TODAY: Adventures in Ukrainian cooking + Attempting to attend Mass!
I wanted to attend Mass at the Catholic cathedral in Vinnytsia, which is across the street from the Orthodox Cathedral.
It turned out to be a Latin Rite Catholic Church, and a Franciscan one, no less! (Hence the Franciscan cross and the mural depicting St. Francis)
Being that I entered the church a little after 10 AM last week and found Mass ending, I decided to get there by 9 AM.
I successfully did so, but it turned out that I had a good half hour to wait and listen to the babushkas sing. And oh, how many babushkas there were!
Mass began. As it went on, though, I grew increasingly perplexed. It seemed I couldn't understand A SINGLE WORD of what was going on. Now I know my Russian's not the best, but being that this was the exact same Mass we have back home, I knew from the set text that I *should* be understanding at least a few words here and there. But no... not a one. Only Бог (Bohg) for God... that was it. Not a Hospody Pomiluy (or Gospody, for that matter!) in sight. I wondered fleetingly... what other language could it possibly be? The only other that I could even conceive of it being was Polish, since I knew a lot of people in Western Ukraine, in L'viv anyway, spoke Polish as it had been part of Poland at one time. But here in Vinnytsia, that wouldn't make sense, right? and so I decided it must just be in Russian, and I was just worse at it than I thought.
Later, when I met up with Tanya, she asked me if I'd made it to Mass and I told her yes. Then she asked me, "Was it in Polish?"
...
I mean, how many languages am I gonna have to learn to get by here!? Hahahaha.... guess I'll have to track down a Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church.
Anyway, in the afternoon Tanya came over to teach me how to cook some Ukrainian food, so that I might not starve. It's not that the food available is so *different,* per se, it's just that it's available in much different proportions than I'm used to. In terms of meat, they mostly eat pork; I was forced to confess that I have very little idea of how to prepare pork, so Tanya taught me to make two dishes using it.
We started with a stewed cabbage dish. Once I saw the finished product, I realized I'd eaten it quite often at the English Summer School where I taught in 2010. This dish is pretty versatile-- you can put in just about any veggies you have around. Tanya brought cabbage, as well as a huge carrot and onions. We cooked the cabbage and added the other veggies once they'd been sauteed to make them sweet. Then, we fried up some pieces of pork and added them in as well.
It was a fun challenge with the limited amenities offered by my pre-furnished apartment: a set of really dull knives, one dutch oven, one frying pan, and one oven pan. But we made do.
Tanya also brought a really tasty Armenian sauce to put on it. We added the sauce and let it cook for a while, so that the cabbage became soft and the whole mixture took on the texture of coleslaw, or relish.
The other way to prepare pork was, she said, called "French Style" although there wasn't really anything French about it. That was kind of immaterial, though, since it was delicious. Basically we took the defrosted pieces of pork and beat the heck out of them with a meat tenderizer. Once they were tender and flat, we put them on the oven tray. Then we sprinkled them with salt and pepper, spread Mayonnaise on them, and topped them with onions, mushrooms, and cheese.
Before cooking:
And after:
Our cooking complete, I sat down at my newly-clothed table...
And enjoyed the delicious meal!
Смачного!
