Review: Interesting recipes of Austrian-Ukrainian base
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 01 22, 2014
I like the book but sometimes the directions are difficult to follow because some are in our measuring system and then they go back to the metric system. And some are both metric and avoirdupois (dry measurements) and British Imperial (liquid measurements) we use in America. She also recommends making a dry roux without fat so she suggests you only "brown" the flour while it's dry!  That's usually a recipe for burnt flour.Some times the pictures don't match as when she puts cherry tomatoes and cucumber slices in the picture.  While that makes the picture very pretty and suggests some additional sides you can serve with the recipe, it may be confusing to someone who looks for the reference in the ingredients list for cherry tomatoes and cucumbers.I can do without the liver meatballs, liver cake  and liver meatloaf plus the overcooked shrimp recipe that gets cooked and cooked and cooked and cooked.  Another recipe calls for "soaking a spoon in a cup of water" as if it were porous.I think she means using a cup of hot water to get the pancake dough to slide off the spoon better.One recipe calls for barberries but it has a link to purchase them on Amazon.com which helps. Otherwise, they are not a common item in your neighborhood grocery store in the USA.  If you don't know where to look for them, try a store that has middle eastern foods and they may be called "zereshk" or even "sereshk".  You might find the plants by the genus name, berberis.  Understand they are very sour and even more tart than fresh or frozen cranberries. You might therefore find cranberries a good and slightly sweeter alternative, either  fresh or frozen. I buy mine during the season and freeze them so I always have them on hand without sugar.Se does swing by the middle eastern regions as well as the Ukrainian eastern Europe ones she starts off with in this book.  It is interesting but I grew up with a lot of these techniques because my mother's people were the Ukrainian Germans from Austria at Catherine the Great's request. In the winter if there wasn't noodle dough drying on top of a clean sheet which was on top of a piece of clear plastic and hanging over the back of the Queen Anne sofa, I was in the wrong house. In the summer, if there wasn't a crock of pickles working on the kitchen counter during the summer, same thing: I was in the wrong house. We also made our own jellied pork luncheon meat called head cheese in the American English and Sülze among my German speaking relatives.