Monday, March 21, 2011

Gnocchi

Tonight, under the instruction of my dear friend Dion, I, for the first time, made a sort of Gnocchi.
I've been led to believe that it's an Italian dish.
We made it as such: simmered down spinach, xacho (a sort of fresh cheese like cottage cheese) and flour. Normally it's made with potatoes, but we experimented. you mix all these together and then roll it out into about a dime size snake and then pinch off 1 inch pieces. have water boiling and drop them in, when they are ready, they'll float to the top. with this recipe, we had to boil them a bit longer, about an extra minute or two.

For a sauce, we made a fairly simple walnut blue cheese sauce. It was toasted walnuts, smashed. onions, sour cream and blue cheese.

Very tasty and simple, just time consuming to roll out the dough.

The Journey.

In the past few months i have not kept you all updated. sorry.

So, I went to Lithuania. I ate loads of wonderful food and quaffed a massive amount of tasty beers and liquors.
Some of which were: Cepelinai, which are large potato dumplings with meat inside and are shaped like, Zeppelins! Several variances of herring, one of the most interesting ones was herring marinated in onions and cinnamon. Also herring salad. Some tasty whole salmon, lots of potatoes, gretchka (buckwheat), and one of my new favorite sauces, which is bacon, onions and sour cream.
On the beer front: Utenos, the dark one of which is awesome. Svyturis, the pilsner and white varieties are definitely of note, and Shnekutis bar, which has a giant variety of wonderful beers from Lithuania.
Of the liquors, 999. this comes in a couple different flavors and all of them are superb. I was told the vodka is good too, but either I was already too foggy to remember drinking it or I just missed out.

After spending a couple of weeks there in Lithuania, my girlfriend Inga and I set out hitchhiking across eastern Europe in the dead of winter.
Shockingly, this wasn't a tenth as bad as I thought it would be. After we got past Warsaw, there wasn't much snow to speak of and it was actually almost warm in most places.
We had a fairly comfortable journey and made it back to Tbilisi in 15 days. And this was with spending 2 nights in Warsaw, 2 nights in Brno and 3 nights in Istanbul. Mostly, we got rides pretty quickly in most places, the worst places being at borders.

So, in a nutshell, thats what I did for christmas. everything since then has just been the normal Georgia crap. Teaching english, scraping by and eating and drinking as many good things as possible.

Until next time,

Andrew