Inch By Inch

I'm making progress, slowly but surely. I had to rip out about an inch when I discovered that I'd gotten thrown off the color sequence. Two colors are close enough that when viewed in dim rooms, one can be mistaken for other. So I'm thankful for my Ott-Light lamp that I keep by my bedside on the floor. I'd like to put it on my little sidetable, but right now there's, ahem, quite a bit of clutter on top of it so the floor it is. Umm . . . that tells me something - I need to clear it off so that I can make room for it. And start dreaming about an elegant sidetable that will go well with the elegant mahogany bed that will be paid for by that $350mil lottery winnings that so rightfully belong to us.

This past weekend I tried an recipe for blini. This is a Russian dish, much like crepes on which you put melted butter, sour cream, chives, smoked fish, caviar, honey, maple syrup, whatever you can think of that will taste good with the blini. You can even use jam to satisfy your sweet tooth. I looked through my cookbooks for a recipe.

It's really unbelievable how there are so many recipes out there. Some are overkill - you include sour cream in the batter - can you say heart attack in the making? Some require the batter to be raised 3 times, taking 5 or 6 hours (do you really want to make your children wait that long to be fed?); some use only white flour, and others use only buckwheat flour (now, that's an adventure in its own. You won't find it at the regular grocery store; you got to go over to Whole Foods and elbow your way through the crowd of yuppies, some who seem to be perpetually in a foul mood).

But finally, I settled on a simple recipe from "Food for Paradise", a cookbook compiled by The Orthodox Church of Saint John the Russian. This is a great cookbook for those who keep the fast, such as the Great Lent, which starts this week for us Orthodox Christians. There's a chapter for festive foods, and I found the recipe in here. So, here's the recipe, in my own words:

I should notice that the amount of sugar was inadvertedly left out, so I took a look at other recipes and made a guess based on the proportions.

Blini

1 package dry yeast (or, 2 1/2 tablespoon if you have a jar of yeast)
1 c milk
3 egg yolks
6 tbl melted butter
1/2 c warm water (about 110F)
1 1/2 c flour
1/2 tsp salt
3 tsp sugar
3 egg whites

You can either use all white, or all buckwheat, flour. The suggested proportion if you want to use white and buckwheat is 2/3 white and 1/3 buckwheat (hmm, recipe says 1 1/2 c flour; the proportion adds up to 1 c - I guess you'll have to tinker around with this). Preheat the oven and keep on warm; put in a platter that is oven-safe and put foil on top as you will be covering the blini as you put in the cooked ones on the platter.

Dissolve yeast in warm water and let stand for 5 minutes. Mix yeast, milk, flour, yolks, sugar, and melted butter in a bowl, using a mixer. Pour into another bowl and let rise for about 2 hours (make sure there's plenty of room in bowl; it will nearly double in size). Beat egg whites until stiff and fold into batter. Heat up a griddle (cast iron pan if you're fortunate to have one) and brush melted butter, or vegetable oil. Drop the batter (you can go from dollar size if you are intending to serve these as appetizer, or go up to regular pancake or crepe size). Turn over when side is lightly browned and brown the other side as well.

It's very easy to double, or even triple, this recipe. Serve with fixings that I've described above. Yummy!!! The batter keeps very well in the refrigerator and I've been told that blinis freeze well, too. So, I'm going to cook up the rest of the batter, wrap these up and put into the freezer. This is going to be a regular family dish, perfect for a quick dinner (and perfect as well for on the Aga stove).