Thanks to Portland's large Slavic population, I've been able to readily buy sulguni cheese for the first time in my life. This has me wanting to make khachipuri, the famous "Georgian Pizza", frequently. However, while the cheese is readily available, dough is another thing entirely, until I found a shortcut for weeknight dinners.

Imeretian Khachipuri, which is a disk of dough, stuffed with cheese, with a small hole in the top, is my favorite kind, probably because that's the first type I had in Moscow. I have two dough recipes for it, one is a yeasted dough that takes 1.5 hours, and one is a yogurt-based dough that's faster, but finicky delicate and hard to work with. Neither was really suitable for a weeknight dinner of khachipuri and lobio, starting cooking at 7. And then, at Albertson's, I discovered this:

Thin-crust, prerolled pizza dough, like they sell in many parts of Europe. It's not a very good pizza dough, but it makes an excellent yeasted dough wrapper for empanadas, and for other things. Like khachipuri!

Since then, we've had more "weeknight khachipuri" than is really good for my chloresterol level.

Now, a note on the cheese: if you can get sulguni, do use it for this. Most folks can't, though, so a good substitute is 2-3 parts dry part-skim mozzarella (but not pre-shredded) to 1 part crumbled feta cheese. In the recipe below, that would be 3oz dry mozz, and 1-2 oz feta. In a pinch, just dry mozz or even Monterey Jack would work.

weeknight khachipuri

• 4-5oz sulguni cheese, or substitute
• 3 Tbs minced cilantro, parsley, or green onion
• 1/2 tsp ground coriander, unless using cilantro
• 1 egg
• 2-3 Tbs greek yogurt
• 1 thin-crust "European style" prerolled pizza dough

Place a baking stone, or inverted cookie sheet, into your oven and heat it to 475F.

Grate the cheese on the large holes of a grater. Mix with the egg, yogurt, minced herb, and coriander (if using).

Unwrap the pizza dough and unroll it, smoothing it out. Make a circular heap of the cheese mixture in the middle of the dough, and then press it into a compact disk. The cheese should only cover about the middle 1/2 of the dough.

Fold the dough over the cheese, turning it 1/8 with each fold, so eventually you have an octagon of folds. The edges should not quite meet in the center; you want to leave a hole that's 1-2" wide.

Trim the baking parchment the pizza dough comes on so that it's not a lot wider than the khachipuri. Slide the khachipuri onto the baking stone (or sheet). Switch the oven to convection (if you can). Cook for 11 to 15 minutes, until the dough is brown and the cheese is foaming and threatening to bubble out of the hole.

Take the khachipuri out of the oven and put it on a rack to cool for 5-10 minutes; you want it hot, but you don't want to destroy your mouth. Cut into 4-6 wedges and share.

Note: Pillsbury also sells "prerolled pizza dough" in a carboard cannister. This is not suitiable for this recipe, or much of anything else either; it has a texture like factory biscuits.

Continued from Part I and Part II

According to what I've read and seen, tkemali, or Georgian sour plum sauce, is the "salsa" of Georgia, appearing on many dishes and in many, many variations. Since this had been the whole inspiration for this meal, I whipped some up. We served this over a simple roast chicken and salmon, in order to cover both the meat and fish eaters: just salt & pepper and butter as seasonings, since the plum sauce is potent enough on its own. Recipe follows.

Finally, we couldn't possibly have an Eastern European meal without dessert! My sweetie prepared dessert, like usual. Here she turned to the Russian Heritage Cookbook, and put together a cheesecake with a cookie dough crust. The original cheesecake recipe called for Tvarog, a fine-curd buttermilk cheese which we couldn't easily get in Oregon. But hey, it's easy, let's make it! We consulted an online recipe from Urban Cheesecraft, and tried to whip up a batch. Unfortunately, the recipe isn't so great; the cooking time and temperature are off, and the yield for the recipe is way lower than stated. So, we used the backup cottage cheese.

The cheesecake was excellent nevertheless. We served it topped with jam, as appropriate for a Russian meal.

Sour Red Plum Sauce (Tkemali)

1 quart sour red plum puree and juice
3-5 cloves garlic, mashed
2 tsp ground coriander
1/2 to 1 tsp hot paprika or Aleppo pepper (to taste)
1 tsp salt
1/2 cup finely chopped mint leaves
1/2 cup finely chopped cilantro (optional)
2-3 Tbs lemon juice (optional, see below)

Place all ingredients except the mint in a small pot, over medium-low heat. Simmer gently until reduced in volume by 1/3, about 30 minutes. Add the mint. Put away in a container to cool. Serve at room temperature as a sauce on meat, fish, or red beans.

Notes: If you can't get sour plums, add 2-3 Tbs lemon juice to the plum puree. To get the plum puree and juice, stew 2 to 3 lbs small red sour plums (use wild plums, or just underripe commercial ones) for 1/2 hour. Drain, mash, and push through a food mill. Traditionally, the mint used in this recipe would be pennyroyal, but regular spearamint works fine.

One of the biggest reasons to eat Georgian food is khachipuri, known as "the pizza of Eastern Europe". Like pizza, khachipuri is more of a whole category than a specific recipe; I think there are as many recipes are there are Georgian surnames. This year's khachipuri was based on an Ossetian recipe, incorporating beet greens since I had a lovely bunch of them from the beets I used for the pkhali. This was excellent; while somewhat less cheesy than other ones I've made, it was flavorful and did well as leftovers.

Speaking of cheese: the traditional cheeses for khachipuri are Imeretian or Sulguni. You can't get these in the USA, except maybe in New York, so substitute a 50/50 mix of block feta and dry mozzarella, and add a couple tablespoons of Greek yogurt. I've also seen American meunster cheese recommended as a substitution.

As always, I used a number of references for this year's holiday meal. In addition to georgianrecipes.net, I also used The Georgian Feast, The Cooking of the Eastern Mediterranean, and Flatbreads and Flavors.

If khachipuri and pkhali are two of the food groups of Georgia, surely lobio is the other. The word "lobio" refers to beans, whether dried red beans or green beans. So we had to have lobio, and this turned out to be the runaway success of the evening. Our guests raved about these, and they were probably the easiest thing in the whole meal. The recipe below is loosely based on a recipe from Flatbreads and Flavors.

Georgian Herbed Green Beans

2 lbs fresh green beans
Salt, large pot, large bowl

Dressing:
1/2 cup walnut oil
1 Tbs olive oil, plus more
1/4 cup red wine vinegar
2 tbs lemon juice
1 tsp salt, plus more
1/3 cup minced fresh mint
1/3 cup finely chopped dill
1/3 cup minced parsley or cilantro
1-2 cloves garlic, mashed
1 tsp sugar, plus more

Mix all ingredients for the dressing. Taste; it will probably be somewhat sharp. Add small amounts of salt, sugar, and olive oil until the flavor is balanced.

Heat a large pot of salted water, large enough for all the green beans, until simmering. Trim the grean beans and snap into 1-2" pieces. Fill the large bowl with cold water and a few ice cubes. Blanch the beans for 5 minutes. Immediately strain them out and shock them in the bowl of cold water, until completely cool. Drain and dry the beans.

Just before serving, toss the beans with the dressing. Serve at room temperature. Do not allow them to sit for long before serving, as the beans may turn an unattractive putty color.

Note: if you can get them, Romano beans are better than regular green beans for lobio.

"When life hands you plums, make tkemali."

A year and a half ago friends in Southern Oregon had a preposterous bounty of plums, so many they were breaking branches on the trees. So many, in fact, that my relatives still have frozen quarts of plum juice and pulp. So when it came time to make Christmas eve dinner for those same friends, I thought of Georgian sour plum sauce, or tkemali. I could serve it with salmon for me, and chicken for the folks who don't eat fish. This lead to a whole Georgian-style holiday meal.

I encountered Georgian food three years ago when I went to Moscow for a technical conference. Georgia is regarded as sort of the France of Eastern Europe: the country with deep cuisine history where all the good cooks come from. Even during war between Georgia and Russia, the Georgian restaurants in Moscow did not close down. The food is that good.

The meal started out with pkhali, a paste made with beets, walnuts and garlic (pictured above). Pkhali is a kind of "Georgian hummus", and is actually made with a variety of vegetables, depending; beets are common, but so are leeks, spinach, or eggplants. What's constant is the walnuts, garlic and vinegar.

Since it's served cold, we had this out as an appetizer course, together with Butte Creek Mill's beer batter bread. Originally, I'd put the pkhali in little jello molds with the idea of unmolding them as amusing shapes, but for some reason it didn't stiffen up in the fridge this time, and wouldn't come out of the molds. A quick save with the cookie scoop, and you have the little pyramids you see here.

It's traditional to top pkhali with onions and pomegranate seeds, and also made a terrific Christmas color combination.

Beet Pkhali

2 lbs large beets
1 1/2 cups walnut halves
1 small-medium head garlic (or 1/2 large head)
1 tsp ground coriander
1 tsp salt, plus more
2 Tbs red wine vinegar, plus more
1/2 cup chopped fresh parsley and/or cilantro

Cook the beets: wash and trim them, leaving a little bit of stem. Wrap them up in heavy foil in bunches of 3-4, stem sides down. Cook at 300F for 1 hour to 1 hour 15 minutes, depeding on the size of the individual beets. Allow to cool until just warm enough to handle, and rub off the peels and trim. Dice large.

Roast the garlic with the beets: when the beets are 40 minutes from being done, trim the end off the head of garlic exposing the tips of the cloves, and wrap it in foil, cut side up. Cook it alongside the beets and take it out of the oven at the same time.

Put the walnuts, parsley and salt into a food processor or food grinder. Pulse until finely minced. Add the beet dice, coriander, and red wine vinegar. Squeeze the roasted cloves out of the head of garlic into the mix. Pulse until reduced to a rough puree. Taste; add additional salt and vinegar if necessary; the phkali should be slightly acid.

Serve with marinated red onions and pomegranate seeds on top.

Marinated Red Onion

1 large red onion
1 1/2 tsp red wine vinegar
1/2 tsp salt

Trim and peel the whole onion. Slice it into thin rings, about 1/8" inch thick (3-4mm). Separate the layers.

Toss the onion rings with the vinegar and salt. Put in a nonreactive container, cover and seal, and refrigerate overnight or up to 1 week. Drain and blot dry before using.