Ukrainian Pelmeni (Украйнские Пельмени)

Must be served with sour cream. Can also be served with vinegar in the Siberian tradition.

I remember  the first time I arrived in St. Petersburg almost four years ago now. Armed with a scant knowledge of Russian and the great ability to point, I was able to order one of my first meals without too much of a hitch — pelmeni. It was served to me in a pool of butter and topped with sour cream, and it was love at first bite. Pelmeni are essentially just a meaty, Russian dumpling, and they’re a staple. You can find hundreds of different pelmeni manufacturers, and most Russian stores have a section dedicated to frozen pelmeni. However, you can only find pelmeni in specialized Russian stores here in the US, and my life has been depressingly lacking in Russian dumplings ever since I returned from the motherland two years ago.

One of my friends from work, Tanya, and I have been talking about getting together to make pelmeni for a few months now. Tanya grew up in Ukraine, and I love Eastern European food, so we both wanted to try to make some hearty dishes from the motherland. Life (aka graduate school) kept getting in the way, and I couldn’t dedicate the hours it took to make pelmeni. Pelmeni making is a pretty time consuming process. With two of us working together, it took a little over two hours to make about 180 pelmeni. So worth it though, because they are stored in the freezer and can last a while. Well, that is if I don’t finish them off in a few days. I love pelmeni.

Healthy Truffles

Mmm chocolate balls.

After my failure with black bean brownies, I took a hiatus from incorporating weird ingredients into my desserts. I gave the black bean brownies to a couple of my co-workers, and after a few bites, they affirmed that the brownies tasted like chocolate beans. Fail. 

I had a few avocados that were very ripe though, and I needed to use them. I wasn’t in the mood for a heaping mound of guacamole, and I’ve been seeing avocado brownies, cakes, and whatnot popping up on foodgawker. It has been a few months since the black bean brownie fiasco, and I thought I’d give the weird ingredient desserts just one more try.

Oatmeal Peach-Apricot Jam Bars

Oat-y

I try to keep within the theme of healthy eating/baking, but that can be hard. There are many successful food bloggers out there that can produce clean, healthy recipes all the time — I’m still striving towards that, but I haven’t gotten there quite yet. One of the biggest obstacles to healthy eating is the cost of all the ingredients. A bag of sugar is about 3 times less than a bag of stevia, at least in my grocery store. Gluten free alternative flours are prohibitively expensive. Yeah, yeah, I know, it’s worth it, but it’s also can be hard to justify when money is tight. I also don’t have many baking appliances (someone please get me a food processor and an electric mixer, I beg of you), which limits a lot of desserts that involve using dates as a sweetener. Working on a paltry graduate school budget, I do what I can.

Really Ugly Protein Granola Bars

Poop.

Or in other words, how I messed up a recipe, but sort of salvaged it. Sort of. God, it’s a hideous granola bar.

So many things went wrong in making these granola bars. First, I ran out of honey, so I tried to make do with only 1/3 cup of honey. No good, the mixture was too dry and crumbly. I tried to salvage it by adding more melted peanut butter.  Still too crumbly. Then, I tried to make an elegant chocolate drizzle, which ended up looking like elegant chocolate turds. Finally, I cut into them while they were still too cold, and they ended up disintegrating everywhere.

But I still ate them, and they taste really good, so that’s what counts, right? I’ll console myself by eating the crumbs.

Turkey Eggplant Parmesan Lasagna

Stacks on stacks on stacks

Finals are over! Commence the weekend-long bender. Joking, all I did after completing my last final was crash at home and take a long, satisfying nap. All I’m really looking forward to this break is sleeping, cooking, reading, and completing my transformation into an old, boring grandmother.

Yesterday, my roommate and I had our former roommates over for a mini reunion. Since my former roommates are three dudes, I needed to make something that could feed a pack of hungry animals. I tried to keep it relatively healthy, and with each serving coming in at 380 calories, it’s not too terrible! Whether or not you can stop at only one serving, that’s another issue.

Glazed Gingerbread Cookies

Full of Christmas cheer

These were the second batch of cookies that I brought to the cookie exchange, and they went over pretty well. Honestly, gingerbread isn’t my favorite, but it’s a traditional holiday cookie, so I had to oblige. Going with the theme of my blog, I didn’t want a cookie that was laden with butter. So I searched for low fat ginger bread cookies. I found this recipe from Skinny taste, and adapted it slightly.

Fact — these cookies need frosting. Absolutely 100% needs some sort of frosting. On their own, they’re kind of dry, and eating dry cookies is on par with eating sand…with hidden shards of glass. So I made a very simple glaze to add to them. The glaze only adds about 1.5 grams of sugar and 10 calories to the cookies, and they clock in at about 85 calories per cookie.

Russian tea cakes

From Russia with love.

Jingle bells, batman smells, Robin laid an egg. It’s that time of the year. That time of the year when you bust out the ugly Christmas sweaters for ironic ugly Christmas sweater parties, cookie exchanges, gift giving, holiday cheer, etc. etc. When you gather around the fire place or Christmas tree, open a ton of presents while dressed only in matching footie pajamas, and are filled to the brim with that warm, fuzzy feeling.

Fact: I didn’t grow up celebrating Christmas, and I still don’t really celebrate it. I partake in the cookie exchanges (read: cookie eating), and buy trinkets sometimes, but that’s about the extent of it. It’s not a traditional Vietnamese holiday, so my parents didn’t really know how to celebrate, nor did they want to. I remember they tried to celebrate once when I was in kindergarten or first grade– they put up stockings, and in each stocking, they put in a one dollar bill. I was so excited. A one dollar bill! A Christmas stocking with my name on it!! I then proceeded to go back to school after the break and boast to my schoolmates about the awesome present that Santa gave me. I had the misfortune of attending a snooty private school, so all of the rich kids made fun of me for my humble present. My parents refused to partake in the annual tradition of spoiling us with expensive gifts the way that the other parents at the private school did, so the Christmas tradition sort of died after that. At least we have Vietnamese New Year — we get envelopes full of money!

Super Breakfast Cookies

Fibrous.

I am by nature a morning person, and I almost always do my workouts in the morning. I find that it’s good to eat something before I workout, but I usually don’t want anything too heavy or filling, because that’ll be sitting in my stomach while I row, bike, lift, etc. For the most part, I have relied on granola bars, but constantly buying packaged granola bars is an expensive habit. What I was looking for was something that was light but would give me energy. Thus, my quest to make a breakfast cookie.

Peanut Soba Noodles

Easy, weeknight dinner.

I have a weak spot in my heart for terrible, Americanized Asian food. I grew up on Panda express, and just absolutely loved the pungent, greasy, fatty fried chickens tossed with some sort of canned, wilted vegetables. Panda Express’s cuisine hails from the giant country of Asia, and it’s delicious. I slowly weaned myself off their faux-Asian fare, since the combination of MSG and heart failure-inducing ingredients isn’t good for you. Panda Express, I’ll never forget you though. XOXO.

To this day, sometimes all I want is ambiguous asian food, not authentic Thai, Vietnamese, Chinese, etc. That’s where this dish comes in. It doesn’t claim to be anything authentic, but it’s sure delicious as hell, and as an added bonus, it’s relatively healthy. Not to mention that it comes together pretty quickly — all together, a sensible choice for a weeknight meal.

Broccoli Mushroom Turkey Bacon Carbonara

Almost as easy as making ramen.

It’s been a rough day. Since the moment I got up I’ve been working on a final paper (a fictitious memo on preventing corruption in Russia immediately after the fall of the Soviet Union, in case you were wondering. No, it’s not a fascinating topic) and cramming a semester full of knowledge for another one of my finals that’s coming up next week. My other two finals I haven’t even gotten to yet. I also had to do some assessments for the last stages of a job interview, and so aside from going to yoga today and making lunch, I’ve been pretty much tied to my computer all day. Good thing I made an extra batch of peanut butter rice krispy treats last night, because I’ve been fueling on those all day long. This is why I gain weight in the winter.