Tatar Food!

Although the Tatars left their nomadic past behind long ago, their traditional foods are reminiscent of that lifestyle, in that they consist largely of meat, milk, and dough. Delicious.

The most famous Tatar food is chak-chak, which is sort of like Rice Krispies Treats, except the Rice Krispies are wheat-based, denser, and deep-fried, and they're held together by honey instead of melted marshmallow. It's a common food for holidays and parties, and I will bet money that in half an hour when one of the ducklings has a little classroom birthday celebration, he's going to get some chak-chak as a gift.

Tatar foods that are more everyday include треугольники/эч почмак/öç poçmak, which means "triangles" (in Russian, Tatar Cyrillic and my own made-up Tatar Latin). They are triangle-shaped pastries filled with cubes of meat and potato, served warm. You can buy them in any grocery store or cafe for about 20 rubles (66 cents). I just had one for lunch.

Another food is губадия/gubadia, a big pie filled with layers of dried cheese curd (hard to describe, but it's dry, crumbly and caramel-colored), rice, raisins, and other sweet things. There's a meat version, too, but I haven't tried that. Check out this website for more info in awkward English. The other day I bought about a quarter of a gubadia from Bahetle, the Tatar grocery store (site in Russian, but it'll give you a nice picture of the triangle pastries or chak-chak on the home page) and have been slowly been working my way through it. It's quite rich.

And the pan-Turkic connection means I have gotten to try Central Asian lagman, a soup made with delicious, thick homemade noodles and beef or lamb, twice already. (Once it was billed as Uzbek, and once it was Uyghur.) Again, very rich. That's really a theme with the food around here. Nomads need their energy and fat deposits.

This has made me a little worried about where my waistline might be headed, but I do a lot of walking, jogging, and shepherding, so I hope I'm in the clear. And I'm trying to make an effort to be more proactive about eating veggies. Just now I bought a head of lettuce (LETTUCE! Unless you've been to Russia before, it's probably hard to understand how exciting that is) and some mystery herb from a dedushka (grandpa) selling his dacha harvest on the street, in an exchange that went like this:

me: How much is your lettuce?
him: Ten rubles. Please, take some!
me: Uh-huh. And your parsley?
him: Also ten rubles. But it's not parsley. It's kinza.
me: Kinza? It's not parsley?
him: No. It's kinza. They use it there... in the South... you know, the Caucasus. I had never tasted it, but I harvested it yesterday, and it is so tasty. Extremely tasty.
me: [piecing together the clues] Can I try a leaf?
him: Yes, please, please. It is extremely tasty.
me: (in my head) CILANTRO!