A traditional dinner

Sunday I went to Kyryl's place and he showed me how to cook some traditional Ukrainian dishes. Most Ukrainian guys actually don't ever cook but Kyryl told me his mother taught it to him because he was often home alone.



First we caught some beers and went shopping at the central market. We needed some meat with bones to make a fond, because for real borsch you would never just use a bouillon cube.




We also got some different pickled stuff. All the pickled stuff here is salty, never sour like in Denmark. When I made this picture I forgot to turn off the flash and the woman got quite angry, but I didn't understand her curses.




I never thought about buying that oil myself but it is actually excellent. It is made from sun flower seeds and I have never before had oil this tasty.




Kyryl went crazy and bought five kilos of these dried fruits. He says he does not eat a lot of sweets but buying this much every two weeks I would say he does.




This is Kyryl's apartment (actually it is his father's). It is a very nice place but Kyryl is not so much into cleaning.




View from the apartment. I really like this area. It feels like we are in the country side but actually it is 10 minutes from the city center by tram.




Our dinner. Our first dish was 'variniki' with potato filling. Variniki is similar to ravioli but the shape and feeling (it is often quite firm) is more like Chinese dumplings. The main difference is that we eat it with sour cream. They also have a variant which we had for dessert, it has a sweet cheese filling. Here we are having borsch and Kyryl is waving a piece of 'salo'. Salo is basically salted (sometimes also smoked) pork fat which they eat with brown bread and cloves of fresh garlic. The borsch is, unlike in Denmark, not a puree and it actually does not have a lot of red beets in it, the color is more orange than red and it mostly came from some tomato paste. We also had the pickled cabbage together with pickled mushrooms and some of the sun flower oil we bought. The Georgian style pickled tomatoes (with a herb filling) were good with vodka. My favorite of it all may be the cabbage salad, because of that oil.




For dessert we also had this 'usvar'. This we made from a mixture of dried fruits which we just boiled in water and so the fruits became big and soft like that. We chilled it a little and drank the water like a sweet tea/soup with some of the soaked fruits in it.

After all that food I could hardly walk but we went to a well close by to fill some big bottles with water. Then I went to my friend Peter's birthday party. We were actually going to meet him at a Shashlik (Georgian style barbecue) he was having but we were too late because of all the eating, and so I just met Peter at Churchill's.