In my first post about dining in Kiev, I mentioned that I wasn’t in that many restaurants on this trip.  It’s not that I have anything against restaurants — some of my best friends eat in restaurants — but this time, since I had a kitchen (and, honestly, someone who wanted to cook for me), there was more dining in than dining out.

Of course, before you can cook at home (or in your rented apartment in a foreign country), you need to pick up a few things at the market.  I’ve been to a few markets in Ukraine — a Trader Joe’s type place in Odessa, a “Safeway” in Mariupol, as well as a couple open air, farmer’s markets — but my shopping previously had been pretty limited.  Mostly just water for while I was there, and candy to bring home.  This time, it was real grocery shopping.

For the most part, there were no big surprises; you could find pretty much the same things there are you would in any grocery store or supermarket over here.  Things were presented differently, of course — not so much refrigeration around the produce and three deli/meat counters — and if you can’t read Ukrainian or Russian, picking out the things you’d need for a nice jambalaya might be harder, but you could find your way around OK.

A few small surprises:  eggs come in 10-packs, not dozens; margarine and butter (масло, pronounced “masla”) come in “slabs,” not sticks; you could buy fish in almost any condition, from live to jerky; the only turkey I found was in a tin, as a specialty product, right next to duck and rabbit in a tin.  Can you believe that?  Eggs in 10-packs?  Crazy!

So the shopping list included potatoes, tomatoes, cucumbers and cabbage (for salad; I generally prefer lettuce, but the leaf lettuce the store had didn’t look that good); eggs, butter and yogurt; chicken thighs and sausages (which tasted a lot like hot dog meat); a couple packages of frozen pelmini (because it’s just easier than making from scratch); a loaf of bread, cookies, mini creme-filled pastries of some kind, and a chocolate bar (with almonds); pasta (macaroni), and rice.  I also grabbed some black pepper, because just putting salt on everything is bleh… but it seems that is what most people do.  The price for all this was about 200 UAH, or about $25.

One thing we forgot was mayonnaise (майонез, pronounced “mayonnaise”), but there was a little Kwik-E-Mart across the street from the apartment which, amid all the beer and wine, also had a couple packages of mayonnaise.  And “package” is right — apparently it doesn’t come in a jar (glass or plastic).  Here’s a picture:

(The yogurt came in a plastic bag, not the tub that we’re so used to, so packaging is a tad different overseas.)  Mayonnaise in hand, we now had the bulk of what we needed for the week.

So what did we eat?  Well, simpler fare, and a lot of it.  Left to my own devices, my meals usually consist of a couple granola bars for breakfast, a rather full lunch from a nearby food cart (quite often Indian food), and then whatever’s left over from lunch or something similar to a sandwich for dinner.  Most Ukrainians don’t have the luxury of the more sedentary life I have, so meals are probably a bit larger in order to keep one’s strength up (and, more than likely, have the energy to endure those hot summer days and freezing winter nights).

A salad of cabbage, tomatoes and cucumbers (with mayonnaise to bind and salt to season) was present at most of the means, including breakfast.  You’d be surprised how long one head of cabbage can last.  In addition to the salad, breakfast also included the sausage, sometimes an egg, a package of pelmini (which is boiled and served with butter), reheated macaroni and/or other leftovers.

Half of the chicken thighs went toward some chicken soup, with rice and potatoes, which was actually very nice.  (My companion, Viktoria, had an upset stomach for part of the time in Kiev, so she wanted some soup to help settle things down.)  This made for a lot of soup, so that was a feature of several lunches and dinners.  (The chicken was used to flavor the soup, but was then reheated for breakfast.)  The other chicken was pan fried and part of a couple dinners.

Bread was there for most of the meals, of course, and the cookies and pastries often went with a cup of tea or coffee as part of breakfast or a little nosh after an evening walk.  One of the more curious dessert things was to take a square of the chocolate and melt it onto a cookie, or when those ran out, a slice of bread.  The bread/chocolate thing sounds a bit odd — and it was — but it still tasted quite good.

Naturally, I asked if this was normal fare for most Ukrainians, and apparently it is.  I did get the sense we had a little more meat and a little less vegetables than is common, but it probably wasn’t that far off.

I will note that it was very strange to have someone else do the cooking.  Honestly, I’m used to doing things myself, and between practical experience and Saturday afternoon cooking shows, I’d say I have a certain style and process when it comes to preparing things in the kitchen.  This meant, of course, that I was utterly useless when trying to help.  Apparently, it is possible to chop cabbage the wrong way, even if the end result looks exactly the same.  (Also, I personally would have put the salt on the tomatoes, let them drain a bit, and then added them to the salad.  But since I also really don’t eat tomatoes, who is going to listen to me?)

I also caused a bit of a kerfuffle (I love that word) when I insisted on cleaning up the kitchen after a meal.  That’s how it was growing up:  if you cooked, you didn’t have to clean, and vice versa.  However, as I was told repeated, women are expected to take care of the house.  I tried to get into the whole equality thing (“Well, what if the man and woman both work; is the woman still expected to do all the housework?”), but some notions just haven’t quite taken off over there (“Yes”).  So for part of the week I was trapped in “The Donna Reed Show,” or possibly “Father Knows Best,”  but other than a few times of feeling totally out of place in the kitchen, things weren’t too bad.  And the food wasn’t bad either.