Sour cherry vareniki, raw pad thai and socca with sweetcorn
In the spring of 1999, I wrapped up my degree in Russian and Political Science and took off for a month's trip to Russia.
It was May – meaning no fresh produce yet – and vegetarianism was still a puzzling concept there, so I survived mostly on a steady diet of fried potatoes, cheese sandwiches and ice cream. (This is in contrast to the summer of 2002, when I lived in Russia for a few months and bought fresh-picked berries from the babushki in the park every day, and gorged on the ripest of locally grown tomatoes.)
But there was a restaurant down the street from the hostel in St. Petersburg that many of us frequented, and there I discovered what is probably still my favourite Russian (slash Ukrainian slash generally Slavic?) dish: sour cherry vareniki. These are akin to what we call perogies here and obviously I had had potato ones before, but I had never encountered the sweet variety, and they blew my mind.
They're hard to find in these parts, and often either expensive (it takes a lot of work to hand-make vareniki) or not that good (canned cherry pie filling is not delicious, unnamed-restaurant-in-Montreal). So this week, thanks to a sour cherry delivery from Muddy Crops, I decided to make my own.
The recipe I used, of course, is from Please to the Table, though there are a million variations online. (Here's the one from the picture, and these plum vareniki look good, and Smitten Kitchen has a potato vareniki/pelmeni recipe, and I am curious about these "lazy" cherry vareniki.)
I won't lie - they're a lot of work, though not actually difficult. The recipe makes a ton, so I froze a lot of them, but we had some for dessert last night (topped with reduced cherry juice and sour cream) and I plan on making them my afternoon snack today. Vareniki of any flavour are a fun cooking project if you're looking for one, and if you have a large freezer, it's a nice way to save some summer fruit for the winter months.
What have you been doing with your summer produce?
Elsewhere
I can't remember if I shared this already, but Megan has been raving about this Rhubarb Custard Cake, which she's also been making with other fresh fruit – I think peaches?
Adrienne recommends this "Rad Rainbow Raw Pad Thai" from Oh She Glows, which I'm planning to make this week. She says: "I threw in come cayenne pepper into the sauce and left out the maple syrup and it was rocking. I also subbed out the red cabbage for arugula (just cuz I didn't have a cabbage) and I think I just hit the summer salad pay dirt."
I enjoyed this article on naming recipes and what it means to call something, for instance, a "Korean rice bowl" rather than bibimbap.
And now that it's corn season, I've got my eye on these socca pancakes with herby sweetcorn salad.
(I think "socca pancakes" is a little redundant, maybe? But it's an example of a recipe naming challenge: do you use the source recipe name, realizing that many people won't know what it is, or do you rename the recipe in "plain" English, or do you do both?)
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