oven to 350°F. Break the rabbit down into pieces (see tutorial here), removing the organs (to be discarded or cooked otherwise – we dredged the livers in flour and fried them up and they were surprisingly tasty). Season the rabbit pieces with salt and pepper.
2. Heat the canola oil in a large frying pan over medium heat. Add the rabbit pieces and brown on all sides. Place the browned rabbit pieces in a 9×13 casserole dish. Add 1 cup of the chicken stock to the bottom of the dish. Bake for 90 minutes, basting with the roasting liquid every 30 minutes.
3. Remove the rabbit from the oven and let cool until it is comfortable to handle. Shred the rabbit meat into pieces using your fingers or two forks. Set aside in a large bowl.
4. Melt the butter in a large frying pan over medium heat. Add the chopped onion and saute until soft and translucent, about 5-8 minutes. Add the chopped mushroom and saute until soft, another 5-8 minutes. Add the rabbit pieces and the dill, and cook to warm the rabbit through, about 3 minutes. Add the white wine and let simmer for 5 minutes, until reduced by half. Remove from heat and stir in the sour cream. Season to taste with salt and pepper.
5. Roll out the kulebyaka dough into two large rectangles, about 8 by 12 inches. Place one rectangle on a parchment-paper lined baking sheet. Pile the rabbit filling into the center of the dough, leaving about one inch of space around all four edges. Pile the filling about 2 inches thick, using about half the rabbit filling – freeze the rest for a later use. Drape the second piece of dough on top of the filling and pinch the edges closed with your fingers. Trim any excess dough with a knife and use to make designs on the top of your pie. Increase the oven temperature to 375°F and let the pie sit at room temperature for 15 minutes. Before putting in the oven, brush the top and sides of the pie with the egg yolk wash and slice a few slits in the top crust to allow steam to vent. Bake the pie for 25 minutes, until dough is golden brown. Let pie cool for 10 minutes before slicing and serving.

Kulebyaka Dough

Recipe from It’s Sooo Good. Makes 1 large pie

• 1 tsp active dry yeast
• 1 tsp sugar
• 2 TBS warm water
• 2 c. AP flour
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 3 TBS butter, cut into 1 cm cubes
• 3/4 c. sour cream
• 1 whole egg

1. In a small bowl, stir together the yeast, sugar, and warm water. Let sit for 10 minutes for yeast to proof – it should get frothy on top.
2. In a large bowl, whisk together the flour and the salt. Add the butter cubes, and use your fingers to crumble them into the flour until there are no large chunks of butter remaining. Stir in the yeast mixture, the sour cream, and the egg until you have an even, soft dough. Form the dough into a disk, wrap in plastic wrap, and refrigerate for at least 2 and up to 12 hours.
3. Bring the dough out and let come to room temperature. On a floured work surface, knead the dough until it is smooth and elastic, taking care not to add too much additional flour. This may take from 5-20 minutes, depending on your dough. Once the dough is smooth, place in a greased bowl, cover with a clean dishtowel, and let rise in a warm place for 1 1/2 hours, or until doubled in size. At this point, proceed with the recipe above to roll out and fill the dough.

The post Back to Russia // Russian Mushroom and Rabbit Pie appeared first on Katie at the Kitchen Door.

I am writing this to you from Russia. Kind of cool, right? I’m here for work (that first photo up above is the view from my office), and I’m certainly working a lot, but with only a few nights of planned activities, I’m also totally free to explore once I leave the office. (And watch Revenge on the treadmill, but that’s probably not blog-worthy material.) Last night I wandered around snapping pictures as much as I wanted – a luxury of walking alone – stopping by a shop for a slice of cabbage pie for dinner and another, smaller slice of apricot pie for dessert. The light was beautiful, the weather cool, dry, and breezy, and even though I initially wasn’t thrilled about coming back to Russia only two weeks after my last visit, I’ve been enjoying it. I studied Russian in high school and college, but after going almost three years without practice, I feel like I’ve just barely been getting around. That is, until today, when my colleagues here decided that my Russian comprehension was good enough that all meetings would switch to being held in Russian – which is one way to very quickly remember everything you’ve been taught.

Since you’re all readers of food blogs, I can’t fail to mention what I’ve been eating, can I? I really enjoy the food here in St. Petersburg. They use a lot of potatoes, cabbage, cheese, pickled vegetables, salmon, mushrooms, and dill. They make these little individual casserole dishes that are super comforting and just the right size to fill one person up, delicious sweet and savory hand pies, consistently good bread, and you’re never far from a hot cup of black tea. I picked up a few Russian cookbooks, and when I’m back in my kitchen, I hope to share recipes for a few of the things I’ve been enjoying the most. But until then, how about some nice American cheesecake bars to tide you over? These were one of the few things I had time to make during my crazy first two weeks in our new apartment. They also happened to use up some of our abundance of blackberries, the remainder of which are now fermenting away in a bucket of soon-to-be blackberry wine (via a recipe from the new cookbook True Brews) that Trevor made last weekend. I cannot wait to try it. Also the mead he’s brewing, the sake he’s brewing, and the pickles he’s been making from our genuinely overwhelming supply of cucumbers. He’s a good person to know.

Back to the cheesecake bars. These are a very simple dessert with a very straightforward sweet flavor – the perfect sort of thing to bring to a backyard cookout when you know everyone will be craving little bites of sweet finger food after gorging themselves on watermelon and lemonade and hamburgers with melty American cheese. Or you could eat them for breakfast out of the pan, like I did on probably too many mornings last week. They are quick to mix up, and you can probably even find all the ingredients besides the blackberries at a convenience store – I did, and in the middle of our move. Do me a favor and mix up a batch of these before berries became a luxury again.

Blackberry Cheesecake Bars

Adapted from Tyler Florence. Makes one 9×9 inch tray.

• 1/2 stick salted butter, melted, plus extra butter for greasing
• 3 TBS sugar
• 1/8 tsp ground cinammon
• 9 full-size graham crackers (one half of a standard box)
• 16 oz. cream cheese, at room temperature
• 2 eggs
• 2/3 c. brown sugar
• 1 1/2 c. fresh blackberries, washed

1. Preheat the oven to 325°F. Grease a 9×9 inch baking tray with the un-melted butter. In a food processor, pulse the sugar, cinnamon, and graham crackers until fully ground. Pour in the melted butter and pulse a few times to combine. Press the crumbs into the pan and make a layer of even thickness. Bake for 10 minutes, until golden brown, then remove from oven and let cool.
2. In a stand mixer or in a large bowl, combine the room temperature cream cheese and eggs and beat until smooth. If mixing by hand, this may take some effort. Add the brown sugar and beat until smooth.  Pour the mixture over the cooled crust, then scatter the blackberries on top. Bake for 35 minutes or until the center is only slightly jiggly, then remove from the oven and let cool completely, then cover and refrigerate for at least 3 hours before slicing. Serve chilled.

The post From Russia, With Love // Blackberry Cheesecake Bars appeared first on Katie at the Kitchen Door.

I miss hearing and speaking slavic languages.  It seems a little odd, but I actually find what most people consider to be the harsh sounds of Russian and Czech very soothing, perhaps because I have only good associations with them.  Memories of good people, of good stories.  It’s been over nine months since I left Prague, and Czech is rarely spoken in North Carolina.  Russian is more common, but I always freeze up when I hear people speaking it, so I don’t get as much practice as I would like.

I won’t be able to take another Russian course until the spring – too much engineering to be done – but I did just get a job with the library collections department assisting with cataloging slavic literature.  It might turn out to be sort of a tedious job, but I’m excited about the practice I’ll get and I think I’ll like it.  I like being around old books, sitting in dark, musty rooms heavy with silence.  I like the mystery of foreign titles, of imagining the story within.  I feel as though I’ve read so many short stories in Russian that I have this whole canon of Russian lore in my imagination.  You know the way that you feel you understand a place you’ve never been, just because you’ve read about it?  How you can have a swirling but fully complete concept of an Arabian desert because your mind has merged all the stories you’ve read into a real place?  How you know the feeling of salt spray on your face, the wind blowing your hair back as you stand on the prow of a wooden ship?  I sometimes wonder what the imaginations of people who have never had access to literature or media are like.  If you live in an isolated tribe in the desert, can you still dream of the ocean, not knowing what it is?  Could you conjure the idea of snow, never having heard of it?  Or would your imagination be that much greater, having never been limited by what can and can’t be?

I think that I have an especially good concept of Russia as portrayed through 19th century Russian literature – of the poverty and wheat fields, the cruelty and power of man, the weakness of the classical female character, of тоска, the untranslatable word that describes the melancholy every Russian is said to hold within their soul.  Maybe I don’t really understand, but when I conjure the Russia of my imagination, there is a sweeping expanse of plains dotted with epic sadnesses and small triumphs.  With happy summer dachas and cold, hungry winters.  With clever men who think only of evil, and strong, brainless men who triumph over them.  With withered babushkas in huts and frail, blonde peasant girls.

To honor all this Russian-ness on my mind, I decided to make fruit dumplings.  In Russian, the word for them is vareniki; in Czech, ovocne knedliky.  In Prague, my roommates and I used to pick these up at the potraviny as a quick dessert, and so I have many good memories of eating them late at night around our little kitchen table.  The recipe I used for these is a Czech one, however, these are a fairly ubiquitous dessert in Slavic countries, with slight variations from country to country, so they can serve as a culinary testimonial to both Russia and the Czech Republic.  The dough is a bit hard to work with, but don’t add too much flour as the stickiness of the dough helps to seal the fruit in.  Fresh or frozen fruit will work equally well here, and these are best served warm with sweetened cream, cottage cheese, whipped cream, or simply melted butter and sugar.

Ovocné Knedlíky – Fruit Dumplings

Makes 35-40 dumplings.  Recipe from bfeedme.

• 1 c. whole milk
• 1 TBS butter
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1 egg
• 2 c. flour, divided
• 8 oz. fresh or frozen fruit (cherries, plums, blackberries)

1. In a small bowl, lightly beat one egg.  Set aside.
2. In a small saucepan, bring milk, butter, and salt to a boil, stirring constantly.  Remove from heat, and pour half a cup of hot milk over beaten egg, whisking vigorously the whole time so the egg does not begin to scramble.  Return tempered egg and milk mixture to pan of milk, stirring.  Gradually pour in one cup of flour, stirring the whole time.  Dough will have the consistency of a thick paste.
3. Pour remaining cup of flour onto large cutting board.  Form a large well in the middle, and pour hot dough onto flour.  Allow to cool for 5 minutes, or until it is comfortable to knead with your hands.  Knead flour into dough until it forms a ball.  Dough should be sticky, but add up to 1/2 cup extra flour for workability.
4. Tear small pieces of dough off the ball and pinch into a thin disk.  Place piece of fruit in center of disk and wrap dough around fruit, sealing the edges, so that the dough is spread equally thin around fruit.  The layer of dough should be as thin as possible for the best flavor.  Repeat to form remaining dumplings.
5. Bring a large pot of water to a rapid boil.  Add dumplings, and boil for 10-15 minutes.  Dumplings should begin to float to top when done.  Remove from water with slotted spoon and serve warm, with sweetened cream, cottage or ricotta cheese, whipped cream, or melted butter.

* Dumplings can be frozen before boiling.

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