Ever had one of those days when you feel like you can’t please everyone and it’s just all too hard? It could be worse; you could be sitting in a windy park covered in paint. I guess there are some parts of history Ukrainians would rather be without, perhaps.
He’s calm, he’s collected and he’s focused; the tranquil cousin of the Kung Fu. This one is for those who are seeking a meal without kick. The preparation is similar to my last chicken dish but the outcome is quite different. After a crazy day in the office enjoy this with a hot cup of green tea and you’ll be transported to a better place.
Doughy chicken-heads watch out! This is Kung Fu chicken. So pork and potato reign supreme; chicken is everywhere.
Here is an authentic and tasty take on a Chinese spicy chicken dish. It does require one magic ingredient; chinese chilli sauce. An authentic chilli sauce (NOT sweet chilli or any other condiment) can be bought at every asian foods store and many supermarkets packaged in a jar. If you can’t find the sauce you can engineer one by making a paste of re-hydrated dried chillies, some vinegar and sugar.
This 10 litre bottle is something you should never be without in Kiev.
This week the water stopped working, as usual. First a couple of days without cold water. Out comes the trusty 10 litre for flushing the loo; water for drinking needs to be cooled then filtered; bathing requires a hot bath to be run and cooled. In a brilliant stroke of irony, the thought occurred to me as I was reading comments on my last post about cooling one’s bath that in fact my bath had been filling for sometime and was probably about the flood the bathroom. Crisis narrowly averted. Today, in a sly maneuver, the hot water stops and cold water resumes. Now the toilet is flushing as normal but I need to boil a kettle for washing dishes and bathing is off the menu. All the while our central heating system temporarily activates, and then stops again, on the first day above 10 degrees in a week.
Today I photographed cola. I did other meaningful things too, but photographing cola bottles is far more interesting than ordering McDonalds in Russian, avoiding a smelly homeless person on the Metro or explaining to yet another person that I can’t understand them. Being a good big brother I spent 30 minutes or so looking unusually odd, photographing for William’s uni project.
Well they’re back, and just when you thought they couldn’t get any better. This time its a succulent roast, perfect mashed potato and a refreshing tomato salad. This applies a few new tricks in kitchen chemistry I recently learnt, so even if you’re an old hand this could be new information. The bottom line; best pork roast I’ve had.
Puritans, skip to the next article. Ignoramuses, keep chewing on your mouse mats.
These fantastic espresso vending machines grace the hallways of most supermarkets and shopping malls here in Kiev. For $0.50 you get an espresso that, while being pretty ordinary, is actually great value when compared with the $3.50 disgrace you’d expect to receive at Coffee Club or Starbucks. And, aside from operating only in Russian, it offers better service than many of it’s brick-and-mortar competitors.
Just think, how many “coffee” franchise stores could be replaced by $0.50 vending machine? We can only live in hope.
Apparently there has been a revolution in Ukraine. Well, not so much a revolution but more like a lot people getting really passionate about Ukrainian nationalism. The poisoned Presidential candidate triumphed over the KGB’s best efforts and won the people’s backing. However, they subsequently voted a Russian-backed candidate for Prime Minister into office; the President’s nemesis became a strange bedfellow. Perhaps then it was more like a lot of people embracing democratic process; process and really colourful banners. Next the Prime Minister bought-off half of Parliament so the President called a snap election; the Prime Minister got the boot. Maybe it was all really just an excuse to skip work and camp-out on some prime Kiev real-estate. Not exactly the stuff that inspires confidence in national leadership. Perhaps this explains why of the 178 countries recently profiled in the Doing Business 2008 report (World Bank) Ukraine arrived 177th worst tax paying country; no tip jar for the President this year.
Pork, potato; potato, pork. That’s about it. Or is it?
Like it or not, with the approach of the winter comes the departure of a wide range of ingredients in Ukraine, except pork and potato. So I have decided that it would be wise to keep a log of successful creations that require not much more than the two columns of soviet cuisine.
Today its pork and potato bake.
As far a cuisine goes, Ukraine missed the boat. There are however a few redeeming factors, bread being one of them. Fortunately, it would seem that they haven’t figured out how to screw up great tasting bread with the aide of modern technology such as preservatives and emulsifiers. The bread we usually get here is the Baton (a white loaf) and Ukrainian Style (the round, dark rye loaf). It is the kind of bread you can eat on it’s own, or with butter, day after day. This is due largely, I assume, to the use of sour dough technique which yields a far tastier bread then any found wrapped in plastic in Australia. It costs no more than 25-50 cents per loaf.