Julie's Boggle

We had a very entertaining night-out yesterday, hosted by one of the guys in Tom’s team at work. It was a Russian evening, replete with genuine Russian dishes and lots of vodka (and schnapps and grappa for good measure).

Our host Artem is one of the younger repo team members. A graduate placement, who seems to have a real heart for entertaining all his friends from work (and a few stray spouses as well). Aside from a very long night spent on the preparations on Thursday, he’d also taken a half day on Friday, all in aid of preparing the delicious spread to treat his mates.

When we arrived, we found the table was already fully laden with the first course which was all the cold dishes. There were three tasty salads, with mayonnaise as a unifying theme – all completely novel to me, a plate of open sandwiches each laid with three small fish; slices of salted, raw fish fillets; preserved mushrooms which were quite unusual, and gherkins. There was yummy rye bread on the side, and glasses of Russian champagne to accompany it.

I was starving when we arrived (Tom had been running late after being part of an interview team at work) but even so, the first course made quite a dent in my appetite. The next course was Russian soup – borscht – a tomato-based meat and vegetable soup – a meal in itself! – which it is traditional to stir a dollop of sour cream into.

Following that we had a bit of a breather to work up our appetitites again, before the main courses began.

The first of these was a potato and meat dish: slices of potato in some sort of white creamy sauce, baked in a tray with slices of pork. Then there was “cabbage and beef” – which was actually a delicious sauteed cabbage and onion base, again with a strong tomato overtone, with chunks of meat in it.

And *lastly* – for those of us with the space to fit in one more main course – there was a chicken and rice dish. This reminded me of biryani because it was a basmati-style rice dish with no sauce to speak of. It wasn’t hot, but it was deliciously seasoned and with a fragrance of cinnamon. For the serious appetites, there were chicken drumsticks in it. All in all, a fantastic repast which left most of us collapsed on the couches.

Artem had also stocked up on some good quality vodka (which came in regular, blackcurrant, or honey & pepper), and certainly the smoothest I have ever tasted. This went down well amongst the guys in a series of tosses which probably didn’t do it justice.

Right before hometime, we got to see the closing dessert course which was a frozen cake. Its Russian name translates as “log”, and it is literally a swiss-roll shaped block of chocolate, biscuit pieces and chopped nuts which gets sliced up. Mmmm. (Oh come on, There’s always space for pudding!)

We said our goodbyes and dragged ourselves away around 23:30, mostly to make sure that we didn’t get caught out by the late shift of the Underground service knocking off before we got home. The first part of our journey was on the driverless Docklands Light Railways (DLR) service back to the City centre, and then onto the Central Line which got us to Shepherds Bush around half-past midnight. Probably within about 15 minutes of the last train.

So all in all a great evening which was my first introduction to at least half a dozen Russian dishes – and all in the comfort of a London apartment. And the lovely Artem has promised to do it all again in the summer with a completely different menu. ‘Na zdorove’ to that!

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 28th, 2006 at 12:00 pm and is filed under Miscellaneous. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.