Diet No. 5

At the health hotel we had Diet No. 5. Pictured here is a typical breakfast.

A Russian breakfast may be similar to supper. You'll notice a cup of tea, a tomato and cucumber salad, an omelet and mashed potatoes. (A Russian omelet is made with lots of milk and is therefore almost a custard.)

Side dishes include tvoroznik (a baked pudding with farmer's cheese), a small plate of oatmeal, a pastry, and red caviar for buttered bread. We could have had boiled chicken or a meat cutlet instead of the omelet. In any case, you can see that there was plenty of food to last us until dinner -- which is in the middle of the day.

A Russian dinner starts with zakuski, or appetizers, which often include vegetable or meat salads. There's also kielbasa, cheese, bread, and a soup course. The main course here will be boiled meat or chicken or baked fish, served on a small plate with mashed potatoes.

The dinner drink at the health hotel is always either kompote, a sweetened beverage made with a few berries or softened dried fruit, or kisel, which tastes somewhat like liquid Jello.

Supper is similar to breakfast. At the health hotel we usually get something to take back to our rooms for a late night snack. Fresh fruit, perhaps. Or kefir to drink (look for kefir in the dairy section of your grocery store; it's similar to buttermilk or drinkable yogurt.)

Diet No. 5 is a generic one here, probably what most people get. There are to be no fried foods. Meat is boiled, braised, or baked. Soups are made with vegetarian broth. Nobody gets seconds, although each portion is small.

One day a tablemate of ours ate our servings of the first course before we arrived. The waitress was indignant, for she had to replace our setting. The guy never tried that trick again!

Slava is a big eater, although a careful one. He needs to have a large stash of fruit around for snacking. So some afternoons we went foraging. From an Armenian couple on the street we bought some grapes and a watermelon. At the central market Slava got plums and peaches. He got pears from a wild orchard we found on a hike.

There's one important food group virtually missing from Diet No. 5. That is coffee. On our first day I asked about coffee at breakfast, and was told that I could have it the next day, which was Tuesday. The next morning I got one packet of instant cafe-au-lait with sugar. I got another one the following Tuesday. I learned that coffee was served only on Tuesdays.

Fortunately I had come prepared for such a situation. I had packed a bag of ground coffee with single cup filters. In a land of tea drinkers, I knew that I might have to be responsible for my own welfare.

Do clients lose weight on Diet No. 5? Not likely. I'll have some remedial work to do in the United States.

A Russian Recipe

Photo of our kitchen in E-burg

After "Food Safety Alerts," published below, I'd like to talk about cooking at home.  In the heat of summer, it’s nice to have a cold soup for lunch.

A Russian favorite is called Okroshka, and it is with pleasure that I share this recipe with you. Note that the quantity of each ingredient is left to your discretion.

OKROSHKA SOUP
Boiled potatoes, diced
Boiled egg, diced
Cucumber, peeled and diced
Green onion, chopped
Fresh dill, chopped
Sausage or other meat, chopped
Horseradish
Mustard
Sour cream – as a topping
Kvas

Oh-oh. The last ingredient is a bit of a problem in the U.S. Kvas is a beverage made from fermented black bread. Although it’s possible to make it at home, no one does that any more. A fair substitute, I think, would be near beer, or nonalcoholic beer.

An alternative is to use the milk product called "kefir."  It's available in most American supermarkets, and it's something like a light yogurt.  It can be used as the broth of this cold soup in place of kvas, thinned out a bit with water.

If you try this in the U.S. and mix near beer or kvas with the chopped vegetables and meat, I think that to get the full Russian experience of summer you should also turn off your air conditioner.

Food Safety Alerts

In an earlier posting, “Secrets of A Russian Housewife,” I stated that the women I know here like to make pelmeni by hand, rather than buy it at a store, like I do. Or rather, like I used to do – until I read the following article in the Moscow Times. The first shocker was learning that at least some commercial pelmeni (Russian ravioli) contains horse meat rather than beef. Then I noted that Darina pelmeni has been recalled in Sverdlovsk (the area surrounding Ekaterinburg). Tons of meat had come from animals infected with anthrax.  

By the way, for the past six months Russian authorities have halted the shipment of chicken from the United States ostensibly because chlorine has been used as a disinfectant. This vigilance in protecting Russian consumers also keeps them from getting frozen chicken that is bigger and cheaper than what is produced in Russia.

I’ll be looking for follow-up stories to the one reprinted below. I’d expect that a few people might get into trouble with these revelations. If that ever happens, I’ll share that news on this blog.


Anthrax Death Linked to Pelmeni 
03 August 2010
The Moscow Times

One man died and five others were hospitalized after contracting anthrax at a farm in the Omsk region that supplied horse meat for pelmeni sold in Moscow and other regions, Interfax reported Monday. 

All six victims fell ill after being hired to cut meat from diseased animals, said Gennady Onishchenko, head of the Federal Consumer Protection Service. Horses started dying at the farm in June, but the farm's owners hid the deaths, he said. 

Lifenews.ru said about 2 1/2 tons of horse meat with anthrax was supplied to Darina, a prominent pelmeni producer. The meat was confiscated, as were shipments of the company's pelmeni in the Moscow, Omsk, Tyumen, Sverdlovsk and Tver regions, the Novy Region news agency reported.

The Health Hotel

I'm starting to write this while in the salt room of the  Health Hotel, undergoing speleology treatment.  I'm to be here for 45 minutes -- sitting, breathing, and listening to New Age music.  That's 30 minutes longer than yesterday, and 30 minutes longer than I can sit without a great deal of figetting.  

When Slava and I arrived at the Health Hotel in Kislovodsk, the doctor who checked us in over-ruled the doctor in Ekaterinburg, who said I have feeble limbs (see August 7 posting on "Health Problems").  The treatment for me here would be for "chronic bronchitis in remission."

Breathing ions in a room walled with bricks of salt is one prescribed treatment.  Five minutes daily of inhalation therapy is another, using a face mask to breathe in air moistened with narsan mineral water.  Every other day I bathe in narsan water; on alternating days I have a "circular shower" for blood flow stimulation.  On alternate days I also get a ten-minute spinal massage.  And every day I get a mug of phytochai, a herbal tea concocted for better breathing.

Slava is getting several different treatments.  He gets a strong underwater massage, magnetic treatments for his knees, and a herbal tea appropriate for his Type A personality.

Actually I don't think that I've ever seen Slava as relaxed as he is here.  He knows the routines of a Russian health spa, and like most clients here he readily accepts the prescription of resting between treatments.

All treatments are scheduled for morning hours.  The afternoons are hot, and without air conditioning or electric fans.  Our sluggish bodies frequently end up napping.  We do, however, often take walks in the afternoon or evening.  We've climbed the hill to Red Rocks, walked to the Valley of Roses, gone off trail to pick pears at an abandoned orchard, and (my favorite) walked 15 minutes downtown to use the public access computers at the main post office.

Good health...good access to the Internet... I appreciate both more than ever!

Learning Russian -- Part II

The first hurdle to learning Russian is the Cyrillic alphabet. Five letters are easy, just like ours: A,K,M,O, T. Eleven others are mostly Greek, and then there are four that make a sibilant sound. The tricky letters are Latin in style, but different in pronunciation: B is ”veh,” H is “en,” P is “er,” C is “ess,” E is “yeh,” X is “khah,” and Y is “oooh.”  The Cyrillic letter for I is sometimes written like U, and the letter T can look like a lower case m.  So...

 The storefront sign says “Coffee House.” The sign on the kiosk transliterates to "Pit Stop."

Learning Russian Part I

 Sign for a "Dino-Park"

The good news is that I seem to remember most of the Russian I learned while living here.

The bad news is that it never was very much.

My first week back I was labeling some containers in the kitchen, and I remembered that the word for flour is “myka” (pronounced “moo-KA”). Slava asked me if I knew the meaning of “myka,”pronounced “MOO-ka.” No, I didn’t. It turns out that myka can mean either flour or “anguish.” With just this one example you can imagine badly I can garble the Russian language.

Ah, let me give you another example. The other day I was in the kitchen with our Russian daughter-in-law, and as she was cutting up vegetables I asked her if she wanted an onion. Only, what I offered her was a manhole cover, Slava said.

Russian grammar is complicated. In addition to suffixes and prefixes, some words have infixes – take a word apart, stuff something in the middle, and put the word back together. Nouns have three declensions and six cases. Verbs have two conjunctions and lots of irregular forms. So many opportunities to make mistakes!

To improve my Russian I like watching three things on television: sports, weather reports, and advertising. These three are presented with limited vocabulary. Win-lose, wet-dry, buy now…

My greatest skill is in listening. My good friend Galina knows English well, but prefers to speak in Russian. So when we get together, she speaks Russian and I speak English. We get along just fine.

Fire, Fire!

The most severe heat wave here in recorded history (temperatures up to 40 Celsius, or 104 Fahrenheit), combined with an unusual drought, has led to a conflagration that has surrounded Moscow with smoldering peat bogs and out-of-control forest fires. The resulting smog may itself be setting a record.  Slava and I are safely away from the fires in European Russia; right now we're in the northern Caucuses Mountains, but on August 18 we'll be going to Moscow.  We trust that conditions in Moscow will be better then than they are today. 

The country's chief lung doctor, Alexander Chuchalin, has said the air pollution is equal to about two packs of cigarettes smoked within three or four hours. The pollution-monitoring agency said that pollution has reached a level 10 times higher than acceptable, and has urged Moscow residents to wear thick, eight-layer face masks outdoors.

But what about the air indoors? Very few Moscovites have air conditioning. The air inside apartments is the same as air outside. Moscovites have nowhere to go to get away from the smog. That part of the story hasn’t generally been reported.

I won’t get into the various examples of incompetence and lack of planning for dealing with today’s problems. Let me just say that summertime fires in the highly combustible peat bogs are a regular occurrence, albeit not usually so dramatic as this year.  

It is said that a question Russians frequently ask is “Who’s to blame?” The fall guy is not usually a high level person, although this time Putin himself has been criticized. Frequent Kremlin critic Yulia Latynina says, “In reality, there is really only one bureaucrat who is responsible for this tragedy — Putin himself.”

When Putin signed the Forest Code of 2007, written to please paper mill owners and real estate developers, forests were to be “protected” by those using them, entities with rights to cut them down. The number of forest monitors was cut by 75 percent.

Latynina says, "Although Russia has been burning for a month, the army was ordered to join the firefighting battle only several days ago. Why was the army not called up three weeks ago? Because there is no fundamental system of controlling and managing the country. Putin decides everything in Russia, and he was too busy with other things during the first three weeks of the fires — for example, doing photo ops with bikers in Crimea or singing songs with the 10 spies who recently returned from captivity in U.S. detention centers." 

Not everyone blames Putin. An Interfax news story reports, “Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill said Russians should seek to stop sinning in order to end a record drought that has stoked the fires.” 

"One shouldn't think that the drought will pass if we just pray to God and then forget and fall into sin," Kirill said during a visit to the town of Lukoyanov. He cited an Old Testament story about a drought sent on the Jews for worshipping a pagan god and said Russians should turn into "a different people" by abandoning their sins.

You’ll note that the patriarch has opinions not unlike those of some American religious leaders who have commented on the cause of hurricanes.

 I’m going to finger someone who has escaped harsh questioning until now, and that is the king of Moscow – excuse me, the mayor of Moscow for the last 18 years, Yury Luzhkov.

The mayor isn’t around right now. He’s on vacation. Where? His aides won’t say. When will he be back? His aides won’t say. The fires are not his problem, they’re outside the city. Oh.

In my opinion,  the city of Moscow could and should have lots of air conditioned shelters set up for the most vulnerable, if only for a few hours of respite during the day. At minimum, more hospitals could and should be air conditioned.

How many deaths will occur because of the current harsh conditions? The answer to that is political, because of course the question really is, how many deaths will be reported as having been caused by these harsh conditions. Count on lowball figures.

The Moscow Times reported on August 5, “The scorching heat and thick smog in Moscow have not reached levels that could be considered critical, the Russian capital's chief pulmonary specialist said on Thursday.” The report noted however that on Wednesday the overnight invasion of acrid smog had shrouded the city's streets and landmarks in a choking haze that was so dense that airplane pilots diverted to other airports.

Pulmonary specialist Andrei Belevsky said, "The peat bogs [around Moscow] are on fire not for the first time. This concentration [of toxic substances] doesn't harm the health of Muscovites." Ah, what has he been smoking?