Family in Fall, Sauerkraut Recipe and New Home

In my last post, I wrote about traditional Fall celebrations in the US which my family and I love, but this time of year is even more precious and beautiful to me for many personal reasons. You might notice it too, life usually brings us things in clusters. One such "cluster" is birthdays in my family. Of course, whenever a few people gather, some of them most probably were born reasonably close to each other, and it's especially true when we talk about a large family. I mean, there are only 12 months in the year, aren't there? But some such coincidences seem more like serendipity or kismet, if you will.

Welcoming Sun and Blini Recipe

Happy Maslenitsa!

Today (Sunday) is the last day of a week-long celebration of MASLENITSA - an ancient Eastern Slavic folk holiday which, as I understand, is the only pagan holiday approved by the Russian Orthodox Church and included in the church calendar - it is always the week before the Great Lent (40 day long, before the Orthodox Paskha). Maslenitsa is believed to be the oldest surviving Slavic holiday and celebrates the end of long Winter. In Russian, the name comes from the word "maslo" (масло) which means butter, in English we could call it Pancake Festival because the most important tradition is to bake blini - pancakes or crepes every day of the week. The deeper meaning of it is celebrating the Sun and the arrival of Spring.

Mannik Recipe

Mannik (манник, pronounced MAHN-nik), a Russian semolina cake, is one of my favorite childhood treats and also a favorite of Anya and Justin. I'll write up my basic recipe first, and offer a few additional ideas to make this simple (yet tasty!) cake even more interesting.

Blue Eyes, Red Pixi, Healthy Salad, Light Heart

When mama visits, I take her at least once during her stay to Erica for a stylish haircut and good professional color, and all the wonderful service Erica provides. Back home, they can't afford a nice hairdresser - both Mom and Dad are retired with less than modest means for living, so they are always looking for ways to cut corners. Mom's haircut is usually hit and miss, and then she just buys an inexpensive hair color from a store, and her sister colors her hair. That is also hit and miss - for instance, last time the color turned out way too bright for Mom's liking (Anya, her granddaughter, did appreciate it though). So this time, Mom's wish was to make her hair more natural looking, warm brown, sort of honey walnut color as she described it. That was difficult to do, given the bright purplish red Erica had to work with, but I think it turned out pretty well.

Meeting Anne The SpyGirl and Russian ABC: S is for Salad

As many of you know, Anne of Spy Girl is currently on an artistic travel adventure - the project she calls On The Edge: US. We are lucky enough to live very close to the Western edge, so Anne and I had a chance to meet. This is the very first time I met someone from this wonderful and warm blogging circle (but I did meet great blogger friends from my previous blogs - with some of them we are friends ever since that, for almost a dozen of years already!). I offered Anne to stay in our little cottage up the hill from the Puget Sound, and she accepted my invitation!

Russian ABC: B Is for Borscht

I have had this idea for a while to write a series of posts about my native culture. I sort of naturally started doing this and introduced you to such very Russian phenomena as banya (here) and traditional Russian platok (here and here). I thought it could be fun to do one Russian cultural phenomena for each letter of an alphabet, and borscht would be my pick for B, as it is one of the most famous and delicious soups in world cuisine. Then I received a request from a friend to give her a recipe, and as I stayed at her house, I cooked borscht to share with her, and decided to photograph the process and finally write a recipe for my blog. When Shawna posted her yummy Italian soup, I saw that it is just the right time to finally begin realizing my idea about the "Russian ABC" series, which will not be in alphabetical order though, as I don't want it to become something forceful and too "thinky" - I enjoy the natural pace of life, and a spontaneous approach to my blogging is a must for me.