There are exactly three things to do in Hutchinson, unless you count going to the mall as a thing to do – Cosmosphere, Kansas Underground Salt Museum and watching the prairie dogs. Both museums are excellent, probably among the best in Midwest, but it’s the prairie dogs who put everything in perspective.

Prairie dogs represent the eternity.

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The shortest route from Kansas City to Memphis is via Springfield, MO and rural Arkansas where highway is controlled by the roaming gangs of deer who stand around the road contemplating if they will let you live. I wouldn’t recommend driving there in the dark.

I didn’t want to go to Memphis. Even though I learned English trying to sing along with Elvis (and that’s why people often ask me if I am from Tupelo),  I didn’t feel the need to visit his house and other Memphis attractions didn’t really seem worthy of a fairly boring 8-hour drive. Usually we try to see things along the way, but there wasn’t much to see and the only memorable item was a town called Cabool, mostly because of how out-of-place the name seemed somewhere in rural Missouri.

Memphis turned out to be a fun place for a weekend trip, with enough things to keep you busy for a few days.

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If you are a long-time follower of this blog, I am sure you already know that today is the day to fly your red flag to celebrate another anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution – a holiday no longer celebrated in Russia where people for some reason blame it for 70 years of crappy life. I am not going to repeat my previous posts on the subject, so this year we will celebrate with another batch of old photos taken at the Moscow’s Red Square on this day in 1962.

On this photo we see the current leadership of the USSR – Comrade Khrushchev is the 5th from the right next to Comrade Brezhnev. In a few years, acting exclusively in the interest of saving Comrade Khrushchev’s health Comrade Brezhnev will replace him while he will be away on vacation.

These people are happy, just imagine their faces when they are not.

Remember spending some quality time in a bomb shelter? That’s why…

Vostok-4.

 

The rest of the photos is here.

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Say you foolishly participated in a weight challenge and now look like a sad sack of skin and bones, or maybe you just feeling a few pounds short of your ideal weight or, perhaps, you just love ice cream. Well, you are in the right place, I’ll have your weight problems corrected and your ice cream cravings satisfied without much effort, expense or experience ( this is what we call “alliteration” in the business).

This recipe comes to us via Russian bloggers in Israel, who saw it in some Israeli magazine, which, in turn, took it from Jamie Oliver, who based it on an Indian dessert called kulfi. After various translations not only from three or four different languages but from left-to-right to right-to-left I don’t think it can be called “kulfi” any longer, so we’ll just call it ice cream. This recipe does not require any special ice cream-making machinery or weird tools, no ice-salt mixtures or whatever else you remember from your long-gone childhood on the farm (everyone knows you made it up anyway); you’ll need a blender and a mixer or something that will do blending, mixing and whipping.
The ingredients: one can of sweetened condensed (not evaporated) milk, 2 cups of cream, fruit of fruit pulp of your choice.
No, this this not a pigeon egg, it’s actually an extra-large egg that I used to demonstrate the size of this Chernobyl-bred strawberry.

I also used pineapple.

Load both into a blender and turn into pulp. You may need a splash of liquid to get the process started, I used some mango juice because it’s good for you.

Add the whole can of evaporated milk (it does your body good, so don’t be skimpy, it’s your body we are talking about here):

It should look like this:

Place into a freezer for 30 minutes to 1 hour until it starts to freeze up on top. Fight the desire to drink it all right away. In the meantime whip about 2 cups of cream (not half-and-half or who knows what) until it looks like whipped cream.

Mix in with the fruit-milk concoction from the freezer:

Back to the freezer it goes for another 6 hours or overnight. You can be creative and make popsicles out of it or make layers or draw Sponge Bob on it, I’ll be eating mine while you playing with your food.
You shouldn’t feel guilty about eating it at all: it has multiple servings of fruit, milk (for strong healthy bones), no fillers, paint, preservatives and it’s probably low-fat, just take my word for it, and every word I say must be true because I have a European accent.
Happy ice cream-making.

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When my Mom asked me what I am doing on Saturday night and I replied that I was baking pumpkin rolls, she thought it was a sad way to spend a night off. In reality, baking with real pumpkin is lot like having sex: there is a lot of foreplay and then there is an intense but short-lived moment of pleasure, followed by desire to do it again and a feeling of being too worn out to start over. As a matter of fact, I feel completely beat and sleepy after wrestling with this for nearly 3 hours, my kitchen is a mess and if I had a cigarette I would’ve lit it up just about now.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RMdMDW_C_nk

I think the second most vicious food crime against the American people after the invention of the sliced bread was the proliferation of canned pumpkin. Nearly every American family buys one or more pumpkins every year, pokes some holes in them and leaves them out to rot on the front porch, just to turn around and go to the grocery store to procure baby-stool-like substance, both in color and consistency, to use in various disgusting recipes. The sad thing is that this stuff really doesn’t taste like pumpkin but since no one knows what the real pumpkin tastes like, everyone identifies it as a pumpkin taste. Well, it’s not. Pumpkin is normally bright orange and sweet-tasting, not medium brown and spiced. Some information on edible pumpkins can be found here and here.

Some notes on the pumpkin handling: it’s not easy. You have to have a decent knife and be careful not to hurt yourself. Don’t  pour  blood all over your keyboard typing me an angry letter, because I warned you. After trying to separate the flesh from the skin cantaloupe-style I had much better luck turning it over and just peeling the skin off. I also found out that shredding the pumpkin with a grater is a long and tedious process much better handled by a food processor. Other than that you don’t have any excuse to trade a sweet pumpkin orgasm for a can of brown crap.

For this recipe you’ll need:

5 egg yolks;
1 3/4 sticks of margarine or butter;
1.5 cups of sugar;
5 tbsp of non-fragrant oil i.e. – corn oil;
1 8oz package of sour cream;
1 tsp vanilla;
1/2 tsp of baking soda and some vinegar;
5+ cups of all-purpose flour;
pinch of salt;
1 average pie pumpkin shredded and a little bit of sugar to sweeten;

Melt the margarine and combine with egg yolks, sour cream, vanilla, sugar and oil. Over the flour place 1/2 teaspoon of baking soda in a larger spoon and pour a small amount of vinegar so it reacts. Make sure that all of the soda is gone in the reaction and combine the flour with liquid mixture. Add salt. Start lightly kneading the dough adding flour as needed until the oily sheen is gone and the dough springs back if you push it with the finger. Cut into six parts. Roll out each part into elliptical shape, add sweetened pumpkin and roll over several times. When adding pumpkin, squeeze it lightly to leave most of the juice out. Bake at 350F for 30-50 minutes until golden brown.

*Note: this is what I wrote down when my Mom gave me the recipe. Since it didn’t come out the way I expected, I took a roll to her for troubleshooting. Apparently I was kneading too hard and didn’t add enough flour. As you can see, my dough was still shiny but I was afraid I used too much flour and lost patience. My Mom confirmed that the recipe was correct and in my defense it tastes great, just slightly heavier than I expected since it didn’t roll out thin enough. Try at your own risk. I am pretty sure that my Mom doesn’t own measuring spoons or cups, so I was using regular drinking cups and table spoons for this recipe.
The important thing is that the great pumpkin taste I remembered from my childhood was there and that’s what I wanted to achieve in the first place.

If you are feeling lonely on a Saturday night, get yourself a pumpkin, it will wear you out but you will feel good about it in the morning.

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