Homemade

When I was a little kid, eating fast food or getting pizza was a big deal. We only got to stop at McDonald’s or eat pizza if it was a special occasion—usually when we were travelling to visit relatives for Christmas. We lived too far away from any fast food restaurant to visit there regularly and no pizza company was going to drive 40 minutes down dusty gravel back-roads to deliver us a hot pizza.

As such, we were usually travelling and in a bit of a hurry when we stopped in at a McDonald’s and it was always a super exciting experience for us kids. I still remember exactly what the lower edge of a McDonald’s counter looked like when standing there, peering up, all of three and a half feet tall, waiting for my mom to order my Chicken McNuggets Happy Meal. Did you ever notice the strip of lights they have under there?? As much fun as it was for us to open up those little boxes and play with our new toys, my parents had less patience for our picky eating preferences. I always wanted my cheeseburgers plain—to this day I’m not a big fan of mustard and ketchup mixed together. And I hated the little chopped onions and the pickles that flavored the bun so much that no amount of wiping off with a napkin (my parents’ suggested solution) would do. Just cheese and meat, thank you very much. And if I were getting the Chicken McNuggets Happy Meal, I wanted extra, extra sweet and sour sauce for those juicy little suckers.

My parents would always get frustrated with my reluctance to eat the cheeseburger as it was meant to be ordered. The kitchen staff would have to make a special cheeseburger just for me and there were already dozens of regular cheeseburgers already made…why couldn’t I just wipe the extra stuff off on a napkin?

At home I wasn’t a terribly picky eater, but there were a few things I just couldn’t do. I hated American cheese, bologna, and mayonnaise (my mother, whose favorite food in the world, next to a Sloppy Joe,  is probably a bologna sandwich on white bread, accused me of being un-American), I wasn’t a big fan of the goopy texture of tomatoes, and I didn’t like excess butter on anything. The only other thing I simply couldn’t stand was eating fatty meat right off the bone. When I would happily proclaim “done! Can I be excused?” at what appeared to me to be the end of a meal, my dad would take a look at the chicken leg I’d been picking at and tell me under no uncertain terms that I was not, in fact, finished. There was “still plenty of meat” on my chicken bone and I needed to finish my meal before I could leave the table. Gristle, skin, bones, anything reddish and suggestive of blood, and lumps of fat were just beyond me—I didn’t like my meat to remind me of the animal that it had come from. I preferred my meat in clean white, sanitary, pre-cut pieces. While my dad and brothers would eat chicken wings clean to the bone, leaving just the skeletal remains (I once saw one of my brothers snap a bone in half to suck the marrow out, he was so sorry to be done with the chicken wings), I avoided wings altogether because there was just so little meat and so much bone and stuff that it didn’t seem worth it to pick around for the meat.

For several years I was a vegetarian, which made the whole thing picking-meat-off-the-bones thing easy to deal with—I just didn’t eat any of it. And then by the time I started eating meat again, I was living on my own, so I was free to buy all the boneless, skinless chicken breast I wanted. Before Ukraine, I don’t think I’d ever bought a cut of meat other than a chicken breast and maybe the occasional package of deli meat and ground beef, and those last two are quite obviously not “cuts” of meat.

I suspected, though, that once I got to Ukraine, I’d have to get used to eating my meat a little bit on the fresher, more genuine side. Sure enough, while living with my host mom during training, I was served more than one chicken leg with globby, fatty skin and plenty of gristle to work my way through. I wanted to be a good host daughter and so I got over my issues with the less-than-appetizing bits and pieces of meat that found their way onto my plate—up to and including a chicken foot, which I am extremely proud to say I picked the meat right off.

Back on my own again, though, I don’t generally buy a lot of meat and I still don’t cook with much other than your standard boneless chicken breast. And although I hardly ever ate McDonald’s or Taco Bell at home, I’ve realized being here how much “fast food” I actually ate. From the pre-packaged, ready-to-go chicken breasts to the frozen dinners to the boxes of “instant” insert whatever you want to eat in an instant here, I hardly ever really cooked. Not Julia Child, need a cookbook, cooking, anyway. Sure, I prepared meals. But I didn’t actually know how to actually make anything except for maybe a really basic white sauce for pasta. Most of the things I made just required being put together. Even my most exotic, special-occasion dishes came from boxes or bags: Cous-cous? Boxed. Butternut squash bisque? Thank you, Campbells Deluxe soup-in-a-carton. Rice? Almost instant, from a box. Oatmeal? Well, that’s not even a special-occasion food. But regardless, boxed and instant.

These days, I’m in much less of a hurry when I cook. I’ve certainly got more than an instant to put my meals together.  And it’s a good thing I’ve got the time on my hands, because it’s a lot harder to pick up ready-to-eat foods here in Ukraine.  No self-respecting Ukrainian would ever buy soup in a can. Granted, you can buy these dehydrated instant-soup bricks, but they’re pretty unappetizing. Besides, “fast food,” unless you count the stands in the bazaar and at bus stations that sell deep-fried dough filled with cabbage, potatoes, and other Ukrainian staples, is fairly hard to come by. The nearest McDonald’s is a five-hour bus ride away.

There have been a few times when, lazy and completely uninspired, I’ve eaten meals of pickles and bread for dinner, but lately I’ve been trying to make a very concerted effort to make real meals. That means looking up recipes and flipping through my “Babusya’s Kitchen” Peace-Corps issued cookbook to find inspiration.

I’ve made a variety of curries, plenty of pasta dishes, and countless, unremarkable dishes that probably had chicken breast, tomatoes, and cucumbers as their primary ingredients. For the first nine months of my life alone in Ukraine, I fell very quickly into my previous habits, buying only boneless, skinless chicken breasts and the occasional package of ground beef (usually only for “taco nights” with other volunteers) when I bought meat at all. More often than not, though, I made do with vegetables, pasta and grains.

Recently though, when I left school on a chilly, rainy day, I decided it was high time I learned how to make soup. Never having made soup from scratch, and feeling vaguely sure this required bits and pieces of chicken that I rarely ever buy or eat, I called a friend to find out what exactly I needed to buy and do. He recommended buying a quarter of a chicken and he gave me further instructions on how to make a tasty chicken broth. I stocked up on all the necessary ingredients and headed back home to make my first soup.

I found the biggest pot in my dormitory kitchen and filled it with water. Once the water was boiling, I dumped in the quarter of a chicken, whole garlic cloves, a few bay leaves, chopped onions, and then I tossed in some salt and pepper. I spent the next half hour chopping potatoes and carrots, which I put in the pot about half an hour later. I added a few more spices and walked away, nervous about what I’d eat for dinner if my soup went wrong. I came back to check on the soup a little bit later and as soon as I stepped through the door to the kitchen, I began to salivate. Nothing I’d made in the last year had smelled so good. In fact, it’s quite possible that I’ve never made anything that smelled this good in my entire life. I didn’t even know soup could smell so tantalizing.

Eventually it was time to take the chicken out and separate it from the bone. Pulling the meat from the bone with my fingers, separating the globby skin from the meat and picking out chunks of bloody gristle, I found myself thinking about the first time I ever reached my hand into a sink full of dirty dishwater to pull the plug without flinching. As a kid, I’d always watched with disgust when my mom dipped what seemed like her entire arm into the depths of the dishwater. I vowed never to do it myself. Of course, the day eventually came when I bravely plunged my own hand into a sink full of murky water and found myself thinking afterward, “Wow. Now I’m a real grown-up.”

I put the chunks of meat, now ultimately separated from the bone from whence they came, and the now picked-cleaned bone back into the broth. I stood over the pot until my glasses fogged up and then I wrenched myself away to let the soup simmer for another hour.

When I came back to check on it, I was pleased to find that I had, as I’d set out to do, made soup. It had that golden-brown transparent color chicken soup is supposed to, with little oily bubbles on top. And I’ll tell you what, little oily bubbles never looked or smelled so good! The soup was delicious. I hardly even needed to add any salt…and I’m the kind of person who puts salt on everything, even watermelon.

Usually when I make meals for myself, I find the process a bit tedious. There’s so much effort and work involved for just one person. It seems like food never really tastes as good when you prepare it for yourself. And besides, as soon as you finish, you have to do the dishes yourself. I guess that’s why I end up eating pickles and bread for dinner from time to time. I just don’t feel like making the effort. But my soup-making adventure was a really gratifying experience and it made me reconsider putting more energy into making my meals.

First of all, there were hardly any dishes to wash afterward. Just the bowl and spoon I used to eat two back-to-back bowls of delicious soup. Second of all, it wasn’t all that difficult and the yield was so great—I ate soup for the rest of the week! Instant meals…Ukrainian-style. And finally, it was simply rewarding to learn how to make something that seemed so simple and yet, before I came to Ukraine, out of the realm of possibility. It would never have occurred to me to make my own soup in America. Why bother when you can buy any soup your heart desires in an aisle bigger than most of the grocery stores in my small town?

Although at first it was frustrating and overwhelming for me not being able to pick up a can of soup at a supermarket or buy exactly what I was looking for in the store, I’ve come to appreciate the need to make things from scratch here.  Here people love to tell you things are “домашний” (domashnyi  – homemade). They take great pride in making their own sauces, soups, canned vegetables straight from the garden, jams, and other assorted goods. People readily announce that the food they’re serving you or sending you home with is “homemade…natural” and “without chemicals!” And they can say that with certainty because they know where their food comes from. They raise their own livestock, buy milk fresh from the cow, gather their own eggs, dig their own potatoes, sow seeds, and harvest the fruits and vegetables they raise in their own gardens. And despite the fact that it certainly takes more effort to make your own soup than it does to pop open the lid on an easy-to-open can of Campbell’s soup, not only does it taste better, it just feels better to know where all the ingredients came from and to know that you put them together yourself. And I suppose that’s the joy of cooking, rather than just preparing your food.

Laura Ruth’s Domashnyi Chicken Soup

 

Ingredients:

Quarter of a chicken (including the breast)

Potatoes (3-4 medium-sized)

Carrots (1-2 Ukrainian-sized…which is to say, the size of a baby’s forearm. I forget how big carrots are in America. I’m gonna guess you probably want 2-3?)

Onions (1 medium-sized)

Several cloves of garlic (peeled)

Water (How much? I don’t know. I never measure anything…just fill the pot up about 2/3 of the way)

1-2 Bay leaves

Dried basil

Salt

Pepper

Put chicken, onion, garlic, bay leaves, and other spices in pot of water, bring to a boil. Reduce heat until simmering. Allow to simmer until meat is cooked. When meat is cooked, remove it from the pot. Allow broth to continue simmering. Wait until chicken cools and then pick meat from the bones. Set meat aside and put the bones back into the pot. Allow to simmer for another half hour or so. Then add cubed potatoes and carrots. Simmer until potatoes and carrots are almost done. Add chicken back into the pot. When potatoes and carrots have finished cooking, remove from heat. Смачного! (Smachnoho — enjoy!)