Ode to the Food

The food is always an exciting part of a new culture.  We have our meals here at the school prepared by the cafeteria cooks, and boy, is it  . . . interesting :)

We all slept in pretty late the first morning we were here.  Someone brought in breakfast for us and set it on the piano.  (And Sister Linde taught me that the piano is allergic to all foods and drinks!).  Those are some sort of little meat-filled potato fried things that we decided would be better with ketchup.  And the jug is this tea stuff that they serve all the time.  There are variations: the red berry kind, one that one of the other teachers says smells like a bonfire, and a few others.  I think at least some of them are herbal and maybe okay to drink . . . ???  But they all seem gross, so we often end up dumping them out.  Maybe we should just try and find a way to communicate with the Russian-speaking kitchen ladies that they don't need to keep giving us jugs of their strange tea. 

Here is one of the lunches they served us teachers before the students arrived.  They seem to be pretty big on sour cream and mayonnaise (or some variation) here.  The sunflower bag thing was I think some type of mayonnaise that was pretty good on the brown bread that they serve all the time.  Sometimes it's kind of a guessing game as to what we're eating.  I think that may be some sort of barley?  With a patty of ground up chicken maybe?  The fresh tomatoes were nice.  Way better than the gross cooked ones they serve sometimes. 

Here is a meal we got once the students had arrived.  Note the fancy double-plate place setting.  Also note the red borshe soup, a very traditional Ukrainian dish.  It's pretty good, at least, I consider it one of the better things they serve here.  In fact, this is probably one of my favorite meals.  Borshe, real chicken (not all ground up suspiciously) sort of fried in egg (one girl said "it's like they were going to make French Toast, and then used chicken instead of bread"), and a weird mashed up side of ??? I think there are carrots and egg in there . . . it's pretty good with the bread. 

So, the way meals work here is as follows:  we have breakfast at 9:00.  Sometimes they serve something soupyish, sort of cream-of-wheat/oatmeal-like but sweeter.  Sometimes it's a plate of barley and pumpkin paste.  The grossest thing they serve, though, is this stuff thats like a chunck of sour milk ( I don't know, maybe that's what it is.), or some sort of cream cheese mixed with cottage cheese.   It comes in many forms: as chuncks, as crepe filling, in a breakfast casserole.  After our lessons, lunch (I think they call it dinner here) is served at 2:00.  That's the main meal.  Usually there is some kind of soup (often a broth with potatoes and other stuff . . . sometimes chunks of eggs or pickles are included in the soup), and a plate of  . . . something.  The pictures above should give a general idea.  Dinner (or supper) is at 6:00 and is like a lighter version of lunch.  It doesn't usually come with soup.Sometimes it's sort of crock-pot-ish, chuncks of potato and meat.  Last night we had rice with a brothy sauce that I thought was pretty good, and chuncks of meat that was a little strange.  One girl eventually concluded it must be liver.  I'll believe it.    There is a second lunch and also a second dinner, so between lunch and dinner we can go get an apple and cracker-cookie thing, but usually we forget, so at dinner they give us bags of both second meals, and sometimes we eat them all right there.  Basically like eating three meals at once, if you count a banana and a strange, poppy-seed filled roll as a meal.  Or we take the bags back to our rooms and snack on them later.  Things like the poppy-seed rolls sit around for quite a while.

Perhaps I shouldn't judge Ukrainian food based on the cafeteria-style meals we always eat.  We have been out a couple times.  There are some places to get pizza (still, it's kind of different), and there are plenty of McDonald's in Kyiv (people love McDonald's here.  The kids seem to think it's the best place in the world.  They do seem like upper-class restaraunts here, much nicer than in the U.S., with a separate little counter for the McCafe items.  We did go to a more Ukrainian sort of restaraunt and I do think the food was somewhat better.  All the same, I am really looking forward to barbecues, anything Mom makes, really just any normal American food when I get back.