Everything I Didn’t Cook in May

Even moms need their moms to take care of them. I don’t completely revert to a child state when my mom is around, but there are telltale signs she is. My will to cook, for one, disappears. As I mentioned before, I love cooking immensely but I equally love not cooking for prolonged periods of time (up to 2-3 weeks is probably my sweet spot).

And so for the past several weeks the extent of my “cooking” was heating up the meals my mom had made for me and my kids. Frying boiled potatoes was doable. Frying potatoes from scratch — an impossible act. I let a bunch of ramps go to waste even though mom expressly said she wouldn’t mind if I made pesto. I just could not.

It is somehow easier to make 3 meals a day every day than to make one dish out of nowhere when you haven’t been cooking for a week. Kind of similar to writing in a flow which only happens if you write consistently. But miss a week and you are likely to be sitting in front of a blank page for hours, in a dreaded state of writer’s block.

I felt a pang of guilt looking at mom fussing over us, but one thing made it better. My mom, it seems, enjoys cooking so much more now that she is a grandma than she did when she was younger. She does it better too, with more enthusiasm and desire to experiment. What used to be a special occasion dish (or at the very least a weekend affair) — a pie, blinchiki — is now part of the everyday. My sons had blinchiki (stuffed crepes) almost every morning for two weeks straight.

Then again, you could say that the two weeks a year I see my mom is a special occasion in and of itself. When I am lucky, I see her twice a year for two weeks each time. So the extreme levels of care my kids and I receive are meant to fill the gaps for all the months in between when we only talk on the phone.

And now, without further ado, some of the meals my mom made for me and my kids. Below, you will also find my mom’s recipes for sirniki (cottage cheese patties) and Belorussian draniki (potato fritters).

I’ve talked extensively about my mom’s cooking, but the first meal was actually prepared by my dad. It’s an easy-peasy sauerkraut and potato salad with boiled sausages. If you want to make it, the one important thing to remember is that you must find sauerkraut that tastes good. If you don’t like sauerkraut as is, the salad won’t work either.

The good thing is: if you tried sauerkraut and didn’t like it, chances are you just don’t like this specific sauerkraut, not sauerkraut as a species. Keep looking for the one you love.

Once you find it, mix it with freshly boiled and cut up potatoes, pour some sunflower oil over, and mix well. That’s it, the whole recipe.

Now, to breakfast dishes. Above: my mom’s sirniki, patties (or pancakes) made of tvorog (cottage cheese) served with sour cream and jam.

Oladushki, little pancakes also served with sour cream and jam. Now that I think about it, a lot of breakfast food in Russia and other Eastern European countries is round and fried and served with sour cream.

Another example is Belorussian draniki, potato fritters.

More round fried food served with sour cream: blini (similar to crepes). Here with cottage cheese and jam.

If you add a filling to blini and wrap them, they become blinchiki. My mom made some with potatoes, meat, and cottage cheese (separately, not all together).

Uzbek plov, one of my favorites in mom’s repertoire ever since I was a kid. A one pot rice dish with lots of carrots, chicken or lamb, raisins, and spices.

This is one of the most fascinating dishes called okroshka. The base is a salad of potatoes, fresh cucumbers, chicken, eggs, and lots of greens.

Then you pour kvass (fermented low-in-alcohol drink) or kefir over the salad and it turns into soup. Served cold, it is great for hot summer days.

Speaking of soups, this one is called rassolnik, sol in its stem stands for salt because one of the main ingredients are pickles.

My mom’s fish pie in the making. She uses salmon that she buys whole at the market and takes it apart herself. A feat I have not accomplished yet.

The pie is ready.

And we had it with homemade cherry infusion.

My mom’s signature pan-fried potatoes that I spent months trying to replicate in Germany and succeeded after many failed attempts. I documented the process and shared the recipe here.

Boiled and then pan-fried potatoes (which are much easier but also less-satisfying) on a different day. Potatoes cooked in any way are almost always accompanied by a cucumber salad. The season for tomatoes hasn’t started yet, so we added radishes.