Ruckers, Ink: Cooking With Shelbi :)

Since Shelbi loves to cook, I decided to combine pictures and stories of her culinary expeditions into one post, which we'll continue to add to as she continues to cook.

Okay, so she's not cooking, but this was the (mushroom) hat she was working on. She has since taken it apart and remade it a little differently and smaller. We thought it quite funny.

Above is shuba, the Russian word for fur-coat. It is made with salted fish at the bottom, potatoes over that, mayonnaise, shredded beats, possibly eggs, possibly onions, and makes a very tasty side!!

Chowder-Moldovan style! It was pretty good.

Some awesome "ninja-bread" cookies Jennifer sent us. We really enjoyed making them and giving them away.

A classic southern meal that we are preparing to make for visitors!

These jars are all gifts from partners and friends here. On the far right is compot (juice) made from water, raspberries, and sugar. The small one in the middle is pickled tomatoes and cauliflower. Behind that is a big jar of pickled tomatoes, and the last is simply pickled cucumbers...pickles!!

Above is our host dad pretending to eat honey with a "lingura mare" or big spoon. It is a joke in Moldova that if someone is very hungry, they will eat with the big spoon. He did return from his relatives' place with a lot of honey, so Shelbi thought a picture was needed.

Guess what I'm making...

The Wallace clan should know clearly by now. And just look at these smiles!

Shelbi is actually mashing corn with the bottom of a bowl. She made her own "creamed" corn for corn casserole. Thanksgiving is on Thursday and we will be going on Saturday to Balti to celebrate with some PCVs before Shelbi goes down to Chisinau for training seminars.

Double-yoke :)

And these little dearies... we thought they might be chestnuts, so we looked up "chestnuts" online, and, sure enough, we saw pictures of these! Shelbi immediately found a recipe and we collected some. After boiling and roasting them, we cut open our first and got a mouthful of bitterness. Our host mom was very courteous as she tasted one and said it was good. We spit ours out and stopped eating. A couple weeks later when visiting some friends in a village not too far away, we were informed those were "buck-eyes," which were poisonous. Luckily for everyone involved, our host mom is still with us.

At least the buck-eyes smelled good.

Just a random overflowing bowl of placenta dough our host mom made. We thought it was funny.

Shelbi's no-bake cookies!! MMMMmmmmm...

Our host mom, Rodica, made these cakes, which were delicious and well-presented. We had to have a picture.

Cake and placenta:

A pancake look-a-like called clitita.

Hmmmm, what went wrong here? We tried to make calzones, but we used too much yeast.

Before the extra rising:

Wow, those are huge!!

They were okay, but yeasty. We decided we needed to try the dough again, so we made pizza the next day. That turned out gustos! (tasty)

This was John's birthday. Shelbi made fasole (beans) and urez (rice) to go on tortillas (yeah, you know). It was a great Tex-Mex-style meal. Just look at that smile.

We taught our host family the Taco Bell tilted head syndrome and they understood 45 degrade (degrees).

Shelbi's cornbread muffins. I guess they were good. I had training in Chisinau when Shelbi made them.

Well, okay, Shelbi didn't exactly cook this. She did find the worm halfway through her peach, though.

The apple pie was terrific!-A real touch of home.

The cookies...better luck next time. I think we tried to substitute too many ingredients. The chocolate parts were good.

Hamburgers were a big deal. We made them for our host family the evening before our host sister went back to university. What I didn't really consider was that they don't really eat dinner. Instead, they eat a large lunch and go light on dinner. I messed that up and scheduled a big meal of hamburgers for the evening, so our host dad didn't really want to eat a hamburger. They were pretty good, even with hard bread :).