Kazan — summer 2014

The main dish I cook most often here in Russia is a mixture of ground meat, cabbage and spices. The Russians might call this stuff бигос or бигус (bigos or bigus). Properly speaking, bigus is made with both fresh cabbage and sauerkraut, some kind of meat, and often has prunes added, but people sometimes fudge and call any non-descript mix of meat and cabbage bigus, so that's what I'm calling it for now.

I love this stuff. Pretty damn easy to prepare. I'm a foreigner, so I use spices that the Russians wouldn't. That's because they are complete wusses when it comes to spice.

Anyway, my most recent batch used ground chicken, and somehow the broth just isn't quite there. That's because the ground chicken I buy is made exclusively from breast meat, which means almost no fat. Fat is flavor, which means that this meat is high in protein and low in taste. Today I realized that I could buy just plain old chicken fat if I wanted to, but that kind of defeats my purpose: I'm trying not to get too complicated. In the States I would just buy some chicken broth or chicken granules for the process. No store in Russia sells chicken broth, and I've never seen bouillon cubes or granules. Did an internet search on bouillon cubes, and to my surprise it seems they have the stuff in the country, though I've never seen it anywhere. The internet also told me that the Russians look at bouillon cubes as unhealthy, evil, satanic, and the root of all moral decay. Good to know.

So at the market yesterday I found a place that looked like they should have bouillon cubes. Didn't find them. Then I did the unthinkable: I asked the proprietress whether she had them. To my shock, she answered in the affirmative, and that they cost 4 rubles. "Apiece?" quoth I. "Verily," she did respond. Huh. Whodathunkit? They sell buoillon cubes here individually, not in packs of ten.

So next time I make this dish with chicken I will add a bouillon cube and see how it turns out. If you want to see my most recent recipe, look on my cooking blog.

I just texted a former student (American) on a Japanese phone with a Russian keyboard in the Tatar language.

I made buckwheat for the first time today. It's one of the quintessential Russian peasant dishes. It's eaten as:

• a breakfast dish, kind of like oatmeal
• a side dish, kind of like rice
• a side dish with onions and mushrooms
• a main dish with meat and baked in the oven, kind of like pilaf

I went for the simplest version this time.

Although I have dedicated my professional life to Russian, my first foreign language was Spanish. Every once in a while I feel sad about how little a role Spanish plays in my life, and for some years now I've been wanting to do something about it. So just before I came to Russia, I decided to read an entire book in Spanish, something I haven't done in years, and for material I chose Ricky Martin’s autobiography, “Yo.” Just finished it a few minutes ago, and I want to record half a dozen thoughts.

Before I get to the content, I have to say I've been losing confidence in my Spanish, enough so that I've hesitated these days to say that I speak the language. But I've just finished a 292 page book in Spanish without needing a dictionary, so I have to say that my confidence has been somewhat restored. Yes, there were words that I didn't recognize, but most of the time I could figure them out eventually from context, and none of them significantly impeded my comprehension. My grammatical memory is still prodigious, and my spoken Spanish is adequate for very many purposes; I'd guess I'm a 2 on the ACTFL scale, so I'm not going to be embarrassed any more about saying I speak it.

So... reactions...

First off, I have the tendency of thinking that pop stars mostly don't deserve their success, and particularly their financial success generally seems to vastly outstrip their contribution to the world. Ricky Martin's oversexed songs don't seem to belie the latter idea. But as to the former, wow, this guy worked himself to the bone for his success. This was not a simple set of unexpected circumstances that accidentally happened to him. He worked incredibly hard for years. He sacrificed a lot for it. So while it might be true that his financial success exceeds his contribution to the world, nonetheless he is someone who now holds my respect for his work ethic.

Next... victimhood... He doesn't allow himself a drop of victimhood. He could reasonably be expected to say something like, “Anti-gay prejudice kept me in the closet for years and thus caused me to hate myself for years and robbed me of many opportunities for happiness.” Martin doesn't go that route. If you ask why he didn't come out of the closet till he was thirty-eight, then he responds, “Because it wasn't my time.” He claims responsibility for each and every one of his actions, mature or immature. I have to respect that. ¹

Next, I very often sneer when I hear an artist say, “I really wanted to express myself in this album.” My gut level reaction is to think, “Yeah, right, you’re expressing yourself all the way to the bank. You follow the advice of your recording label in order to maximize profit, and if there is any of you in that album, it's the money-grubbing you.” But now having read the book, I can see places where Martin himself is in fact expressed in his music. Probably the place that jumps out most to me is some lines in “La copa,” the song that he sang at 1998 Grammys and made him an overnight sensation in the anglophone US. He sings in mixed Spanish and English (here translated),

You have to fight for a star
Pursue the cup of love with honor
To survive and fight for it
Do you really want it? (Yeah!)
Do you really want it? (Yeah!)

I think the question is great. Do you *really* want it? Then fight! Martin thinks you have to fight for the things you really want. You can't just let life happen to you. Gotta respect that. BTW, here's the video from that night. Alas, the English they added for the American audience doesn't flow quite as well as the Spanish original... but that's what you get for speaking English.

Another quote I love:

Truer words were never said. In the gay community one often sees a bitchy-queeny sarcasm that gets quite tiresome. I understand the etiology of this defense mechanism, but in the long run happiness does not find its source in constant internal bitchiness.

Another one:

Great attitude. Has a certain danger as well. When we are young we can often give “a little bit more than everything” because we actually haven't learned our limits yet. As you grow older, you learn some limits, and if you are smart, you don't push past them.

Next:

No comment on that one. I just liked the quote.

Other topics... Martin believes you should always follow your passion. To be frank, I don't think that that is an option for everyone. Probably not an option for most people. If you are a Pashto girl in Afghanistan, you will never be given education or time or respect enough to learn self-respect enough to actually be able to gauge your passions. If you are in a small town in Arkansas with a Birdseye plant the only source of employment and you never graduated high school, then butchering chickens is hardly your passion, but it may well be your only option. I'm glad Martin had a life where he could pursue his passions realistically, but realistically it is not something everyone can do, and probably not something the majority of humans can do.

On another topic entirely, Martin also decided to have children with a surrogate mother. Myself, I think surrogacy and biotech for fertility are morally questionable as long as we still have children in orphanages or foster care. Still, the desire to have children of one's own body is a strong one that I can identify with. And Martin didn't go into the process on a momentary whim. He researched and read and prepared in advance, and he did it specifically at a time when he felt ready to be a parent and to give the unconditional love a child needs. That's better than many parents can boast.

Lastly, instead of sitting at home on his well-financed tush without thinking about the rest of the world, Martin has invested himself in philanthropic work. His first foundation began by helping the handicapped, and nowadays he is active in the fight against human trafficking. Gotta respect that.

In short, then, the biography surprised me. I gained respect for a guy who I didn't particularly think I would respect. Enjoyed reading it. Enjoyed the Spanish challenge. I now see that biography is a genre that is particularly good at my reading level, so I may have to read some more biography as well, although my next non-Russian book is probably “Interview with the vampire” in Bulgarian.

¹ I suppose "It wasn't my time" doesn't necessarily sound like taking responsibility for one's own life, but in the context in which he writes it, he means that he himself wasn't ready. In other words, he is not assigning responsibility to a third party, so I think the interpretation works.

Source of Spanish quotes: "Yo" by Ricky Martin, trade paperback, ISBN 978-0-451-23415-5.

I'm mentally gearing up to try making a real plov (pilaf) this weekend. A former student of mine, Ryan, learned about good tasting plov when he served in Afghanistan, and there the locals he knew always made it with red palm oil, which was the only thing they had handy, but it imparted a taste to it that Ryan raves about. Sounds like an interesting place to start. I've been looking up and down to find that stuff here. No luck. I even went to ask the Tadzhiks at the dried fruit market where to find it. They told me you couldn't, and they offered me two variations. The best version, quoth they, is a homemade oil made from walnuts and some other thing that they didn't know how to say in Russian. It's a dark brown oil and costs 300 rubles for a half liter. I'm tempted, but that's about nine bucks for half a liter of oil. Y'know, if I were trying to cook something with a recipe I had paid multihundreds of dollars for to a New York restaurant for a dish that had once blown my mind, then maybe I would use exact ingredients. But to pay nine samolians for an oil of questionable provenance that has been bottled in used plastic bottles from the Raifa monastery... no, I don't think so. They said the second best option was cottonseed oil. Seriously? They said it's great. Later I wikipedia the info: turns out cottonseed oil was the most common cooking oil in the US in the first half of the 20th century, and that Crisco was originally made from it. Huh. Whodathunkit? So that's an option.

Finally, I gave up and went to the place I should have gone first, Бәхетле, the Tatar equivalent of Whole Foods. First I found linseed oil. I had known it was used as a base for paint, but I didn't know there was an edible version. Then I found mustard oil, the cooking oil, not the essential oil that is used as a spice. Turns out you can't import or sell mustard cooking oil in the US. I should probably try that while I'm here; it's supposed to have a fairly sharp brassica taste. And then, yes indeedy, I found red palm oil. 700 rubles for a half liter (= $21). Am I going to pay that much dinero for an experimental oil? Maybe if I were Andrew Zimmern, but for a minor experiment in Russia? Nosirree, bob.