Care Packages

I was reading Beth's blog (which always makes me hungry), and she was writing (as she often does) about home-grown and locally produced foods in North Dakota. You can't broach that topic without kuchen coming up at some point, and the thought of it suddenly made me so homesick for NoDak I could have cried a blizzard.

I'm not from North Dakota originally, but I think that makes me love it even more, because I know it'll never really be mine. Being a non-native, my eyes were always open for the new things my surrogate home state had to offer. I think my first kuchen experience was in the kitchen with Mon in our wood-paneled campus apartment right next to the railroad tracks, back in the Good Old Days. Her grandma (whose culinary skills are legendary) had sent some of her magnificent home-made prune kuchen down from Rugby. Monika introduced me to more of her grandma's German-Russian recipes, like the day I came into the kitchen and found her cutting dough bits into boiling water with a pair of scissors. I'd never seen such a thing; I thought scissors were for opening packages, not for cooking. Knoefla soup! Who knew? Turned out Monika kind of was opening up a care package for me with those scissors. It was one of those pivotal moments where you feel your mind opening up to the creative possibilities of comfort food.

Lucky for me I love cabbage and potatoes, the kinds of foods that can be stored for a long dark winter on the Russian steppes or the Great Plains, and on this hot June day down in the Godless Cities, dreams of winter are keeping me cool. Looking for kuchen and knoefla recipes took me here, to this fantastic database of Germans from Russia recipes created by the Heritage Center at NDSU. It just shows you which cookbooks contain recipes that match your search terms, not the recipes themselves, but is pretty inspiring nonetheless. (I just might have to order "Value Meals on the Volga," because you can't beat that title.) And it's a bit humbling to think about how people in kitchens throughout the ages have come up with approximately 900 bazillion ways to eat what little there was, make it last through the end of winter, and still have it nourish both body and soul.

Speaking of which, Beth also tipped me off to a care package service: mail-order kuchen from Hebron, ND. Filling, frugal, and full of love, it's NoDak to the core.