This is so my thing Larch .. Food, not only as sustenance but as beauty and as art and as health.

My tip for the day .. cook as little as possible!   Cut the sugar, cut the wheat, unless it is well made into well-fermented bread.

Grains must be fermented, and corn must be nixtamalized. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixtamalization and https://www.fermentingforfoodies.com/fermented-cornmeal/

Eat meat with green veg, not with potatoes and starches.

Let me get my mind to go in this direction and I’ll talk way too long and too much.

If there is any world food, it must be meatballs and also then pancakes.  Every country, every region and every housewife has their way of doing meatballs and pancakes.  There must be thousands of types of pancakes.  Pan Cake, so every flatbread in the world, even Ethiopian injera made with teff flour and acts as both plate and utensil, with all the fillings dotted on the big injera, is a pancake.

So pancake is a base that can be used for savory dishes and of course sweet.

It is also one of those dishes that can be spectacular and a marvelous and sweet and a soft delicious thing.  Think of classical Crepe Suzette, served flaming with Grand Marnier and often served with some orange sauce and cream cheese, or icecream.

French crepes are my favorite pancakes.  US pancakes are not pancakes, they are more flapjacks (the Brit terminology).  But, I love all pancakes.  These are good, simple and joyful.

We would make a bunch of these (without sugar) during sleepy farm evenings, layer them with saucy and tasty ground beef, pour a cheese sauce over the top, and pop them in the oven to brown it all.  Cool a bit, serve cut in slices and eat with a green salad.  No, pancake certainly is not only for breakfast.

We would also mix up some cinnamon in the sugar, sprinkle some over as the pancakes came out of the pan and cover, for the heat to melt the cinnamon sugar.  At the end of all of that, roll em up and eat with melted self-made sugar and cinnamon sauce.  I thought the farmboys were visiting me, but they were really visiting the house where pancakes were being made.

Where I come from, they have pancake machines, that can produce something like 30 pancakes (square ones) in a short period of time and every cattle auction or church gathering could not be complete without pancakes.

Many types of flours can be used.  But here is a very quick pancake for you that is very different and very tasty.

2 ripe bananas, overripe is good

2 tablespoons of peanut butter, not the sugared stuff

2 medium eggs or one large one

Mix together with a fork.  Don’t mix to death and it is fine if bits of banana are still not smashed in fully.  But the egg and the peanut butter should be mixed well.

A hot pan, with a little ghee or oil, (the pan needs to be hot, so, too hot for butter as it will burn), spoon them in about 8 cm rounds and fry one side, until you see bubbles on the top, turn around and cook the other side.  Don’t cook to death.

Have with berries, fruit, soft cheese … as you like.

Buckwheat is a great flour for pancakes.  How about Brie cheese, bacon and fresh grapes, buckwheat pancakes.

And then we have to touch eastern tastes … Scallion Pancakes

This is the one I want to try next.  Moroccan Semolina Pancakes – https://www.lavenderandmacarons.com/moroccan-semolina-pancakes-vegan-baghrir/

And we have not even touched the world of pancakes.  There are beautiful pancakes done with oat flour and a million more.  My next career .. a pancake expert.  Imagine what Smoothie will say about that lol.  (Teeheee … she is only a pancake expert!)

Today this household was busy.  So, we had to defrost some chicken broth and make a quick soup.

We have to talk about the glories of broth.

I have such stories about meatballs.  Having grown up on a farm with family in the meat business, we always had top quality ground beef on hand.  We made those things for everything!  Just a pan full in the oven, and we went everywhere (not too many restaurants where we traveled and we often took road food with).  A sandwich in one hand and even a cold meatball in the other, and that could keep the kids from whining.  (Yeah, I was the eldest and had reponsibilities! ha!)

My family in law are Swedish, so, all they knew about meatballs was Swedish meatballs.  For them, a meatball did not exist if it was not a Swedish meatball.  So, the parents-in-law got older and I inherited the job of making Swedish food and of course, I had never seen a Swedish meatball.  So, I just made some, and the family story went that I made the best Swedish meatballs ever!  I just left those perceptions as it was too hard to change them.  Those were African meatballs and they had never seen a Swede.

Nooooo!  German Sushi, just Nooooo!

We have a taste for good sushi if we can get good sushi-grade fish.  The dearly beloved one worked in Japan (brilliant young technologist engineer before that was a word) and we often make sushi.  Where we are, they serve it with mayonaise — oh, the despair!  so, we have to make it.  Those are nice days.  I do the rice and by the time we are ready, with everything chopped, the rice is just at the right temp and well sticky.  We only make sushi rolls unless the beloved one gets very into it, and makes some sashimi and that is after the kitchen knives have been sharpened.  I’ve been known to lend my hand to fine tempura.  But, it is never as good as that of a trained sushi chef.

How factory-kitchens freed Soviet women from ‘tiresome’ cooking

Click for all the photos … https://www.rbth.com/history/335132-factory-kitchens-freed-soviet-women-history

I guess in other places these were called canteens.  Where I am, they are simply called Economicos .. i.e., canteens that are very economical and serve basic food that most can afford.

In the late 1920s and 1930s, the USSR experienced a boom in the construction of factory-kitchens. Everything was done to make housework easier for female workers and to protect men from alcohol abuse.
In the 1920s, the Soviet government launched its industrialization program. New factories required a lot of workforce, including women. The ‘factory-kitchens’ project was born to establish centralized catering and to relieve female workers from cooking at home. In addition, the government fought alcoholism and believed that workers should spend less time at home, more time working and even spend leisure time together with other workers. And factory-kitchens were the preferable place for this. The factory-kitchen became a place to eat out, buy ready-to-eat meals and a place for cultural leisure activities – the buildings housed department stores, post offices, pharmacies, gymnasiums and libraries.

At first, factory-kitchens were housed in pre-existing buildings, but soon, an architectural program was developed to build separate structures. These were enormous complexes, which, by analogy with “palaces of culture”, were called “palaces of food”.

Canons of constructing “food palaces”

Lunch at the factory-kitchen.

Александр Родченко/МАММ/МДФ/russiainphoto.ru
The height of a typical factory-kitchen building was three or four stories, with a basement containing refrigerators and a food warehouse. The buildings also had a semi-basement with a bakery and a staff room. The first floor housed production workshops, a laboratory, a cloakroom for visitors, a snack bar and a convenience store. Dining halls were on the second floor and banquet halls were on the third floor.

Factory-kitchens were built either with high floor-to-ceiling windows or with ribbon glazing. In both cases, the halls had to be bright for visitors to dine in natural light. This had aesthetic value and saved electricity. Factory roofs were built flat, so that tables and chairs could be placed there in the summertime.

The first factory-kitchens

Workers in the canteen at Factory-kitchen No. 2.

Александр Родченко/МАММ/МДФ/russiainphoto.ru
The first factory-kitchen was opened in 1925 in the building of the former dormitory of a chintz printing factory in the city of Ivanovo-Voznesensk (present-day Ivanovo). This city is still known, not only for its many brides-to-be, but also for its textile industry. Leaving the facades unchanged, the interiors of the building were radically transformed. Equipment for cooking was purchased in Germany. Refrigerators, elevators, electric washers, dryers and bread cutters were installed.

In the late 1920s, the factory in Ivanovo served lunch to 600 people each day and also produced ready-to-eat meals for eight factory canteens. The People’s Commissar of Health at the time, Nikolai Semashko, called this factory-kitchen “a bomb thrown into the old way of life”. He recognized the project as a success and, soon, similar facilities began to open all over the USSR.

Factory-kitchen No.1. Moscow, Leningradsky Prospect, 7. 1931.

Public domain
The Moscow Canteen Factory No. 1, which opened in 1928 on Leningradskoe Shosse, was a famous factory-kitchen. The building was symbolically located in front of the ‘Yar’ restaurant, a favorite place for partying of pre-revolutionary aristocracy and the creative intelligentsia. The building was first designed from scratch by the architect Aleksei Meshkov, in the spirit of Soviet modernism. A dining hall for 1,200 people was constructed in the building. In addition to the factory-kitchen, there was a snack bar for 250 people, where you could buy breakfast, lunch and dinner. There was also a store, a savings bank, a post office and a telegraph office. By 1936, there were 25 kitchen factories in Moscow or at least that many were listed in the address and reference book ‘All of Moscow’ (1936).

Leningrad (present-day St. Petersburg) was not left out either – four factory-kitchens were opened here in 1930. The largest complex (with an area bigger than 20,000 m2) was located in the Kirovsky District, which served the workers of the ‘Krasny Putilovets’ factory.

A factory-kitchen in the shape of a hammer and sickle
In 1929, the city administration of Samara decided to build a factory-kitchen for the Maslennikov defense plant. The first Soviet female architect, Ekaterina Maximova, who by that time had already worked on similar projects in Moscow and other cities as part of a group of ‘Narpita’ (People’s Food) specialists, was put in charge of the construction.

Factory-kitchen in Samara.

Kak vse (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Maximova believed that “in the future the factory-kitchen should… liberate women from boring domestic duties and enable a full life and self-expression on an equal footing with men”.

Maximova designed a two-story constructivist building in the shape of a sickle and hammer, the Soviet symbol of the unity of peasants and workers. Invented in 1918 by artist Yevgeny Kamzolkin, it became part of the coat of arms of the Soviet Union. Maximova used the unusual shape to separate the building into segments by functionality.

The first floor of the hammer housed the kitchen and technical facilities, while the sickle housed the cloakroom and three canteens: for children, workers, and factory employees. A conveyor belt served food from the kitchen in the “hammer” to the canteens in the “sickle.” The factory had a production capacity of nine thousand meals per day, and three thousand meals were made daily in the form of semi-finished products.

The second floor of the building was occupied by technical rooms and staff offices. The floors were connected by six staircases, the spans of which were decorated with colored stained-glass windows. There was a terrace on the roof, where, in summer, people could have lunch if the weather was good. In addition to the dining halls, the building housed a cookery, a library, a post office and a sports school.

Were the factory-kitchens a success?

Factory-kitchen No. 3.

Александр Родченко/МАММ/МДФ/russiainphoto.ru
Factory-kitchens as places of public catering had several advantages over cooking at home or eating at a café: bulk purchases of products and high productivity with mechanized cooking methods made it possible to produce lunches at home prices with substantial savings in time. Earlier, workers simply stepped away from their machines and ate a piece of bread or other simple food brought from home for lunch. Now, all workers ate meals prepared to a uniform standard in bright dining rooms from clean porcelain plates with shiny cutlery.

Lunch at the factory-kitchen.

Александр Родченко/МАММ/МДФ/russiainphoto.ru
Despite all pros, the construction of factory-kitchens was halted by the mid-1930s. The construction of huge buildings with high-tech stuffing was expensive, while their profitability was low. In a slightly better position were the factory-kitchens that sold bulk food for canteens of other factories. However, at that time, many enterprises began to open their own, in-house canteens and provide their employees with food. In addition, the food industry was also actively developing. The USSR began to produce canned foods, which also facilitated cooking at home. However, the complete abandonment of homemade food did not happen.

Factory-kitchens worked until the very collapse of the Soviet Union. In the 1990s, private businesses reappeared and the profitability of factory-kitchens did not suit the private sector. Stores and other enterprises that brought more income began to open in the buildings.

One of my favorite recipe sites.  The reason is that the Russians have such simple ways to preserve fresh food and their canning or bottling methods are simple and easy.  But there are some tricks there .. bottles must be very very clean – I boil mine in a big stock pot and take them out onto a kitchen cloth to dry – it is a quick process.  Boil the bottles, take them out with some kind of gripper, let them dry just quickly, and fill ’em up.  We don’t want to create a bottle of botulism for sure.  And check the lid – if done correctly, it will indent just a little while cooling, and that is your cue that the produce is canned correctly.

Here is an interesting one – a marinated salad with eggplant from the south of Russia.  I like it .. no stupid videos, but wonderful photos to illustrate the process.  Of course, the produce must be ripe under the summer sun and none of the stuff ripened under lights.

https://www.rbth.com/russian-kitchen/335357-marinated-salad-with-eggplant-recipe-russian

I always have this lonely tab among a bunch of other work tabs with a recipe or a method that I study for a while.

We’re talking seasonings.

Here in the tropics when summer comes, we eat very lightly as it is hot and nobody wants to spend time in the kitchen.   But after 4 days or so of boiled eggs, half an avocado eaten out of the skin with spoon, cheese sandwiches and salad, there comes a day when hunger strikes and people want food.

These seasonings would probably be very good in winter time, but for me, they are a summer time thing, as I don’t have to spend too much time in the kitchen.  In our winter, we roast stuff more and I’ll post a dry rub for that.

Yeah, you can buy them, but they are usually flat in taste and frequently full of filler.  It is worth making these.  So, it is creole seasoning today.   This can be used even in small amounts in a salad dressing or vinaigrette.  I use these for upping the taste of whatever can go into the slow cooker, a stew or the innards of a meat pie or anything that I can leave in peace in a slow cooker and leave the kitchen in peace.  It’s hot there!  You can season rice, sprinkle on potatoes or lightly steamed veggies and I put a spoon in the water for cooking couscous – a goto for us in summer because it takes only 5 minutes.

Let’s make it:

Ingredients
4 teaspoons garlic powder
4 teaspoons onion powder
2 tablespoons sweet paprika powder
1 teaspoon smoked paprika
1 tablespoon dried thyme
2 teaspoons dried oregano
2 teaspoons dried basil
1 teaspoon dried rosemary
1 bay leaf
2 teaspoons cayenne pepper (or less if you don’t want it as hot)
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
1 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

(So this means that your dried spices and herbs are also fresh and not old, which happens in my house from time to time.)

Place all of the spices in a spice or coffee grinder or a blender. Pulse until you get a fine powder.   Get it into an airtight jar and I store mine in the refrigerator.  Use within 2 months or so.

For a stew .. prepare your meat, cubed and quickly browned for a nice crust and a Maillard reaction.  If you add vegetables, now is the time to add them to the bottom and around the walls of the slow cooker.  Carrots and onions would be my first choice here, but also potatoes if you want a one-pot meal.  Meat on top of the veggies, sprinkle a good 2 tablespoons of spice mix, on everything as you layer it in, a little bit of broth or stock for enough liquid, turn on the slow cooker and leave the kitchen.  No, I have no idea how long it takes – for me, I smell it, the moment it is cooked.  Depends on the meat or chicken or fish that you’ve selected.  Make 3 minute couscous which takes all of 5 minutes, plate and eat.

I don’t like this one for a dry rub and as soon as I remember the ingredients, I’ll post a dry rub.

This is in my future this week!  But oh man they use too much sugar.  So, I won’t use cherries, but probably a sweeter fruit, mangoes I think and I will reduce sugar wherever else I can.

This is mouthwatering stuff.

https://youtu.be/Umch4INxi2Y

For AHH

Alexander Pushkin’s 5 favorite dishes

Alexander Pushkin is a famous 19th-century Russian poet and writer. Today, June 6, is his birthday, and we recall his favorite foods.

1. Valdai baranki
2. Pozharsky cutlets (recipe (https://www.rbth.com/russian-kitchen/333003-pozharsky-cutlets-recipe-russian-cuisine))
3. Strasbourg pie
4. Blancmange (recipe (https://www.rbth.com/russian-kitchen/330519-blancmange-la-rus-pudding-almond-milk-dessert))
5. Apple pie

Have you ever tasted any of his favorite dishes?

👉 READ MORE (https://www.rbth.com/russian-kitchen/328342-alexander-pushkins-5-favorite-dishes)

📷 Orest Kiprensky. Portrait of Alexander Pushkin (1827), Legion Media, Imagebroker/Global Look Press

Have a wonderful son’s birthday Sudhi!

AHH, when I go on internet culinary adventures it is amazing how many dishes overlap.  Many of the Russian dishes, no, not dishes, but methods, were methods that I learned at mother’s knee, specifically the methods to can or bottle things.  It is the simplest thing if you know how.  Got to the US and they had all kinds of equipment and rules to bottle things.  I was stunned – did people not know boiling water, real long spoons and glass bottles and good seals and the ability to do it without killing people with botulism?

Blancmange?   We grew up on it – cheap cheap desert – actually a sweet silky smooth firmed up custard.  But, we thought it was quintessentially British.  Now I learn the Russians have it too and Pushkin like it … how interesting the world is.

Your Umm Ali, Egyptian flatbread looks just like some Indian flatbread or South Asian flat breads.  There are so many hundreds of ways to do them.  Good flour, water and a bit of salt .. butter, good oil or ghee, and one can change the world!

So many threads overlapping.

My paternal family (two boys, two daughers in law) were food snobs and the daughers in law developed a truly unhealthy food competition.  The one played off the other to be better at ….. something.  They tried to get me into this but I would not bend.  Shortly after I was married, I made some apple pie .. lovely thick juicy apples with crispy pie dough, even put the proverbial 3 dough leaves like a flower around the hole stuck in the middle to let the heat out and not burn it or burst it – classical.  These were quality apple pies, no cream or ice cream was needed.  You know what my mom said – Uhm, lovely – did the neighbor bake them for you?  Oh boy … I left the competition.  But it did not leave me and kept haunting me for years.  We had a small uhm disturbance in the field some years later.  I made Christmas meal for all the family and my mom could not help it – she was so indoctrinated.  Sugar sweet she says … Your food always looks SO nice – clear subtext – but it disappoints in the taste department.  My youngest sister, who refused to cook an egg because of this unhealthy competition burst forward to my defense.  She made a speech – to my mom – Do you know Amarynth’s fridge? she said.  I come into her house, and I can put a meal together that looks nice and tastes wonderful and is healthy and fills me up, just by opening her fridge and then if I come into her house, she quickly does it for me!.

But besides that competition, the elders truly were instructive.  With that competition, even though I had culinary classes in many many disciplines, they wriggled their noses.  Till my mom passed, she still held that I could not cook!  Ahaaaa … so, RIP mom, we loved you nevertheless.  And Blancmange is universal!  Just like pancake.

I am starting to think most human foods are evolutionary from single source, branching out like roots! Also like language — as tribes spread out and were broken up by geography and what was available locally, the differences developed. Too many similarities worldwide for it to be random…
I am not demanding at all with most foods, as long as tasty! And a good mix. And during the hot months, light fare.

PS – Umm Ali (“the mother of Ali” in Arabic) starts as sweet flatbread, but after soaking it softens into a pudding like texture. Kinda like Tiramisu softens too. An excellent dessert.

A little decompression.  Humus, humous, whatever is a staple in our house, but recently because of dietary requirements we have not had too much of it.

The time has come and I have garbanzos soaking on the kitchen counter top.  Please! not the canned stuff!  You can make this – just make it – as people scramble eggs .. No instruction is needed.  But this time I’m doing it up a little.  I like it not so very very smooth, so for that, you have to keep some skin on – old old style and not new new smooth as silk style.

Beans soaking, add a little baking soda for those skins, take off about half the skins by rubbing beans between your hands, rinse beans really well and a number of times, put beans up to cook with a pinch of salt and that will be quick if they were well soaked but not oversoaked – depending on the age of your dried beans.

Cool a little and into the food processor.  First process garlic, lemon or lime juice and cumin together.  No, I have no idea how much – you have to have ‘hands’ for this one and read a bunch of recipes so you can get used to the ‘how much’ of things.  I use a whole bag’o’beans, and perhaps five garlic ‘teeth’ as they call it here, a lemon or lime juiced, and half a teaspoon of cumin, depending if you use tahini or not.  You may need another pinch of salt.

Then, the question – humous is humous – tahini humous is tahini humous – depends on what you like.  If I have fresh tahini, and we do have a field of sesame seeds on the farm, make tahini humous and now add tahini.  Not too much, because I like the garbanzo and garlic and lemon taste and just a dab of tahini.

Now add the beans to your first mix – and process with about half a cup of olive oil.  Repeat so as not to overload the food processor.  Keep enough out to eat, and freeze the rest in containers.  It has to rest a bit, for the flavors to meld.

Now comes the fun part – either make some kind of flatbread quickly, or use tortilla or other big hearty chips of some kind, or even toasted bread if you have nothing else on hand, and serve with black olives and any kind of pickles on the side and fresh big summer tomato slices and a further drizzle of olive oil over the top.  Garnish with a bit of curly parsley or even some chopped sweet basil.