Thursday, March 09, 2006
Happy Family Do Cooking!
So say the aprons, in English, worn by the women in the cafeteria at AUCA. A good point, I think. And one I like to enact as often as possible. Sitting around a table with a (few) bottles of wine talking with people I’ve just fed ranks really high on my lists of things that make life good. Especially when the dogs do the bulk of the cleaning up of leftovers. But the feeding and sitting and eating and reveling hasn’t really happened on any large scale since we’ve been here, for a number of reasons. Until yesterday.
Yesterday was Woman’s Day. (It is singular in title, oddly, and thereby gives the sense that each woman individually owns the day as an autonomous entity, which strikes me as sort of contrary to the whole socialist thing, considering this holiday was birthed [pun? me? never.] by the Soviets way back when. Maybe collectivism was only for men. Are Communists still beholden to patriarchy? Well. But the women got their own day! One whole day! Suckers.) Where were we? Right, Woman’s Day. So a couple weeks ago, you’ll remember, we celebrated Fatherland Defender’s Day, aka Man’s Day (a holiday whose motto may very well be “we get most of them anyway, but it’s nice to set one aside every now and again to really revel in it.” When we get to Straight White Middle Class American Day is when the real party gets going!). So on Man's Day, we trucked over to Nathan’s apartment with the usual crew of students and faculty and friends we’re taken to trucking around with and you’re no doubt used to hearing about by now. Once there, Yelena and Asel (Yelena’s best friend and fellow AUCA student) made us all samsi and in the process taught us how to do so ourselves. As you’ve seen over on Erin’s blog, we’ve done our best to put the teaching into practice. But while we were still learning and the samsi were still not yet oven-bound, I commented that I’ll have to cook for Yelena and Asel sometime. I like to cook, you see. And Fatherland Defender’s Day made for the second time I had been cooked for in a short period of time by one of the women among us. So it was only right, right? I thought so. Yelena and Asel didn’t quite understand. “Erin will cook for us?” they asked. “I don’t cook,” lied Erin. “Well then,” said Yelena after a long quizzical look at both Erin and me, “we will have pancakes. For Woman’s Day.”
Somehow, by the end of the evening it was further decided (by Nathan, I think) that I would make crepes. Blini were out of the question, as you don’t make borscht in the buckle of the world’s borsht belt without a serious wish for failure. (Does that metaphor even work? I don’t know. It would be best to just move on…) And American pancakes were vetoed as well, as Yelena (wrongly, but with conviction) assured us that they were the same thing as blini. So crepes it was.
We bought a new, smaller non-stick pan and a whisk, milk and eggs and flour and sugar, some jam and ground meat and sour cream and mascapone cheese (Italian cheese made in Wisconsin, bought in Bishkek; living abroad has more rewards beyond the obvious, I'd say), and on Sunday had Janika over for a test run. All went well. I was afraid without a blender (most crepe recipes I know involve blenders) that things might be a bit clumpy and weird. I whisked all of the batter together in a bowl then transferred it to a jar left over from the tomatoes we used for lasagna a couple months ago and shook it like Tom Cruise doing his bartender thing in Cocktail. Like Catharine Hepburn in an earthquake I shook. Like Otis at Monterey. Shake with the feeling! In the end, all was well. The batter was smooth and problem-free. Let’s hear it for jars and rapid movement.
Because the number of people coming over was constantly in flux (when I saw Yelena at the university on Monday, she listed people she’d invited for what seemed like twenty minutes; turns out I missed a segue in the conversation and after some amount of time she had moved on to talking about who she had seen over the weekend. My bad.), I decided to make a minimum of six batches of crepes—two savory, two sweet, and two neutral (or, as I’ve taken to calling them, bland). I figured I’d spread the crepe-making over three days and save myself some work—bang out a couple of batches on Monday, a couple more on Tuesday, finish up on Wednesday in time for guests. As with most things I plan, that didn’t work. Monday I woke up late and fell asleep early, obsessing over some revision work I was doing the entire short-lived period of wakefulness. Then on Tuesday we were invited at the last minute (totally normal move here, by the way, which I love) to a party at a cafe in celebration of Woman’s Day hosted by the former head of the Anthro department at AUCA. It was weird and took most of the night and involved another American forcing unwilling Kyrgyz to do improv games ripped right off from the lesser of the two What’s My Line?s and adapting Eliot’s poems from Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats over and over again to the point of people literally groaning whenever he started to even mention a cat. So the night wasn’t entirely a waste (ahem). But that left me to spend eight hours yesterday standing in the kitchen flipping crepes. Well, most of the time I was flipping crepes. There was also some sautéing of mushroom, some cooking of meat, some sitting around checking my email and reading about the Red Sox pre-season woes. But mostly flipping, which looked a lot like this:
Eventually people showed up and ate the crepes, which was really the point of this ramble wasn’t it? Janika and Alexander showed up first, but, as they themselves pointed out, that’s to be expected: they’re German and have a stereotype to live up to. Matt, an American here running the Alpine Fund (as well as a fellow New Englander—Maine—and Red Sox fan, so he gets extra points), turned up next with what seemed enough pussy willows for every women in Bishkek to have her own four foot stalk. They are all still in a vase on our balcony, which is pretty rad, if you ask me. Shortly after that Yelena and Asel showed up and kicked me off the stove. “I’m supposed to be cooking for you,” I said. “But you’re doing it wrong,” said Yelena. Who can argue with that? She was at the stove long enough to make one pancake, thick like a blini, then wandered off to argue with Alexander in Russian about the Uzbek/Kyrgyz relationship (she’s half Uzbek, half Kyrgyz; Alexander is German; they were arguing in Russian. Brilliant.) and Asel took over the cooking. I hopped in the shower in an attempt to scrub off the layer of grease that had taken over my entire body. When I got out, grease-free, there were about twenty people in the apartment, smoking, drinking, laughing, telling stories, reading poems, making toasts, and eating crepes. Many, many crepes. There were over a hundred in the end and they all got filled with the many tasty things people brought—Nutella, jams, meats, veggies, cheeses, on and on—until there were no more left and people were full and content and talkative. It was wonderful. If the dogs had been here to give the plates a once over, it may have been perfect.
Yesterday was Woman’s Day. (It is singular in title, oddly, and thereby gives the sense that each woman individually owns the day as an autonomous entity, which strikes me as sort of contrary to the whole socialist thing, considering this holiday was birthed [pun? me? never.] by the Soviets way back when. Maybe collectivism was only for men. Are Communists still beholden to patriarchy? Well. But the women got their own day! One whole day! Suckers.) Where were we? Right, Woman’s Day. So a couple weeks ago, you’ll remember, we celebrated Fatherland Defender’s Day, aka Man’s Day (a holiday whose motto may very well be “we get most of them anyway, but it’s nice to set one aside every now and again to really revel in it.” When we get to Straight White Middle Class American Day is when the real party gets going!). So on Man's Day, we trucked over to Nathan’s apartment with the usual crew of students and faculty and friends we’re taken to trucking around with and you’re no doubt used to hearing about by now. Once there, Yelena and Asel (Yelena’s best friend and fellow AUCA student) made us all samsi and in the process taught us how to do so ourselves. As you’ve seen over on Erin’s blog, we’ve done our best to put the teaching into practice. But while we were still learning and the samsi were still not yet oven-bound, I commented that I’ll have to cook for Yelena and Asel sometime. I like to cook, you see. And Fatherland Defender’s Day made for the second time I had been cooked for in a short period of time by one of the women among us. So it was only right, right? I thought so. Yelena and Asel didn’t quite understand. “Erin will cook for us?” they asked. “I don’t cook,” lied Erin. “Well then,” said Yelena after a long quizzical look at both Erin and me, “we will have pancakes. For Woman’s Day.”
Somehow, by the end of the evening it was further decided (by Nathan, I think) that I would make crepes. Blini were out of the question, as you don’t make borscht in the buckle of the world’s borsht belt without a serious wish for failure. (Does that metaphor even work? I don’t know. It would be best to just move on…) And American pancakes were vetoed as well, as Yelena (wrongly, but with conviction) assured us that they were the same thing as blini. So crepes it was.
We bought a new, smaller non-stick pan and a whisk, milk and eggs and flour and sugar, some jam and ground meat and sour cream and mascapone cheese (Italian cheese made in Wisconsin, bought in Bishkek; living abroad has more rewards beyond the obvious, I'd say), and on Sunday had Janika over for a test run. All went well. I was afraid without a blender (most crepe recipes I know involve blenders) that things might be a bit clumpy and weird. I whisked all of the batter together in a bowl then transferred it to a jar left over from the tomatoes we used for lasagna a couple months ago and shook it like Tom Cruise doing his bartender thing in Cocktail. Like Catharine Hepburn in an earthquake I shook. Like Otis at Monterey. Shake with the feeling! In the end, all was well. The batter was smooth and problem-free. Let’s hear it for jars and rapid movement.
Because the number of people coming over was constantly in flux (when I saw Yelena at the university on Monday, she listed people she’d invited for what seemed like twenty minutes; turns out I missed a segue in the conversation and after some amount of time she had moved on to talking about who she had seen over the weekend. My bad.), I decided to make a minimum of six batches of crepes—two savory, two sweet, and two neutral (or, as I’ve taken to calling them, bland). I figured I’d spread the crepe-making over three days and save myself some work—bang out a couple of batches on Monday, a couple more on Tuesday, finish up on Wednesday in time for guests. As with most things I plan, that didn’t work. Monday I woke up late and fell asleep early, obsessing over some revision work I was doing the entire short-lived period of wakefulness. Then on Tuesday we were invited at the last minute (totally normal move here, by the way, which I love) to a party at a cafe in celebration of Woman’s Day hosted by the former head of the Anthro department at AUCA. It was weird and took most of the night and involved another American forcing unwilling Kyrgyz to do improv games ripped right off from the lesser of the two What’s My Line?s and adapting Eliot’s poems from Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats over and over again to the point of people literally groaning whenever he started to even mention a cat. So the night wasn’t entirely a waste (ahem). But that left me to spend eight hours yesterday standing in the kitchen flipping crepes. Well, most of the time I was flipping crepes. There was also some sautéing of mushroom, some cooking of meat, some sitting around checking my email and reading about the Red Sox pre-season woes. But mostly flipping, which looked a lot like this:
Eventually people showed up and ate the crepes, which was really the point of this ramble wasn’t it? Janika and Alexander showed up first, but, as they themselves pointed out, that’s to be expected: they’re German and have a stereotype to live up to. Matt, an American here running the Alpine Fund (as well as a fellow New Englander—Maine—and Red Sox fan, so he gets extra points), turned up next with what seemed enough pussy willows for every women in Bishkek to have her own four foot stalk. They are all still in a vase on our balcony, which is pretty rad, if you ask me. Shortly after that Yelena and Asel showed up and kicked me off the stove. “I’m supposed to be cooking for you,” I said. “But you’re doing it wrong,” said Yelena. Who can argue with that? She was at the stove long enough to make one pancake, thick like a blini, then wandered off to argue with Alexander in Russian about the Uzbek/Kyrgyz relationship (she’s half Uzbek, half Kyrgyz; Alexander is German; they were arguing in Russian. Brilliant.) and Asel took over the cooking. I hopped in the shower in an attempt to scrub off the layer of grease that had taken over my entire body. When I got out, grease-free, there were about twenty people in the apartment, smoking, drinking, laughing, telling stories, reading poems, making toasts, and eating crepes. Many, many crepes. There were over a hundred in the end and they all got filled with the many tasty things people brought—Nutella, jams, meats, veggies, cheeses, on and on—until there were no more left and people were full and content and talkative. It was wonderful. If the dogs had been here to give the plates a once over, it may have been perfect.
