Mushrooms are a big part of Russian cuisine, they are plentiful in milder climates and many people are experienced mushroom pickers. Mushrooms can be easily preserved by drying, marinating, canning or whatever else people do to store them and that makes them available year round. I like mushrooms in soups, fried, sauteed, marinated, in stews, in salads, etc. Like Pavlov’s dog I buy every jar of mushrooms I see in front of me, most of the time just to be disappointed because someone just decided to drown them in vinegar and make them inedible. Most of the local grocery stores sell regular white mushrooms or champignones. For a better variety of canned mushrooms you need to head to your local Asian store. There you’ll find a whole aisle filled with cans of exotic mushrooms. Yesterday I picked up a large can of straw mushrooms at the 888 Market in Overland Park.
Straw mushrooms have a more rubbery, chewy texture, I usually like them peeled, although some sources say that they are better and more nutritious unpeeled.
When buying and eating mushrooms you need to decide for yourself if you trust underpaid Chinese children to pick the right mushrooms for you. This blog will not be responsible for your untimely death from mushroom poisoning to which there is no antidote.
This giant can cost me six dollars. The mushrooms are packed in slightly salted water which is pretty much tasteless. First thing to do after opening the can is to drain the water.
After the water is drained the mushrooms look like this.
For this recipe you will need onions, garlic, black peppercorns, bay leaf if you have it, salt, oil and vinegar.
Slice the onions and peel the garlic, put as much as you feel like – you cannot over-onion this recipe. Then put your ingredients in the jar. You can do it in layers or not, especially if you are not taking pictures.
In retrospect, a better idea would be to mix it up before putting it in the jar. Oh well. The marinade is not supposed to be over salted or too acidic. That’s why I am not giving any measurements, adjust it to your own taste by mixing salt, oil and vinegar. It should be slightly more vinegary than you’d like because the taste of vinegar weakens a little bit. Do not try to be Rachel Ray – olive oil solidifies in the fridge and I cannot guarantee the result with any specialty vinegar. Regular corn or vegetable oil and plain white vinegar will do just fine.
You are done. The marinade should cover the mushrooms.
Do not hesitate to try the mushrooms and see if you like the taste. If not, add more of whatever is missing, usually salt or vinegar.
Leave in the refrigerator for few hours or overnight. Then add as a condiment to any dinner, for example, freshly cooked BBQ riblets.
The Holocaust Remembrance day falls on May 2 this year and in the few following posts I will publish several documents concerning the treatment of the Jewish population in my hometown of Odessa, Ukraine issued by the Romanian Authority which occupied Odessa from 1941-1944.
At the beginning of the occupation there were 80,000-90,000 Jews who did not evacuate from Odessa. When the city was liberated on April 10, 1944 there were reportedly only 600 left. Somewhere in the Odessa Region my 6-year old Father survived in the ghetto with help from kind people and lots of luck. The area where he lived with my Grandmother was occupied by the Italians who were not very enthusiastic about being in the war and their relative reluctance to torture and execute the Jews might have resulted in more survivors than in the areas controlled by Romanians who proved themselves to be ruthless murderers.
Many places in Odessa and the Region have memorial markers where the executions were conducted, such as a place where over 25,000 Jews were burned alive shortly after the occupation started. Unfortunately, I never stopped or paid attention to them, probably like most people. I saw more memorial markers today, while researching this post, than I remember seeing when I still lived in Odessa.
The Russian text is found in the National Archives of the Odessa Region, translation mine. If I have time and patience I will also try to translate a personal memoir written by a survivor; translation is a long and tedious process, and even though I start with a machine translation, it still doesn’t always come out right. Feel free to let me know if I can correct some grammar or spelling errors.
Recent post by Scott Adams described his vision for the future of public transportation in the new economy.
Suppose the government enacted laws that made it legal for anyone to be a taxi driver in his own car without a special taxi license. And suppose the income was non-taxable. The result would be cheap taxis and high availability. Every time you wanted to run an errand, and had an extra minute, you could choose to pick up a rider and cut your own driving expense in half. Technology will make it easy to match amateur taxi drivers with riders. And the market would keep prices low.
This is very similar to the system that existed for years (and still alive an well) in the USSR and countries that followed it. In addition to pretty well developed system of public transportation and state-owned taxis, a person could just stand on the street, raise a hand and flag down a private car. Both sides benefited equally: a passenger received a semic0mfortable ride for a price comparable to a cab (general price/distance ratio was common knowledge) and a driver made some extra money without making any extra effort. Some people liked it so much that they made it into a part-time job. Others just picked up passengers on the way home or wherever.
Imagine yourself standing somewhere on the Lenin Street (each city had one of these), you raise your hand and soon one of these beauties stops to pick you up:
Soviet Union had its own “Big 3”: GAZ, AutoVAZ, and AZLK; ZAZ in Ukraine produced some of the ugliest and the most unreliable even by the Soviet standards vehicles. Due to the shortage of cars and years-long waiting lists people were happy to get anything with wheels. Sometimes, when at the end of the month autoworkers were rushing to fulfil quotas so they can get their bonus, a lucky buyer would find a bucket of uninstalled parts inside his new vehicle. Despite these cars being 20-30 behind the rest of the automotive world when they came off assembly line, many of them are still on the road closing in on 40 years. Soviet people invented ingenious ways of keeping them going and they turned out relatively easy to fix and maintain.
