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Vegetarian Club Anyone?

#546
andrew said:
Good timing on a resurrection of this thread.

What's everyone have for your Christmas/holiday meal?
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for thanksgiving i went to a relative's house who simply microwaved me some rice/beans/other veggies and a HUGE bowl of tofu. it was...okay.

for christmas i'm not quite sure what to expect yet! there's a 'veggie heaven' nearby so i might buy a meal from there. i'll keep you updated (if i remember) !
 
#547
i just got invited to a friend's place for xmas dinner. they are veg's too. i heard the first meal, at 2,will be soup (my job) and a bunch of roasted veggies and i don't know what else. the second meal , at 8, is gonna be "raclette." i have no idea what it is, but it looks like a partying day will be had by all.

traditionally, i make minestrone soup on xmas (family recipe). yum, yum.
 
#551
Christmas dinner was yams and mashed potatoes with rosemary, wild rice (with corn, green onion and cashew), savory stuffing, asparagus with garlic, beans and carrots, mock bbq chicken, and christmas bread (which has walnuts, raisins, dates and cranberries in it). All vegan, all delicious.
 

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#553
Me and my wife decided to make this New Years Eve a fast day (i.e., no rice, no wheat & other cereals, no beans & other pulse, no honey, no tea, and, right, no alcohol). It was my first alcohol-free New Year since childhood. And we had a great supper. A crazy mix salad with vegetables, potatoes, apples, tangerines, sour cream, feta cheese and Indian spices; lots of fruits; different cheese; our favourite mulled wine with cloves, cardamom, cinnamon etc., but made of reasonably watered down cranberry or cowberry jam instead of red wine. That was DE - LI - CIOUS, and we eventually got overfed with that "fasting" meal : )

Going to have something with wild rice for Christmas (we celebrate Christmas on January 7th in Russia). The choice is much wider when not fasting, so....... :hyper:
 
#554
Impostor said:
Me and my wife decided to make this New Years Eve a fast day (i.e., no rice, no wheat & other cereals, no beans & other pulse, no honey, no tea, and, right, no alcohol). It was my first alcohol-free New Year since childhood. And we had a great supper. A crazy mix salad with vegetables, potatoes, apples, tangerines, sour cream, feta cheese and Indian spices; lots of fruits; different cheese; our favourite mulled wine with cloves, cardamom, cinnamon etc., but made of reasonably watered down cranberry or cowberry jam instead of red wine. That was DE - LI - CIOUS, and we eventually got overfed with that "fasting" meal : )

Going to have something with wild rice for Christmas (we celebrate Christmas on January 7th in Russia). The choice is much wider when not fasting, so....... :hyper:
Click to expand...

I'd like to learn more about being vegetarian in Russia. Is it easy or hard?

Also, what are your traditional foods at Christmas, and can they be modded to accommodate being vegetarian?
 
#555
andrew said:
I'd like to learn more about being vegetarian in Russia. Is it easy or hard?
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Well, I'd say it's a little bit hard if you have to eat out, because most of the people here are obsessed with meat, and so are most of the menus available. In a typical canteen you simply have nothing to eat except for garnishes and, maybe, one or two of the salads. When it says, "pea soup", read "...on chicken broth" between the lines, and so on. Cafes are a bit better... I'd say, generally the size and the very availability of vegetarian menu in an average cafe depends on the size of a city and its distance from the capitals. Veg cafes are not in every city. I'm lucky in that my full time job (I'm a programmer) allows to do most of the work remotely from home, so I rarely spend much time downtown; also, soon after I turned to vegetarian there appeared an Indian cafe in a downtown yoga centre. Not long ago there opened another veg cafe, in closer proximity to my working place, though I haven't visited it yet. So we have two in Tomsk. But, for example, in nearby Novosibirsk, which is more than twice larger (over a million people), there are no veg cafes at all.

andrew said:
Also, what are your traditional foods at Christmas, and can they be modded to accommodate being vegetarian?
Click to expand...
First of all, the Christian tradition was largely broken during the Soviet era. The popular Orthodoxy reborn in late 1980-s and early 90-s is kind of rootless. The way of observing Lent and celebrating Easter is, more or less, taken root and revived. Christmas is less lucky. New Year is THE holiday, and Christmas is a secondary one for most of the people, even more so given that the Orthodox Christmas is a week later than the Grigorian New Year's day. The traditional food for Christmas Eve is soaked wheat grains (or any other cereal such as buckwheat) with raisins, maybe other dried fruits and walnuts. It is called "sOchevo", and because of that the Christmas Eve is called "sochElnik". The latter word is used by everyone, but still not everyone knows about sochevo and its traditional usage, due to the decades of official atheism. Sochevo is all that is allowed to be eaten all the day on sochelnik until the fist star, which signifies the birth of Jesus Christ. After the first star the feast begins. Maybe earlier there were some specific dishes for the Christmas feast, but now it simply means, eat and drink anything you wish as much as you wish.

For the New Year's eve there is a Soviet tradition of what is called "Olivier salad" in Russian, or "Russian salad" in the West. Omit sausages, change mayonnaise for sour cream, and it's OK. You can also add some fruits, because this recipe actually allows free addition of nearly anything. Herring salad - cannot be adapted. These two salads are traditional, also traditionally there must be abundance of different salads with no requirements for any specific recipes. Sometimes the salads are so abundant that there is no roast or anything like that on the table: just the salads accompanied by some alcohol, and then tea with a cake. Usually there's so much of the salads left, that all of the food on January 1 is yesterday salads taken from refrigerator, for the whole day :D
 

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