Бульон с клецками is like chicken noodle soup, without the chicken and without the noodles and with farina dumplings instead. My mom makes it for us when we’re sick and also just as a meal and expression of love, this weekend included. For most of my childhood I took for granted that it was Russian—but when I tried to talk about it with my Russian friends in undergrad none of them had heard of it or anything like it. I decided it wasn’t Russian, so I decided it was Jewish, some version of matzo ball soup—but when I asked my parents it turned out it came from my paternal grandmother, the Russian side of my dad’s family, not the Jewish side. So we decided it wasn’t Jewish, either. When we set out to solve the mystery of where it came from the closest we found was a Polish dish, and then I found a Hungarian recipe, which mentions that it is popular in Eastern Europe as well, and that it is indeed a version of matzo ball soup—so both Jewish and Russian and other cultures’, despite being a mystery to seemingly everyone directly in our lives but us. I asked more Russian friends and one of them had distant family and acquaintances who have it in their families. I have no idea how the recipe got into my family if it didn’t get into theirs; for all I know it came from a friend of a friend and not from a long line of relatives—horizonal transmission rather than vertical, maybe bouncing around between Jewish and Russian and back again and again until it reached us.
Here is my mom’s recipe, passed on from my paternal grandmother—
Ingredients:
Broth
An egg
Farina (манка)
Flour
Salt
Process:
Heat up a bit more than a soup bowl full of broth.
Whisk one egg with a fork in a bowl.
Add two pinches of salt.
Stir about a third of a cup farina into the egg. The exact amount might vary, but the important thing is that it should look like this:
Stir about one eight cup into the egg-farina mixture. As before the exact amount might vary, but the important thing is it should look like this:
The broth should be boiling now; if it’s not then wait for it to boil.
Stick the ends of two spoons in the broth to heat them up—it’s very important that they are heated.
Scoop up spoonfuls of the dough, stick the spoon with the dough in the broth, and let the dough fall off into the broth. If the dough gets stuck on the spoon, use your second spoon to scrape it off into the broth.
Leave the dumplings on the stove for a few minutes. They’ll be ready pretty quickly.
Transfer to a bowl, get a new spoon, and eat.
As a bonus, here’s a fancy avocado salad my grandmother created after doing what she usually does to get recipes, which is to read a ton of recipes on the Internet and then let her neural nets process them into the resulting final recipe.
2 avocados—peel and cut them small.
3 eggs, hard-boiled—cut slightly bigger than the avocados.
A little cilantro or a similar small leafy thing—chop small.
Green onion, 3 stems—cut off the roots and then chop and add the white and green parts.
Juice of one lemon.
Salt to taste.
According to the Internet you can also add mayonnaise, but my grandmother doesn’t.
Here are some photos of the sunset at Shaver’s Creek, in Central Pennsylvania, this past weekend:
Being Russian, we get to enjoy a lot of different kinds of pancakes, a wonderful diversity of pancakes that I think greatly enriches life. (The big, fluffy, American pancakes usually eaten here are actually considered a kind of omelet, at least among my mom’s side of the family, at least after we first moved here.)
Today I want to teach you (and the future me reading this) how to make сырники, really delicious Russian cheese pancakes I remember fondly from my childhood and have just this year finally learned how to make myself. I am also going to share with you оладьи (oladi), small fluffy pancakes made with kefir, and an old, traditional recipe for блины (bliny), Russian crepes that my mom remembers from her childhood and which she shared with me for my birthday this year.
Сырники (Syrniki, Cheese Pancakes)
Very early on in the pandemic, when one day I had half a tub of ricotta left over from making lasagna, my maternal grandmother, who had covid at the time but didn’t know it yet (and who is thankfully alive and well, knock on wood), spent an inordinate amount of time with me over Skype teaching me how to make сырники, she in Moscow watching me in Massachusetts and guiding my hands through the physical process.
Here is the recipe, modified a bit to reflect my own experience with it.
As a note before we start, I am going to assume you have an effectively infinite supply of:
all-purpose flour
olive oil
I am also going to assume that you are wearing an apron or a shirt you don’t care about, and that your skin is either covered or emotionally prepared to dodge hot oil.
You will want the following:
16 ounces ricotta cheese—a small half-container, or half a large container
2 eggs
2 teaspoons sugar
½ teaspoon baking soda
4 tablespoons flour, with a peak of flour rising up from the spoon
some blueberries or frozen blueberries or another berry or anything else you might like in fancy pancakes—no more than a quarter cup or so, nothing overwhelming
Having gathered that, you will now do the following:
Mix everything together in a big bowl. It should turn out liquid—not too thick.
Pour enough olive oil into a large non-stick pan that the pan is comfortably coated in olive oil. Leave it uncovered on the stove at medium heat to heat up.
Pour some flour onto a big plate in a small mountain. In addition, coat a cutting board with flour. (This is of course more flour, not included in the 4 tablespoons you mixed into the ricotta.)
Scoop up some of your ricotta mixture with a large spoon and plop in onto your flour mountain. Drizzle some flour on top of it. Gently, reach your hand into the flour under the blob and scoop up the blob. Toss it between your hands a few times, touching only the floured parts, not getting into the wet insides, rolling it about and smushing it a bit. This part is baffling, especially the first time, especially watching an experienced pro, but it gets much easier after a few tries.
Your ricotta blob won’t gain any actual structural integrity, but at some point it will feel less like liquid and more like liquid with a substantial amount of flour-covered surface tension. Place your precious flour-coated ricotta blob on the flour-covered cutting board. Repeat until you have four or so delightful ricotta-mixture blobs on your cutting board.
At this point, your pan and the olive oil should be hot. You can test out that the pan is hot by taking a bit of flour and dropping it into the pan, which is something my grandmother likes to do because she is epic. The flour should sizzle in a way that is frankly violent and terrifying to anyone who is not a grandmother.
Scoop up your ricotta blobs and plop them onto the pan. Smush them a little with the flat part of a spatula. Because your pan is hot (and you made sure your pan was hot), your blobs should sizzle aggressively. This is important. Sit and feel the violence of this particular part of nature and contemplate that we as a species have turned it into something delicious, because some things in life are beautiful and because of course we have.
Once your blobs have formed a nice crust on the bottom, flip them over. Lower the heat and cover the pan and let your blobs cook through to their insides for a little bit. While these pancakes are cooking, get to work on the next round of blobs.
After a while, remove the lid and flip the pancakes over a bit more until you are satisfied with the crusts on both sides. (This is where I diverge a bit from my grandmother’s initial advice, which was more organized.)
Remove your cheese pancakes. Replenish the olive oil, add more blobs, and repeat until you are out of ricotta mixture.
Serve immediately with honey and/or sour cream and enjoy.
Оладьи (Oladi, Kefir Pancakes)
Another pancake that is similar to сырники is оладьи (oladi)—оладьи are made with кефир (kefir) rather than ricotta cheese (though I think you can make them with other dairy products instead) and come out smoother, more pancake-like, and less cheese-pancake-like. Almost three years ago, or two years before I started drafting this blog post, in August in 2018, my good friend Masha, whom I met in 7.02 and who at the time still lived in Boston, came over and taught me how to make оладьи. The recipe we used is here. It is a very very special memory. We were squeezed into my tiny kitchen and Masha taught me how to use our roommates’ (who are also very close friends and are one of the two also Russian) cast iron pan. (They later gifted us a cast iron pan when they moved out to their own new home, and thanks to Masha I know how to use it.)
Both of my grandmothers have made me оладьи, just as both of my grandmothers have made me сырники, though their recipes produce smaller, limper cakes, while Masha’s are fluffy and more solid. I especially fondly remember from my childhood оладьи with small apple slices in them, still crispy even in a cooked pancake. All options are excellent.
(And I have very fond memories of my paternal grandmother, who lives in Perm, saying “Практика, Лидия, практика” while teaching me how to cook.)
Here are the оладьи that Masha and I made, so perfect and fluffy:
A translation of the recipe we used, with some of my own embellishments—
Here is what you will want:
½ liter kefir
1 egg
2 tablespoons sugar
1 teaspoon salt
2½ cups flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
olive oil
And here is what you will do:
Beat the egg lightly with a fork. Add the kefir and stir. (The recipe suggests warming the kefir up a bit in the microwave first to bring it to room temperature, since you’ve probably refrigerated it.)
Stir in the sugar, salt, and flour. Finally, at the end, stir in the baking soda.
Stir the mixture and let it stand for 15-20 minutes.
If you would like, stir in berries or thinly chopped apples—a satisfying but not too great density of berries or thinly chopped apples.
Heat a frying pan and pour in some olive oil. When the oil is warmed up, reduce the heat.
Spoon some of the pancake batter on the pan to form small pancakes, multiple pancakes on the pan at a time. Cook over low heat. (The recipe suggests cooking without a lid over medium heat if you have a heavy pan with a thick bottom, or on low heat with a lid if you have a light teflon pan. The important thing is that the pancakes have a chance to cook all the way through.)
Serve with sour cream or honey or jam or berries or anything else.
Traditional Блины (Crepes)
I got to see my family for the first time in a long time for my birthday a few months ago. My mom asked me what I wanted for my birthday, and my answer was cakes: lots and lots of cakes, cakes for every meal. For one of our cake meals, my mom made pancakes—specifically, my mom made traditional Russian блины (bliny, crepes), following a recipe we do not usually use because it involves too much butter. It gives a feeling of a very special and loving multigenerational full circle—my great-grandmother Lydia, whom I was named after, used to make traditional блины for my mom and this year my mom made them for another Lydia: me. It feels like a meal and a love shared over a century, a bridge by people who are lucky to have overlapped—my grandmother, my mom, and me, Lydia; and my mom, my grandmother, and my great-grandmother Lydia—connecting two lives that did not overlap—us two Lydias.
Here is a loose translation of the recipe my mom used—
You will want the following:
300 g all-purpose flour
300 ml milk
7 g dry yeast
70 ml butter
3 eggs
60 g sugar
1 tablespoon sea salt
200 ml water
olive oil
And you will want to do the following:
Combine the eggs with the sugar and salt and beat thoroughly until an even layer of foamy bubbles appears on the surface. Add the yeast, butter, flour, milk, and water. (The recipe notes that it is better to add warm, recently boiled water—but make sure you don’t kill the yeast with the heat.) Mix well so that there are no lumps and the mixture becomes homogeneous. (My mom notes that she added everything at once and mixed it in a blender. It turned out great and is easier, so you should probably do that instead.)
Cover the container with a towel and put it in a warm place (the recipe suggests a warm place by the radiator) for 40-50 minutes.
Thoroughly mix the risen dough and leave it in the warm place again. (My mom notes that she did not do that.)
Without stirring, cook in the usual way for pancakes: preheat the pan and lightly grease it with oil. (The recipe suggests using a culinary brush or half a potato to grease the pan.) Gently scoop the dough from the top with a ladle and pour it into the pan, letting it spread evenly. When the surface of the pancake is dry, flip the pancake and fry the other side.
Serve with caviar, butter, sugar, jam, or honey. I have very fond memories from my childhood of блины (our usual recipe, not this one) buttered and then folded into quarters for the butter to melt and then sprinkled with sugar; they are alternatively very good buttered and then with caviar spread over the butter and then the crepe rolled, or with sugar sprinkled on or a light coat of jam or honey and then rolled. Many magical options, all excellent—best to enjoy a few of each.
Here are some photos of our crepe experience (crepe-sperience, if you will):
As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. This part of the blog post includes links with my Amazon referral code. If you click one and buy something, I get about 4% of the price as commission. You don’t have to buy these things from Amazon—actually, you don’t have to buy these things at all. You can also support me by buying merch of my art, by buying me a campground store decaf coffee, or by simply reading and enjoying. Thank you!
In case you see any of them and are considering looking for them, here are my things that appear in these photos or were barely off-screen:
This large non-stick pan, which I bought because my parents had the same pan and liked it. It has lasted three years so far and stood up to near-daily heavy use with none of the usual non-stick pan misery and speedy demise. I don’t think I’ve ever had a non-stick pan last three years. I have no complaints and am very happy with it, which for non-stick pan is a huge compliment. I liked it three years ago and I still like it a lot now.
This huge lid with ridges on it that fits on any size large pot or large pan. I have one and I bought one for my parents because I like it so much.
This dish set we bought when we first moved into our apartment. We bought it because our friend we subletted from had the same dish set, and when we tried to remember what we thought of it we couldn’t remember it at all, which is an excellent compliment. We have since broken a few of the pieces, but most of the set survives six-ish years later.
This very pretty set of small plates that I bought more recently to complement the surviving dish set after we broke all the small plates. They are all different and all pretty and a small happy experience of their own to add to meals.
These mixing bowls, which we bought because our roommates had them and moved and then we missed them (the roommates, but also the mixing bowls). The roommates also had colorful lids for the mixing bowls, which I will probably end up buying eventually.
Happy and colorful yet classy and sturdy and grown-up measuring spoons.
My adorable powder blue toaster, which I chose entirely for its color and aesthetic and which brings me joy every single day, even when I do not use it, and which I will never regret paying a little extra for just because I like the color.
My adorable powder blue tea kettle, which matches my adorable powder blue tea kettle and has a glorious extra feature of keeping my hot water hot after it has boiled and after I have forgotten it, so that when I remember it again I do not have to boil it again, thereby risking forgetting again and starting the whole tragic cycle anew.
In our home it is mostly my partner Cory who cooks, especially when it comes to fancy things, though I occasionally have a burst of cultural inspiration and cook something Russian or Jewish or Russian Jewish or something I found on the Internet. (Usually I also like to contribute a side dish or two, especially a carb or vegetable, and play line cook while Cory does creative things. (I chop and peel, because I enjoy chopping and peeling.) This is how we every evening end up with something our roommate Helen says resembles Thanksgiving dinner in workload.) Right now we are both working from home most (he) or all (I) days, which means more meals at home, which means more cooking—so I have been trying to handle lunches. I am 1. lazy, 2. usually very focused when I’m focused, which I try to be on workdays. We are also, for pandemic reasons, trying to keep grocery shopping to a minimum. My lunches reflect those restrictions. I am very proud of some of my go-tos and I want to share them with you.
Of course, all of these do include some chopping and stove time—but that is the point. It is all minimal: you only chop one thing for each “recipe,” and that is about where I draw the line most workdays.
Mac and Cheese (From a Box)—With CaramelizedOnions
Ingredients:
boxed mac n’ cheese (I like Annie’s)
one or two onions
olive oil
some kind of milk and/or butter, depending on the package instructions
optional: panko or other bread crumbs
Instructions:
Peel and chop your onions. I chop them in half, then slice each half in thin-ish, parallel lines, then chop each chunk in half perpendicular to the long slices. That makes strips of onion that aren’t too long. But you can chop the onions however you want.
Put some water on the stove in a small pot for the mac and cheese and leave it on medium-low or low to start boiling.
Caramelize the onions. Caramelizing onions is fancy but is very hands-off. You put them in a small pan in olive oil, bring them to sizzling on medium heat, stirring often, then turn the heat down to low and let them simmer gently in olive oil while you work on whatever you’re working on that day, coming by occasionally to stir them when you need a break and might otherwise open Twitter. Eventually, they will get soft and wilty and clear. Some time after that, they will start to brown and will shrink. That—when they just start to brown—is when you want to start making the mac and cheese in earnest.
Make the mac and cheese according to the instructions on the box. (A tip: take the mac and cheese box very seriously when it comes to the order of operations and general process of preparing the cheese. When it says to do it while the pasta is draining, you should do that. When it says to make sure the cheese powder dissolves fully in the hot milk and butter, you should do that. That way your cheese won’t be lumpy.) When the onions are done, turn them off or leave them on low.
When the mac and cheese is done and cheesy, stir in the carmelized onions. Serve on plates or in bowls. Sprinkle panko or other bread crumbs on top if you’re feeling extra fancy.
It’s boxed mac and cheese!—but the carmelized onions make it fancy.
Rice Pilaf (From a Box)—With ChoppedStuff on It
Ingredients:
boxed rice pilaf (I like Near East rice pilaf with almonds)
olive oil (for the rice pilaf)
fresh avocados and cucumbers (or another vegetable or other food you enjoy eating raw)
Instructions:
Prepare the rice pilaf according to the instructions on the box. I like to make rice pilaf in the microwave, because then once I put everything in a casserole dish and put it in the microwave I can forget about it.
When the rice pilaf is done, while it is resting at the very end of the instructions, peel and chop a cucumber and an avocado. I recently-ish learned how to peel and chop avocados—first, cut it in half, going around the pit in the middle. Hold the half with the pit in one hand; with your other hand, thwack the pit of the avocado with the sharp side of the knife. Hopefully the pit sticks to the sharp side of the knife and you can lift it out of the avocado and into the trash. It doesn’t always work, but sometimes it does.
Serve your rice pilaf with avocado and cucumber on it. So yummy, and so fancy—and it feels well-balanced.
Veggie Pasta—With Spinach and Garlic Olive Oil Sauce and an Egg
This one is a bit more hands-on, but it is also very filling and feels the most like a real meal.
Ingredients:
boxed veggie pasta—I like the spirals, or the little tubes, or the big nests
olive oil
one or two or three garlic cloves
frozen spinach
egg(s)
Instructions:
Peel the garlic cloves and chop them into thin slices. I like to chop each clove in half first, to make slicing it easier.
Cook the veggie pasta according to the instructions on the box.
While the pasta is cooking, hardboil your eggs. Put another small pot of salted cold water on the stove with an egg (or however many eggs you want to eat) just submerged in the water. Put the water on medium, boil the water with the egg in it, and then, once the water is boiling, turn the stove off and leave the egg for 10 minutes or, probably, until the pasta is done.
Cook the chopped garlic in lots of olive oil in a small pan on the stove, stirring occasionally. Once the garlic cloves start to brown, add some frozen spinach, mix it up with the garlic, and let the spinach melt and heat up.
When the egg(s) are done, drain the pot and submerge them in cold water a few times. Peel them. I find it easier to peel eggs while they are submerged in cold water.
Serve the veggie pasta with the garlic and spinach sauce on top. Serve the egg on the side, sliced into little boats.
Chickpeas With Asparagus
Ingredients:
a can of chickpeas
fresh asparagus
olive oil
Instructions:
Rinse the asparagus. Chop the white ends off, then chop the rest into pieces several inches long.
Open and drain the can of chickpeas.
Fry the asparagus and chickpeas in olive oil on medium heat until the chickpeas are very lightly browned and the asparagus is ready to eat.
You might have noticed a pattern here—usually boxed carb and something else, usually something that lasts a long time between grocery trips. Most things can be swapped out for most other things—another protein instead of the egg, fresh for frozen, frozen for fresh. If you buy all the different kinds of boxes of mac and cheese, and all the different kinds of boxes of rice pilaf and couscous and similar things, and all the different kinds of other boxed carbs you like, you can get a real sense of novelty in your meals.
We used to go grocery shopping sporadically once a week or so—usually with backpacks on to walk home with. During the pandemic we are limiting our grocery trips. It’s now just me, solo, no backpack and no browsing, filling a cart as fast as I can and then waiting for Cory to pick me up in the car. We do most of our shopping at Market Basket in Union Square, which is cheap but crowded at the best of times. Instead of doing lots of weekly small trips, we are now doing one big, expensive trip about once every three weeks or so. I plan the whole thing out ahead of time and organize my shopping list by aisle. I go during the day, when people who aren’t grad students are working. Our recently-ish acquired car helps a lot. I speed-run it. (My parents didn’t let me play video games as a kid except when my mom had to bring me to work, so this is the only thrill I’ve known.)
On these trips, I buy a truly absurd quantity of my favorite boxed carbs (Near East rice pilaf and couscous and others, Lundberg risotto and quinoa and rice and others, every single variety of Annie’s mac and cheese, and whatever veggie pasta is in stock). I stack them high on an extra floating shelf we installed in the kitchen, which means I can store as many boxes as I like in the vertical space to the ceiling. I also buy frozen spinach, which is limited only by our freezer space, which is limited but a lot less limited than the shelf-life of non-frozen vegetables. Fresh vegetables (and berries and chocolate and tiny fancy canned coffees) are exciting in the days after a shopping trip, but frozen facilitates holing up safely at home. (Perhaps this, after the car, is the start of our final slide to suburbia.)
These meals—and, to a large extent, the style of grocery shopping that comes with them—is something I think I’ll take with me when the pandemic is over. I really enjoy the amount of time I save by not going to the grocery store as often—easy meals are good too.
As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. The rest of this blog post includes links with my Amazon referral code. If you click one and buy something, I get about 4% of the price as commission. You don’t have to buy these things from Amazon—actually, you don’t have to buy these things at all. You can also support me by buying merch of my art, by buying me a campground store decaf coffee, or by simply reading and enjoying. Thank you!
When we do cook actually fancy fancy things, these are our favorite fancy cookbooks—
Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day by Jeff Hertzberg, M.D. and Zoë François. Last winter we took a bread-making class at Harvard during J-Term and it changed our lives—specifically, we starting baking a lot of bread. By far one of the most excellent decisions I’ve made in grad school. The recipes from that class were based on the recipes in this book.
Also useful, for the food in this blog post in particular:
This really lovely set of four small blue plates, all different, is one of my favorite physical items that I own and brings me small but very valuable bursts of joy every day.
This electric can-opener we recently bought, which is a new and still terrifying concept for me but is very fun, especially compared to opening cans with a regular can-opener.
This large non-stick pan, an earlier version of which we bought years ago and still use every day with no complaints, which is unusual for non-stick pans that live in our home.
L. A. K. 