The Dinnertime Dispatch

Successful cooking ventures since arriving in Dushanbe:

• Beef curry stew with potatoes and peppers (secret ingredient: Kazakhstan packaged spice mix "Karri" [one of my more positive purchases at Sadbarg!]; secret technique: browning the stew chunks after first dredging in flour mixed with salt, pepper and spice)

• Cabbage, carrot and turnip/rutabaga? soup (the squat, roundish yellow root vegetable sold here in the markets remains a mystery to me -- even after scouring the Wikipedia page... I guess this is closest to a rutabaga, although the way it looks when sold really doesn't look exactly like the images I can find online)

• Apple tart -- gradually adapted from several recipes on Epicurious.com; just your basic flour-sugar-butter-salt-icewater dough, plus sliced apples, with cinnamon and honey and some more sugar, arranged on top, raisins optional (unless you are Anya, then they are de rigueur)

• Oatmeal cookies -- from this recipe (with the sole adaptation of substituting anise liqueur for vanilla extract -- thank you, Istanbul Airport Duty Free)

• Simple ground beef pasta sauce (secret shortcut ingredient: letcho [Hungarian stewed peppers] from a jar)

• Roast chicken and roasted root veggies (simple, but good...)

• Marinated strips of chicken breast (marinade ingredients: a whole lotta minced garlic, onions, lemon juice, and kefir and yogurt, coriander, cumin, and cayenne), pan-fried and eaten in a flatbread sandwich or over cilantro rice
  

• Pan-fried steak (well, it sounds easy, but can you really be confident you won't screw it up?)*
  

• Sour cream pancakes (quick and easy, and pretty tasty, too; recipe c/o The Big Book of Breakfast, often substitute some combination of kefir and yogurt for actual sour cream or local smetana)

* Meat/poultry note: I am still working my way up to the confidence to purchase the butchered meat sold hanging out in the open at the bazaars. So the beef we still buy from the counter at the nicer supermarkets in town, and the chicken is almost universally the Brazilian frozen imports sold in the same Western style supermarkets. But this week maybe I will screw up my courage and get some lamb, at 18 somoni or so per kilo.