The Grechka kings

I've been asked to showcase Russian food before. And I have. But to quote a Russian friend, "Russians don't have their own cuisine, we just borrow it from others."
Here's a list of a few famous Russian dishes:

Borsch (beet root soup)- from Ukraine
Shashlik (kebab style meat)- from Armenia
Piloff (rice, meat and vegetable fried mix)- from the Caucasus peoples
Pelmeni (meat and pastry dumplings)- from the Mongolians and Chinese (think won ton).  (I had to laugh when we were at the Great Wall in China and I overheard some Russians saying- "look it's Chinese pelmeni.")
There's more but I'll stop at that for now.

Yesterday we had a dish for the first time here. Not sure how much of a dish it really was though. It was "Buckwheat pie."  What's buckwheat?  Good question. Well considering it is not grown at all in Australia and only a very small amount is grown in Canada you wouldn't be expected to know.  It is a little more commonly grown in America among African Americans, hence you might have heard the name before. In West Virginia there is a Buckwheat festival where the King of Buckwheat is crowned.

Russia is the world's biggest producer and consumer of buckwheat, China is second.  Significantly behind this are Ukraine, France and Poland, then the US is sixth.  No wonder it was new to me when I first came to Russia.

In Russia it is called "grechka" and it is ubiquitous. I think the first time I remember having it was actually when staying with a Ukrainian family in South Melbourne back in the Summer of 1999 (although I feel quite sure I would have had it on my first trip in 1998.) I was served it cold for breakfast. It really was too hard to stomach.  Later on my next visit to Russia I remember thinking that it tasted better hot than cold.  Like other foods that I found it hard to stomach (try pickled tomatoes), it tasted better when mixed with mashed potato. These days I seem to have acquired the taste.  I will happily order it at the "stolovaya" a cafeteria type public dining hall, where people eat lunch.

Grechka is quite a basic food, and really it is served straight, perhaps with a gravy sauce, but almost never creatively. So I was pleasantly surprised to see it served creatively yesterday when we visited at some people's home for lunch. What followed was, well it was mostly grechka!  It had some fish, carrot and potato in it to mix it up a bit.  It had a pastry shell.  It was tepidly warm. Good thing I've developed a taste for it I think!  Somehow I managed to skip the pickled cabbage, I've never been a cabbage fan.