Intimidating Vegetables - 2000

The end of summer brings bounty from the "kitchen garden" at the dacha. The experiences reported here were repeated in one form or another every year. This report on "Intimidating Vegetables" is from August 8, 2000


My current concerns are very elemental. Normally I look at vegetables as lumpy things that just lie there. They don't seem intimidating. But en masse I've found they can be threatening.

Last week I had buckets and buckets of cucumbers and tomatoes and squash sitting on the kitchen floor, making it difficult for me to get from refrigerator to sink, from stove to table. In the refrigerator were bags of black currents, patiently waiting to be turned into jam. All this produce had come from our dacha, where we had been the previous weekend with Slava's sister and her husband.

The weekend had gone well. Olga and Eduard had never been to our dacha before, and they enjoyed its bucolic setting. The main street of our village, which is unpaved, has more traffic from cows than from cars. Many of the villagers, it seems, keep a cow. And in the morning the cows amble past our house in sociable two's and three's, on their way to the lake where they get a drink, and where later in the day we go for a swim.

Alla and Alexander, who are the in-laws of Slava's son Dima, are the chief gardeners at our dacha. They prepared the garden this spring and put plants in the huge greenhouse that Alexander built for us all last fall. The greenhouse is divided into two parts, one housing tomatoes and the other cucumbers. To give you an idea of its size, there are 75 huge tomato plants. I think that Alla is raising them for market, because the size of the crop will be intimidating. Fortunately not very many tomatoes were ripe last weekend, so I only got a few buckets full of tomatoes.

We picked the cucumbers that were ready for harvest. I didn't worry too much about having only a couple of weeks to eat them before our departure, because I expected to share the bounty equally with Olga, Alla, and Yulia. Well, Olga took her portion, but Alla and Yulia insisted that the rest of this week's pickings be mine for making pickles. Uh, thanks.

I almost enjoyed picking the black currents. Interfering with my pleasure was an irritating insect Slava called "sleppen," and with his amazing English vocabulary, he translated it correctly as "gadfly." Oh. I had never known what a real gadfly was, only knew it in the metaphoric sense as applied to an annoying person. The one that buzzed around me had a vicious bite that drew blood, and then it kept trying to return to the scene of the crime to lap up the blood. A gadfly is something much worse than a mere annoyance!

We picked some fresh leaf lettuce for a salad, harvesting some green onions and garlic and parsley at the same time. We got a few carrots and baby beets, knowing however that they wouldn't be nearly as sweet as they would be when harvested in the fall after the first frost.

Our squash looks like zucchini on steroids. I picked a half dozen, each of which is a meal for six. Previous experience has taught me that these large squash keep fairly well for months if kept cool.

Because Slava's sister is a good cook, I planned our weekend menu with care. I had a few things that Olga hadn't seen before, such as fried green tomatoes and roasted garlic, but in general we had Russian style meals such as pirogi meat pastries, much-appreciated beef tongue, and kvass soup. Kvass is a Russian non-alcoholic beverage made from fermented black bread. It's a summer drink, and it's also used as a base for a cold soup with chopped cucumbers, green onions, and boiled eggs. Only I didn't know that there are *two* kinds of kvass -- one sweet and carbonated, and the other tart and plain. So my kvass soup was sort of like Coca-Cola soup with vegetables. In other words, disgusting!

On our return to Ekaterinburg I wanted to be sure to get recipes right for canning and preserving all our produce, so I checked with my friend Galina. Russian women generally follow traditional practices passed down from mother to daughter, and cookbooks aren't all that important to them, but Galina got out her cookbook for me. She has just one, which I think she got when she was first married nearly forty years ago. The book was written to contain all the knowledge that a housewife needed to know -- it has a section on cooking, one one sewing, and one on raising children. We looked up the official Soviet instructions how to make pickles.

The cucumbers in the kitchen were particularly intimitating to me. Fresh from the garden they're wonderfully crisp, and unlike the waxed products in American supermarkets. But give them a few days and they go very very limp. I had to make a peck of pickles before my cucumbers went bad.

My first task was to get some canning lids, dried bay leaf, and fresh dill (I did have garlic, but I had forgotten to pick fresh dill at the dacha) . Fresh dill isn't available in any grocery store, but there are babushkas on the streets selling their own products, and I got some dill fairly easily. Normally bay leaf is a staple in the grocery stores, but the current demand for it has outstripped supply, and I had to go to four stores before I found it. The same with canning lids, which took trips to several stores. And with all ingredients on hand, I started making pickles.

If you don't mind, I'll keep secret the Soviet recipe for pickles. I will reveal, however, that I used a French recipe for bar-le-duc jam to preserve the black currents. The tomatoes went into Bulgarian lecho.

All is now calm in the kitchen. I'm no longer being intimidated by vegetables.