New Year's is the big winter holiday in Russia, because of decades of Soviet history during which celebrating Christmas was suspect. If you want to celebrate in Russian style, there's still enough time to make vareniki.

Only just, though. Like other dumplings, making vareniki is a labor of love, or at least binge-watching Iron Chef in the kitchen, because stuffing all of these is going to take you some time, to say nothing of the cleanup afterwards. So, better get started now.

vareniki/pelmeni dough

3 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons salt
2 eggs
Slight less than 1 cup water

Separate the eggs. Beat the yolks. Save the whites aside for sealing the vareniki later.

Mix the salt in the flour. Add the eggs, then the water. Mix until a dough forms. Knead until smooth, about 10 minutes. Cover tightly (e.g. wrap in plastic wrap) and set aside to rest for at least one hour (or overnight in the fridge). In the meantime, make the filling.

savory potato-cheese filling

1 large russet or 2-3 yukon gold potatoes, about 1 lbs
8oz tvarog (farmer's cheese)
2 Tbs thick (Greek) yogurt
1 large egg
1/2 cup minced fresh dill
1/2 tsp salt

Peel and slice the potatoes thick. Place them in a small pot, cover with lightly salted water, heat, and then simmer for 20 minutes. Drain, then mash into coarse lumps with a fork or hand-masher.

Mash the other ingredients into the filling.

Get out a large breadboard or rolling mat and roll out the dough to between 1/8" and 3/16" thick, about the thickness of a hardback book cover. Using a 3" circle cutter, cut this dough into many, many rounds. Knead and re-roll any scraps to make a few more.

Mix the reserved egg whites with 2 Tbs water, and use to paint the edges of each circle for sealing. Fill each dough wrapper with about 1 Tbs of filling. Fold over and seal; hopefully you have a dumpling-sealer for this (like the one pictured). Otherwise, use your fingers.

At this point, the vareniki can be reserved aside until the day of the meal. Line them up on a heavily floured baking sheet (use more flour than I did), and refrigerate for up to a couple of days, or freeze for months.

cooking and serving potato-cheese vareniki

4 oz butter
2 large onions, chopped small

Heat a large pot of salted water for boiling the vareniki. While it heats, make the dressing.

In a wide, deep pan, melt the butter. Add the onions and cook, stirring, until they are brown and nearly caramelized, maybe 15 minutes. Lower heat to very low. By now, the water should be boiling.

Drop the vareniki into the water and cook for about 2 minutes, at which point all of them should float to the top. Skim them out using a large skimmer or slotted spoon. Add them to the pan of onions, and toss them in the onion-butter.

Serve on a large platter. Makes 40 to 48 dumplings, enough for 4 to 6 people as a main course, and 6 to 8 as a first course or side dish. Serve with vodka.

с новым годом!

If you follow this blog, you know that we don't do "traditional" Thanksgiving food. It helps that everyone in my family has always hated turkey. Since it seems like America has become a vassal of Russia, this year we decided to do a Russian/Polish dinner.

So, I bought some cookbooks and checked another out from the library. Mamushka covers Ukraine, Eastern Russia, and some of the former Soviet states. Please To The Table is pan-Russian, from East to West and including many of the "stans". The Russian Heritage Cookbook covers old-school Russian-American dishes. Finally, Polska is a Polish cookbook which will change your perspective on Polish cooking. Besides, how can you not love a Polish cookbook written by a woman named "Zuza Zak"? After a weekend of reading, I was ready to go.

Of course, any festive Russian or Polish meal needs to start with zakuski and vodka. We went out to Great Harvest to get a big loaf of pumpernickel rye, heated it up, and then cut it into little toasts. Then I served toasts with three different toppings:

Russian egg salad and Riga sprats (per Russian Heritage)

Beet butter (from Polska) and boiled eggs

Tangy twaróg cheese and diced radishes (also Polska)

I had plans to also do caviar toasts, but couldn't pick up caviar in Portland in time.

We ate our zakuski with two vodkas, one a bottle I picked up in Moscow, and another a bottle I found in my in-law's cabinet, which dates back to 1970's Los Angeles. The Moscow vodka is really good, the "Kamchakta" a lot less so.

Since we were having vodka, we also had to have the easiest and most essential Moscow vodka bar snack: salt pickes. Here's a non-traditional, but quick and easy, recipe for those:

Quick Salt Pickles

• 5-8 "gherkin" sized cucumbers, about 12 oz
• 1-2 tbs kosher salt

Quarter the cucumbers lenghtwise, and put them in a single layer on a tray, skin side down. Sprinkle wtih salt, making sure to dust each slice. Then leave to "pickle" for at least one hour and preferably 3-4 hours. Serve with vodka.

According to my Russian friend Ilya Kosmodemiansky, the real recipe for salt pickles is more complex and takes longer. See the bottom of the post for a complete recipe

I'll also share my adaptation of this zakuski from Polska:

Bread with Twaróg and Radishes

• 4-6 slices rye or pumpernickel bread
• 1 cup twaróg cheese (see below)
• 1 Tbs sour cream
• 1 Tbs yogurt
• 6-8 salad radishes, diced 1/4", about 2/3 cup
• 2 Tbs minced chives

Mash together the cheese, sour cream, and yogurt. Spread this over the bread slices. Sprinkle with the diced radishes and the chives.

Twaróg is Polish or Russian farmer cheese, available at Eastern European groceries. It can range from dry to creamy; use additional sour cream if you have the dry kind. If you can't get it, then combine 1/2 cup ricotta with 1/2 cup small curd cottage cheese.

On to the main course next ...

Traditional Salt Pickles

This recipe courtesy of my Russian friend Ilya Kosmodemiansky

Take small to mid-size cucumbers, not soft, skin should look like the picture above ... it is better for ion penetration. Cut off the ends and put cucumbers into cold water for half an hour or so.

Brine up to my standards should be 7-10% NaCl solution (2-3tbs of salt per 1l of water, depends on salt). Russian way of pickling cucumbers is all about crunchiness, so avoid iodized purified salt (iodine and high concentration of Na+ destroys cell wall, no crunchiness), experiment with salt, which contains additions of Ca and Mg; both can stabilize cell walls. I even experimented with adding small amount of medicinal CaCl2 solution, works good. Heat your brine practically to boiling point, let it cool down to about 30-35C.

Meanwhile, put cucumbers into a pan or a pot - fit them standing, very tight (the idea is to not let them float when brine added). In between of cucumbers, put spices, pour the brine, put a lid on. In a day or two it would be so called "lightly salted" cucumbers: still bright green, but salty, after several days they turn to be "cask salted". I like both, some people prefer one or another kind.

As for spices, defaults are: dill (with flowers and seeds), black or white pepper (whole), and garlic (whole, not crushed), a bit of mustard grains. Good additions are cloves and fresh blackcurrant leaves. There are no single opinion, to add red hot pepper (fresh, whole one) or not. It is good for taste of cucumbers to add one, but not so good for one another important role of this brine in Russian culture: it is an ideal hangover isotonic.

Here's a simple, unusual, and surprisingly healthful appetizer you can really only make this time of year. It depends on finding really fresh, young spring carrots, the kind which are only 5" to 7" long and 1/2" in diameter, and very sweet. And you'll probably have to grow them yourself or get them from your local farmers' market (I went to the PSU farmers' market), because you need them to have nice, fresh, dry, carrot tops because you're going to eat those carrot tops. Yes, really. You'll even like them.

Anyway, don't try this with supermarket carrots, you'll just taste the bitterness of regret and wilted carrot tops. Taste the carrot top leaves. They should taste grassy, not bitter, kind of like Italian parsley.

This recipe is the "carrot reunion" because we'll be making a "pesto" from the carrot tops and then serving it with the carrots. Note that the pesto is actually a brighter, more attractive green than it looks in the picture.

Here's the recipe, roughly. Do use your judgement here. Particularly, green garlic can vary a lot in size and strength, so don't use so much it overwhelms everything else.

Spring Carrot Reunion

2 bunches of freshly picked young spring carrots, with greens
2 slices stale white bread
1-4 stalks green garlic, depending on size/strength
1 oz (1/4 cup) pecorino romano cheese
1/3 cup olive oil, plus more
2 Tbs fresh lemon juice (from 1-2 lemons)
salt
ground pepper
water
food processor, Vitamix, or food grinder

Separate the tops from the carrots, and wash and dry both carrots and tops.

Roughly chop the green garlic. Dampen the bread and tear it into small pieces (should be around 2/3 cup). Dice or crumble the romano. Put all of these in the food processor. Roughly chop the carrot tops and put them on top. Pour the 1/3 cup olive oil over them, followed by 1/4 water. Add around 1/4 tsp salt and the same amount freshly ground pepper. Add the lemon juice.

Puree the mixture. If it's too dry to puree, add more olive oil and water, 1 Tbs each at a time until the blade moves smoothly and can create a smooth puree. Taste, add salt or lemon juice if you feel it needs more of either.

Put the carrot top "pesto" in a bowl, and serve with the young carrots for dipping.

One thing that's saved our holidays is that my in-laws don't like turkey either. I suspect a lot of Americans don't really like turkey whether they eat it or not; after all, why would people be deep-frying it if turkey actually tasted good? Anyway, eight or nine years ago we started on our theme of doing something different and ethnic for each Thanksgiving, including Austrian, New Orleans, Mexican, Turkish, and Italian foods.

This year's theme was Moroccan. Just to make things interesting, I decided to try to render as many of the traditional Thanksgiving foods as possible, in North African form. Except, of course, the turkey.

First Course

To make things even more perfect, we even had plates and other dinnerware from Tunisia.

First we started with an old Thanksgiving tradition: olives. In this case, salt-cured olives marinated in spices (rosemary, garlic, cumin and fresh bay leaves) and olive oil.

Standing in for the butter rolls or Pillsbury croissants, we have rgayif, a layered "pastry" made by the Berbers, from Jeff Koehler's Morocco. First step was rolling out the dough on an oiled mat to transparently thin; this was easier than it sounds. However, Koehler's recipe was faulty in that these really need finishing in the oven. Although my sweetie said I got them right based on her experience, I don't feel like the effort was really worth it; they were more chewy than flaky.

As our mashed potatoes replacement, I had intended Doights De Fatma, or "Fatima's Fingers", based on a recipe from Kitty Morse's North Africa: The Vegetarian Table. These are basically tubular pastry filled with cheesy mashed potatoes, and they seemed perfect. However, 2/3 of them exploded in the oven. I think this was my fault for refrigerating them overnight; it left too much time for the wrappers to get soggy.

No Thanksgiving plate could be complete without cranberry sauce, here replaced by cranberry harissa, here served in a handpainted bowl from Algeria. This was my own invention, loosely based on the harissa recipe from Kitty Morse. This was a success; the cranberries made the harissa just a bit different without making it overwhemlingly cranberry. I'll make this again.

Roasted carrots are also a TY Day thing, and are here represented by carrot, cumin and feta "salad" from Ghillie Basan's Moroccan. This is another recipe I'll make again just because it's so dead simple: you roast carrots in the oven with olive oil and cumin, and then puree them with a little feta. Here the salad is displayed in one of my own bowls, part of a nested set I gave my mother-in-law.

Then we took a long break to get our appetites back, before starting on the second course.