A sliced apple, three slices of sausage (сливочная, варёная), two pickled tomatoes, and a slice of pickled pepper.

This is very different than what I normally eat at home, which invariably includes oatmeal. I bought oatmeal as well, but it's the 45 minute kind, and I haven't actually made it yet. When I next shop I hope to buy a chicken and make a chicken and oat pilaf.

Here is my new favorite place in the world:

It is called Galereya kukhon' narodov mira "The Gallery of the Cuisines of the Peoples of the World." It's a cafeteria with a great selection of Russian and Tatar food (mostly), and they play easy listening music in the background at a volume low enough to let you get work done. This morning I ordered:

On the right is coffee, black. Black coffee mostly seems to come with sugar in Russia, just like iced tea in the American south. On the left is tvorozhnaya zapekanka, a dish made of farmer's cheese and eggs. It's essentially a lightly sweetened cheese cake, and I absolutely love this stuff. What's more, it's considered a dietetic dish! Healthy! Good for you! (I think the Russians think that because it doesn't have meat in it.) I'm willing to ignore my personal nutritional analysis of it cuz it is, as they say in southern Russia, muy bueno.

Back in 1986 in Moscow food establishments generally closed before 8:00 p.m. Russians rarely ate at restaurants. You bought food at a store during the day, and then ate it at home. If you got home at 9:00 p.m. and you had nothing in the fridge, you went hungry till morning. By 1997 the situation had improved a bit: there were more fast-food type restaurants, but still they closed early. Imagine then my shock to find that here in Kazan one block from my current apartment there is a 24-hour snack bar. And then imagine my chagrin to discover that I hardly understood a damn thing on the menu. It turns out that Tatars have an amazing tradition of baked goods. They love make dishes of dough, meat, and potatoes. So all these things on the menu that I hadn't come across before were in fact Tatar dishes. Oh. Well. Maybe I'm not so dumb after all.

So here is one of the first dishes I've encountered. In Tatar it's called пәрәмәч, which is taken into Russian as перемяч, which is pronounced by the local Russians as peremyach:

Essentially a peremyach is a savory doughnut. On this occasion it is about four inches in diameter and stuffed with meat and potatoes. You roll out some calzone-like dough, put the filling on top, seal it, fry it seam-side down first, and then seam-side up. Very tasty.

I had intended this summer to avoid the local food, eat mostly vegetables and shed a few pounds. Forget that idea. There is so much interesting food here to explore that I'm going to come as bloated as August Gloop.

Lunch: it's not just for lunch anymore. This morning I thought to myself, "Jeez, Don, if you don't start making your way through the entire menu of the cafeteria, summer will eventually end without you having tried everything. That would be a sin." So I decided to have lunch for breakfast:

In the upper right is boring ol' apple juice. The upper left is a soup called rassol'nik, made with pickles, and in this case it also had small meatballs; notice also the glorious glob of sour cream floating in the middle. To the right is a plate that contains mixed vegetables (unexpected) and a chicken breast covered with shredded carrots, shredded cabbage, shredded cheese, and a sprinkling of corn (unexpected) all baked together.

Tasty-tasty! (Oops, now I've got Fergie going through my head.)

As part of my doubtless futile quest to eat my way through every item in this particular cafeteria, I present to you my morning breakfast:

On the top left is кыстыбый (pronounced kuhstuhbuy), which is essentially a Tatar tortilla, in this case filled with mashed potatoes, folded, and smeared with glorious butter. In the middle is ordinary tomato juice. On the right is кияу пельмене "Brother-in-law's pelmeni." Pelmeni are essentially the Russian-Siberian-Tatar equivalent of ravioli, in this case stuffed with meat, and here served in a clay pot filled with a chicken/pork broth and a dollop of glorious sour cream. On the plate is a sardel'ka, a type of sausage, accompanied by a lightly seasoned cabbage and carrot dish.

I had hoped to get another monster sized meal in at lunch time, but this one was so filling that I just couldn't.