Appetizers

To go with the Moscow Rules series of restaurant reports that I’ve recently started, I intend to create recipes that are directly inspired by or adapted from the dishes I ate during…

I’ve been wanting to make crab rillettes for quite some time now. The idea sprung from a dish I tried at Michael Mina’s late RN74 in San Francisco back in 2015: Dungeness crab…

After all my years of trying them at restaurants and reporting on them in these pages, I sure hope you know what pelmeni are. One of Russian cuisine’s most famous dishes, eaten…

As winter officially comes to an end, this recipe will take us back a few months, when I found inspiration from two separate experiences. First, while vacationing in Mont-Tremblant, Quebec, I had…

Spring has now sprung in earnest, but tell me, what foods can possibly mark the beginning of spring in a world where you can buy bad strawberries all year round, and even the…

The last entry in my series of national dishes was Kazakhstan’s beshbarmak. This time, we’re hopping to the Baltic to try Latvian piragi. Naming a single national dish for a whole country is a…

Right. It’s the middle of the summer, 30 degrees outside (we’re using the metric system here, remember?), and here I am with my recipe for goulash, blood sausage, and foie gras, like…

As I wrote a couple years ago, fishing the Salmon River in autumn can be pretty hectic. Thousands of fishermen, many of them about as clueless as me, crowd the river bed,…

Despite my efforts to create original recipes, the most popular post on this blog remains Blini and Oladi, Russian Pancakes. Not exactly the most innovative dish, one must admit. But I guess I’ve got…

Here’s a bite-sized dish to kick-off the holiday season in style! This very Russian combination seamlessly mixes poor and rich man’s ingredients, with potato and brains on one hand, and king crab and sturgeon…