You know how it goes. One minute you’re riding a bike through the idyllic Russian countryside, the wind blowing through your hair, the sun a ball of fire sinking slowly below the horizon. The next minute, you’ve fallen off your bike into a hole you didn’t notice because you were planning out the opening of your next blog post. It happens to the best of us. Twice. You know. Paths carved by people riding tractors through fields are not well known for being a smooth ride, and the dips and valleys I avoided far outnumber the ones that got me. We went back to the dacha this weekend. We left Friday afternoon and came back late Sunday night, which is when I started studying for Monday’s history test. Well, it’s like that sometimes. The test was in Russian. I did not do very well. But that’s skipping ahead. On Saturday morning, Arina and I picked raspberries from the bushes on their land. Then we brought them back to her grandmother’s house and mashed them, stirred in sugar and butter, and ate the finished jam with a spoon. It was awesome.
In the afternoon, we went to the beach with some of her younger cousins. They liked me, if only because my bigger hands could hold more seashells than theirs, and they were hell-bent on coating every inch of their sand castle in delicate swirls. I waded in the river, but only to my knees, since I was in my normal clothes. This did not matter to the cousins, who decided that my presence in the water was license to splash attack. The sun dried my clothes pretty quickly, though.
We also made pelmeni this week. Pelmeni are little beef dumplings. Marina cut circles out of dough she made from eggs, flour, butter, and water. She showed me how to fold them around the filling to make a little tortellini-shaped dumpling. We sat at the kitchen table for almost an hour before all the dough and filling was gone. The pelmeni were cooked for a few minutes in boiling water, and then served with sour cream, mayo, or ketchup, as you prefer. Russians put sour cream (сметана) on pretty much everything, but it really does work. And for some reason, the sour cream here tastes much better than usual. Marina also puts mayo on hard boiled eggs, which is delicious and a habit I plan to keep.
In the afternoon, we went to the beach with some of her younger cousins. They liked me, if only because my bigger hands could hold more seashells than theirs, and they were hell-bent on coating every inch of their sand castle in delicate swirls. I waded in the river, but only to my knees, since I was in my normal clothes. This did not matter to the cousins, who decided that my presence in the water was license to splash attack. The sun dried my clothes pretty quickly, though.
We also made pelmeni this week. Pelmeni are little beef dumplings. Marina cut circles out of dough she made from eggs, flour, butter, and water. She showed me how to fold them around the filling to make a little tortellini-shaped dumpling. We sat at the kitchen table for almost an hour before all the dough and filling was gone. The pelmeni were cooked for a few minutes in boiling water, and then served with sour cream, mayo, or ketchup, as you prefer. Russians put sour cream (сметана) on pretty much everything, but it really does work. And for some reason, the sour cream here tastes much better than usual. Marina also puts mayo on hard boiled eggs, which is delicious and a habit I plan to keep.