Kitchen Mishaps

This morning I ruined the French toast. Here’s what happened:

I started out with some good demidovsky, a dark bread with raisins. In a bowl I mixed together an egg, some nutmeg, several glurps of milk, and a tablespoon of salt. It would have been much better if I had used sugar instead of salt, but I can tell you that Slava made the problem worse…

In the U.S. Slava will put maple syrup on French toast. He decided to top his French toast here in Russia with a spoonful of sour cream, to which he added a tablespoon of salt from the sugar bowl. I’ll pause for a moment for you to imagine his reaction when he tasted this mess…

How did this happen? Well, yesterday I took on the task of reorganizing the kitchen. One part of that job was to take many small plastic bags with white ingredients, and label them. A carry-over from Soviet days is that there are many foodstuffs that are still sold in bulk, scooped into plain plastic bags. You can buy flour that way, and cream of wheat, too. Plus sugar…salt... Slava says that this is not a problem – if you’re not sure what’s in a bag at home, all you have to do is look at the grains very carefully, or scoop up some to taste. Wanting to put the Soviet system behind us I gathered a collection of glass jars, and labeled them with the intended contents. In various places around the kitchen I found several bags to combine of “mannaya kasha” (cream of wheat), “caxap” (that’s the Russian spelling for sugar, pronounced “sakhar”), “myka” (flour), and col (“sol” or salt). One bag that had just a small amount of sugar I simply dumped into the sugar bowl. That was yesterday’s mistake, which Slava discovered when he went to put sugar into his tea and discovered instead what salty tea tastes like.

This morning I picked up the jar labeled “caxap” and put a spoonful into the French toast batter. I then discovered my second mistake in the kitchen.

Tomorrow morning I think we’ll have “mannaya kasha” for breakfast.