Russian Date Night

So I haven't updated in ages, thank you internship, job, and school...

The boyfriend and I had our Russian date night a couple of weeks ago, but regardless, it needs to be documented.

On the menu:

Beef and Pork Pelmeni

Stuffed Cabbage

Cherry Varenyky

Miam miam!

We shall begin our adventures with the pelmeni, so good we made them two nights in a row.

I got the recipe here and modified it a bit the second time to include fresh chives.

After making the dough (210 ml cold water, one egg, teaspoon salt, around 500 grams flour) and rolling it into a long snake, we then cut the snake into little discs.

Rolled out the discs of dough and filled them with a rounded teaspoon-ful of the filling.

Then you just fold the sides together until it resembles an empanada, then fold the outer edges over each other to create the pelmeni shape.

The filling was just as easy as the dough.

1/2 lb ground beef, 1/2 ground pork, 1 medium onion - chopped, some garlic, salt, pepper, and spices.

Adding chives makes them about 20 million times better, so that's a must.

Then you boil the suckers until they float at the top for approximately 3 - 4 minutes, then remove from water.

Serve with sour cream and butter - we like ours with soy sauce as well.

Note the flour on my cardigan - I'm a messy cook.

Now that we've learned the ins and outs of pelmeni - which are extraordinarily delicious and amazingly easy to make - it's time for a primer on stuffed cabbage.

We used this recipe and learned very quickly that Tyler Florence doesn't know shit about Russian food.

Or, at the very least, Tyler Florence has never actually made this recipe.

I made the sweet and sour tomato sauce that the recipe calls for - fine.

I made the cabbage roll filling with rice, ground beef and pork, onion, garlic, sweet and sour tomato sauce, red wine, etc. - fine.

I like to think that I'm not totally inept at cooking, and then came the actual assembly.

As per the recipe, the boyfriend and I slaved over the two cabbage heads - coring them, peeling off the leaves, and boiling the leaves once peeled off.

Only after we finished massacring the leaves trying to peel them off and were left with a pile of tiny, ripped pieces that could barely be filled and rolled up to resemble anything similar to a cabbage roll, did we realize that the Food Network is generally crap and no one apparently tests their recipes and what every sane person on the planet does is boil the entire head of cabbage and then peels off the leaves, easy as pie.

However, we soldiered on, and the recipe yielded an absolutely insane amount of cabbage rolls.

They were generally well-liked.

The boyfriend's mom makes them by piling them into a huge pot, covering them with water, and simmering them, so my baked version was not as moist and the cabbage leaves were not as soft as the boyfriend is used to.

And though they managed to dirty up every casserole dish in the house, I was happy for about the first three days that I ate cabbage rolls for every meal. After that, I started to get a bit burnt out on cabbage.

After the entree portions of our meal were made and eaten, it was, of course, time for dessert.

Our distended bellies cried out for even more Russian food.

I found the recipe for the cherry varenyky here.

It started out very similarly to the pelmeni.

We actually used the same dough recipe and just added sugar to it to sweeten it.

Instead of rolling out a snake and cutting discs out, we instead just rolled out the dough and used a cookie cutter to make the rounds.

After making the cherry filling - which was basically just canned sour cherries drained and topped with sugar - we filled the varenyky.

Instead of folding the sides in, we kept the empanada shape and crimped the edges with a fork.

Then the varenyky were boiled, floated, and rescued from the water to be eaten.

Like all good Russian food, enjoy with sour cream!

I'm currently getting started on making a multitude of variations on the pumpkin pie, so I'll be posting again soon!

Bon appétit,

Gabriella