Cooking workshop

A few weeks ago I visited a fun event — cooking workshop.

The idea of it is simple and pretty clever.

It's almost the same as go to the restaurant, but before your dinner, you work on the kitchen with a chef cooking for yourself.

There are several restrictions for it.

You can't choose all the dishes which you will cook. You only can choose "theme" or "topic" beforehand, and the chef will prepare menu for you and instructions.

This time we've chosen the topic "Indian dinner".

My reason was pretty simple, I always like to learn something new, and I knew nothing about Indian cuisines at all.

The restaurant provide you all the ingredients, tools, the chef with his assistants, and a separate room for that.

It is not mandatory to work on the kitchen, you can just watch, or ask, or like that, but I prefer to do everything by myself because I think it's the best way to learn.

Our chef was an experienced guy who lived in India for awhile, so I think, we can pretend that it's kind of authentically. 

I am strongly believe in experience and practice as the most valuable things; you can get the receipts in the Internet, but it will not give you a real knowledge.

All the things are always about small details which is obvious for masters and spoil the student's work.

To see these details I like to have a coach. 

I like the result what we have at the end, but I should admit it has kind of unusual taste for Russians.

We don't have too many Indian restaurants here, the closest one is 50 km far away from my place, but we visited it a few times just for comparison. And I would say that I still have many things to work on.

Banya

What makes steel harder than iron?

Structure?

Tempering. It makes everything more hardened. 

Russian banya.

It's impossible to speak about our culture and don't mention our type of sauna - banya. 

The Friedrich Nietzsche quote "That which does not kill us makes us stronger." can be applied to almost every Russian activity as well. 

We like this philosophy, we like to challenge ourselves and strongly believe that it the only thing which make one strong.

As we becoming more international, as our culture blending with other cultures this beliefs are going to extinct.

I think in few next generation our men will sit on their couches and  speaking about their feelings during knitting their hand kerchief and watching "sex and the city".

if you have any intent to see real Russian culture you'd better to hurry up, don't put it off.

But I learned from the best, from the generation of old bones, and I know many ways to manage Russian banya.

I have one at my country house, and today I'll present it to you.

Part 1: Equipment

Banya itself is a small wood farmhouse, made of logs and planked by wood. It well insulated, for that purpose wood has a special cut-off.

 It prevents loosing heat.

Typically banya consist of three parts:

1. Resting zone — the cold zone with couches, table for tea and beer etc, and armchairs.

2. Washing zone — place with barrels, shower, basin and tape with hot water from the oven.

3. Hot zone  — place where you hardening yourself by hot, and making steam.

Each part is well insulated, especially hot zone.

The banya's oven is very special thing.

Most of it is situated in the hot zone, but the door for firewood is in the rest zone.
The idea is - door to the hot zone is always close. You don't have any additional reason to open it.

The oven itself pretty complicated, chimney has many segments inside the oven, and warps the special section section which located inside the oven and full of special stones. On the top of the oven we have big metal barrel to heat the water.

Oven made of very thick metal (4+ cm), and stove itself + stone section + stones is about few tons of material which keeps heat.

To warm it up you need to keep fire for several hours, but after it heated it's hard to cool it down, and it's crucial thing for this banya.

We will use the heat to produce steam and in same time we don't want to loose any temperature.

Another important part of the banya - is icy water.

I use this kiddie pool (many people use special big barrels).

It located outside the banya, on the street, I feel it by water from deep bore (75 meter into the earth), and the water temperature is about +5 +7.

I use small pool because my well is not good enough to get more ice water at once.

During the winter we don't use pools, we jump in to the snow.

Part 2: The process

I start to heat up the stove at Saturday noon, with idea to have it ready at evening.

Few hours later I put broom into the water. Broom is made of tree sticks, it can be birch, or fir or even nettle. The water is hot and the broom will be soft enough after this long watering.

A several hours after, the oven and stones inside are red (about 250+ degrees), the walls and air inside hot zone is about 100-120 degrees, and water in the hot barrel almost boil.

We are ready to start!

Episode one is "dry hot".

People go inside hot zone, and they are trying to survive in 100-120 degrees hot and dry air.

From time to time, you go to the rest zone through washing zone, and get some water inside, and cool down.

It prepares your body to continuation. Usually it about 2-4 times for cycle hot zone/ rest zone.

If my boys can't bear them, I put them into barrels with water, and they sit inside it (like on the picture above).

Episode two is "add some steam".

All the people in the hot zone wear special caps. They made of felt, and save you head.

There are many types of these hats, and many jokes.

The title on my heat claim that I am in charge here. I am Napoleon, it says.

It mean that I will take the hardest part of the job, i'll produce steam and work with broom.

I open the small door to the stone section inside oven, and with a small ladle, I splash the water to the stones.

It makes a lot of steam inside hot zones. Totally another type of heat. 

And I start to work with broom, i use one or two, to lightly whip everyone inside.

Because of air movement it becoming even hotter, and makes some massage.

Those who can't bear more run out and jump to the ice water.

We repeat it as long as we have fun of it, and we have some periods of cooling and drinking beer in the rest zone.

Adult men usually can bear 3-5 cycles, for children one is enough.

The oven is good enough if during all the process that may take a few hours it doesn't allow cool down the temperature.

After banya we drinking something and having rest and lazy conversation which each other.

I always feel relaxed and lazy. 

We strongly believe that this procedure make us stronger and healthy.

Would you like to try Russian banya?

Cedar

Cedar is the very special tree in my place.
There are many reasons for that:

- cedar's wood is very good for carpenters.
It's soft, easy to work with, and never splits during the work.
That's why if you are a cabinetmaker or something like this it will be priceless for you.

- It is big sized, 30-40 meters tall and more than 1 meter diameter.
It's good if you need massive and natural block of wood.

- It is a really rare tree. You can go hundred kilometers through the forest and don't meet one.
It likes very special circumstances: stoned mountain slopes with a lot of sun.
Look at this photo:

Steep cliff flooded by stones, sunny side, the place which I visited last weekend.
It has enormous amount of cedars, I've seen more than 30 of them here.

- Their cones (nuts inside cones) are really delicious. I don't know what to compare with, but I like them a lot.
Since my youth we are going to the special places in the forest to collect them.
It's a really hard work. Cedar is a tree which grow slowly.
It starts produced cones at age of 40-50 years, but it's very little amount of cones like 10-20.
In age of 100 and more, it become to be 150-200 cones for one shaft.
The cedar has cones not every year, but in the period of 4-6 years, it depends on many factors.
At this age the tree is tall enough and it is a hard work to get the cones.
We use this way: one of us goes up to the tree and shake sticks.

The sticks are fragile, and climbing the cedar is not safe.
Our guy who climbs is usually the lightweight one, and he uses ropes for safety.
All others collects the cones from the earth when they drop down.
This amount of the cones we collect for one hour, our team has four guys.

And it considered as a bad harvest, we didn't find a good cedar. The other hunters were here before us.
Two big cones contain this amount of cones (the glass is a big glass for beer 0.5L)

My 1/4 part of all nuts looks like that:

And this is the photo how the walnut (unshelled part) looks like:

It's very delicious, and very expensive (because of rareness and hardwork to get them).

- Local tribes who lived here before Russians (they called themselves Vogul) used cedar cones for many things, for producing oil for instance and cedar was they sacred tree.
In that time the man who kill the cedar has to be killed too.
We don't have such pagan's superstitious now, but our family has a story about cedars too.
Almost for each child the father plant new cedar somewhere on family's land.
Don't know why, perhaps without a reason -  just a tradition.

This one on the right photo is mine.
Planted 36 years ago.
He is already much taller than I ever will be.
I don't remember the time when I was taller, but my parents told me it was so.
Probably I will be able to taste his cones if I have luck to live long enough.
The tree near to it is my sister's tree.
2 years younger and slightly shorter.