Maslenitsa—Pancake Week

Our Russian friend Svet cooked dinner for us last night, starting out with big glasses of carrot-green apple juice he juiced himself, then he made these big, thin pancake-thingies and got out the good Russian caviar—a red caviar, in this case—so we could have blini. Of course, the first thing he made me do was learn to pronounce the word correctly. I've always called them BLEE-nees, but the correct pronunciation isn't plural and puts the accent on the last syllable: blee-NEE. He started off with several eggs (and several pieces of accidental egg shell!) in a blender, eventually adding milk, oil, flour, and a pinch of salt, not really following a recipe or doing any exact measurements at all. He poured the thin batter into a large, oiled skillet and cooked the pancakes there, turning them several times. When it was time to eat, he spread a pancake with butter and added a couple of generous spoonfuls of caviar, spreading it around the middle of the pancake. Then he rolled the pancake up into a tube and proceded to eat it. For the second blini, instead of caviar, he used fruit preserves (he seems to be quite partial to black currant). Since this is Maslenitsa, the pancake week which is the Russian Orthodox Church's pre-Lenten equivalent to Carnival or Mardi Gras, it was an appropriate and traditional meal.

The Orthodox don't start Lent until Sunday, unlike those of us from liturgical denominations of the Western church. So, while I've already started my Lenten discipline, Svet wasn't the least bit sympathetic, and on the second day of Lent made me break my food rules already! I'm being vegetarian and giving up meat, fish, alcohol, and desserts for Lent, but he insisted that I had to eat some Swiss milk chocolate infused with orange essence, Lent or not. And, the jury's still out on the issue of whether or not eating caviar violated my prohibition on meat; I submit that it did not, however, on the grounds that I'm being an ovolactovegetarian and can eat chicken eggs, which means that caviar (fish eggs) is just another "ovo" food. Fortunately I'm not Orthodox like Svet; according to strict Orthodox tradition, meat, fish, dairy, and eggs are all forbidden during their Great Lent!