Pelmeny

Pelmeny – a Siberian dish of small pockets of dough filled with seasoned, minced beef, lamb, or pork and served boiled, fried, or in a soup.

I first heard of pelmeny about a year ago. A family friend was teaching English at a Russian university and received so many questions about what he was eating that he posted a short video series on his blog of him preparing his favorite meals. The final episode was dinner; the entree - pelmeny. In fact, he liked it so much that he wanted to figure out a way to export it to the US once he left Russia so he could still eat it!

I showed the episode to my friend Clarissa, who studied in Russia for a semester in college. She vividly remembered eating pelmeny and wished she could enjoy this Russian comfort food once again. We decided then and there to be on the lookout for a Russian grocery store so we could buy some pelmeny. She could eat it again, and I could see for myself why she and Daniel loved this little filled “dumpling” so much.

“There’s a Russian grocery store!” I exclaimed as my parents and I drove to church on a Sunday morning several weeks ago. Just a few blocks north of my parents’ house on the corner of a little strip mall was a Russian and European grocery store. Why hadn’t I noticed it before? “We should go there,” I continued. “We need to see if they have pelmeny.”

Monday afternoon before I left Lincoln for Des Moines, Mom and I stopped at the grocery store. Shelves lined the perimeter of the small room. Large burlap bags of something, I am assuming a grain of some sort?, sat piled on the floor in the center of the room. A small upright freezer stood against another wall. A tall, broad shouldered woman came out of the back room and greeted us. Her thick accent strongly suggested that she was indeed Russian, and I assumed she was also the store owner.

Mom and I began looking at all the bottles, cans, and boxes – clearly labeled in Cyrillic. We could figure out what most things were either by the bright picture on the front or the bits of food we could see in the glass jars around the labels. “We have to buy something you know,” Mom said. I was crossing my fingers they’d have pelmeny. “Oh look! There’s the box juice that Clarissa raves about. I wonder which was her favorite,” I said.

We finally made our way around to the freezer and there, filling one entire section were the bags of pelmeny. There was veal pelmeny and beef pelmeny. Hmmm…I wonder which the most popular kind is, I thought.

“Sorry I am out of pork pelmeny,” the woman said. “It should be in Wednesday night.” Pork - that must be the most popular then. Not having until Wednesday to buy any, I settled on veal and took it up to the counter to pay. The woman was in the middle of a boisterous conversation on the telephone – all in Russian of course, so I glanced at the bags of bread and little cooked pastries on the counter.

“Sorry about that,” she said, hanging up. She rang up my pelmeny. “Do you know how to cook this? You take it and” she started banging the frozen bag against the edge of the counter to break up the pieces! I am sure I must have looked quite surprised and startled.

“I am going to make it with a friend who lived in Russia for a while.” I managed to get out. “I think there are instructions on the bag too.”

She stopped hitting the bag on the counter and slid it into another sack, taking my money and clinking it into the cash register. “Thank you and enjoy!” she said as Mom and I left.

Two days later Clarissa and I had our biweekly cooking night. Pelmeny and tiramisu were on the menu. She was thrilled we were having pelmeny. We carefully read the instructions, boiled the water, dumped in the pelmeny, stirred until the little pelmenies floated to the top of the water, and then cooked them for twenty minutes.

Although not a soup per se, Clarissa dished the little puffs into bowls with some of the broth. The traditional way to eat pelmeny was with sour cream, which seems to be a staple of most Russian soups, and dill. Not sure of what to expect, I scooped up one pelmeny and slid it into my mouth. The dough casing was thicker than ravioli. Suddenly, hot broth and peppered seasoned veal filled my mouth as the pelmeny broke open. “Hot, it’s hot.” Clarissa warned, waving her hand in front of her mouth. I nodded; it was soooo tasty.

“Now imagine eating this when it’s freezing cold outside and you’ve been working in an old cathedral turned car factory all morning,” she said when she could talk again. I could understand why she ended up loving it so much. As we ate one pelmeny after another, Clarissa reminisced about other times she’d eaten pelmeny in Russia, and we planned our trans-Siberian railroad trip that we dream of taking someday when we are famous and someone will pay us to go write a book about our experience.

When Clarissa and her husband were coming and going from Colorado two weekends ago, they stayed with my parents, and my mom bought several bags of pelmeny to have for Clarissa to bring back to Des Moines with her. And now, I think, a trip to the Russian and European Grocery store will become a mandatory stop on any and all trips I take to Lincoln.

A Time to Write, Part 2

In retrospect, I had a valuable time at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival this last weekend. I say retrospect because while I was there, I wondered if I truly was benefiting from my time at the festival. It was so different from last year. Six sessions of workshop spread over six days compared to four sessions of workshop crammed into two. A very general brainstorming workshop versus a more specific genre workshop. Entire mornings and evenings to work on assignments compared to one evening and barely part of a morning. No expectations verses expectations.

And yet, as I continued to talk with my mom yesterday about my workshop, I realized that I did glean small nuggets from my workshop that should prove quite useful as I continue to grow as a writer. In fact, it is okay that I didn’t have monumental breakthroughs or learn all sorts of new things about writing anecdotes. So, here briefly, are some of those nuggets:

1. Anecdote is a slippery word to define. According to The American Heritage Dictionary, anecdote means “a short account of an interesting or humorous incident.” And yet, it can be hard to pin that word on a piece that you are reading or writing. Some anecdotes we read were one paragraph in length, others were three pages or so. Overall, I think an anecdote can best be summed up as a story you would tell a friend over the phone: “You’ll never believe what happened to me today!” Or a story you would share during family gatherings: “Do you remember the time when?” with perhaps a little or a lot more detail thrown in!

2. The spaghetti must be in the back of the boat, meaning, one must give enough clues in the first few paragraphs, so that the last paragraph or two are as powerful as can be. Set-up, set-up, set-up! The piece should be structured like an arch with secure beginning and ending points.

3. Sometimes one must write 30 words and then eliminate all or almost all of them in order to find the precise phrase to capture between the lines the word or description that is precisely right.

Attending the festival always reminds me of how much I love language. Here are a few of the phrases spoken/written by my fellow writers that stood out to me:

“beef fed Iowa boys”
“attitude short of beautiful”
“ghostly traces of my wisdom from yesterday”
“talking way too loudly about way too little”
“my kids may be sick, or my husband may be sick of my kids”

So, all in all, the weekend was different than I expected, but valuable and fun nonetheless. I had a great time with my mom. There were several instances when we just about died laughing recounting stories both from our growing up years and from the weekend itself. Mom loved her workshop, “The Art of the Interview,” and passed along all she was learning to me. She took me out for my birthday Saturday night to a wonderful Indian restaurant in Iowa City. And by wonderful, I mean that their naan was just a half point shy of being as good as the naan at India Star, which serves the best naan of any of the eight Indian restaurant I’ve been to!

Now that I am home again, the real work of the workshop begins. I began several pieces in my workshop that must now be developed and revised as I move them toward publication – even if it just means posting them here!

A Time to Write

Hooray! Just four more days, and my mom and I will be in Iowa City for the University of Iowa’s Summer Writing Festival! Mom and I are just going for the weekend, and that means I will get to write all day Saturday and Sunday! (I will be returning in July for a week long workshop, but I’ll write more about that next month.) Mom is taking the Art of the Interview workshop while I will be in The Art of the Anecdote. We decided to divide and conquer, so it’s almost like I’ll be taking two workshops at once.

I pulled my registration and letters out thte other night in order to refresh my memory on the exact details of what exactly I signed up for way back in March. Yep, still excited about this workshop! Shannon Olson, my instructor, writes in her introductory letter that she “built [The Art of the Anecdote] on the premise that a lot of great writing has come from small sources, those brief anecdotes that we share with friends and family,” and I will learn how to “bring to life small personal moments and shape them into something that means more.” I will be reading pieces by Erma Bombeck, Garrison Keillor, Jim Heynen, David Sedaris and others to learn just how the anecdote can work.

With all the little interactions my co-workers and I have with our visitors and each other at Living History Farms, I figure I should have enough little incidents to write about for a long time! Speaking of little incidents, during my two and three-year-old Sunday school class this morning I learned that one of my little guys only wants to be called Super Man and wont answer to his actual name. Hmmmm… I wonder what I could turn that into! I’ll have to keep it in the back of my mind for this weekend.

Des Moines Snapshot

The balmy weather and my antsy legs propelled me outside after I got home from a busy day of helping people make copies at Kinko’s. Needing laundry detergent in preparation for Monday’s laundry, I decided to take my walk in a productive direction to Family Dollar. I had driven by the store several times and thought I could walk the nine blocks in a decent amount of time.

University was filled with the closing activities of the day, the street crammed with cars commuting home from work or out for a night on the town. The gentlemen who sell rugs from the back of their large white “moving” truck in the auto parts parking lot were rolling up their merchandise and stowing it away on the shelves lining the inside of the truck.

An elderly woman climbed down from a brightly illuminated bus, clutching her purse and shopping bag. A teenage boy ambled by a sagging house in need of paint and new windows to replace the plywood coverings.

Family Dollar sat back from the street; its parking lot providing a buffer zone from the speeding traffic. I walked into the store behind two Hispanic teens who picked a bag of Cheetos from the rack sitting right next to the door. Easter candy, curtains, children’s cloths were crammed onto the shelves and scattered around the store helter-skelter. I looped around the side of the store and wandered my way back to the laundry detergent.

As I was comparing the unit prices of the four different sizes of Extra laundry detergent a voice began making announcements in Spanish. Feeling slightly guilty for not having kept up with my Spanish, I tried to pick out a few words, understanding “gracias” and “Family Dollar.” After a half-minute lag, the announcement began once again in English.

“All your activities in this location are being monitored for your safety. Thank you for shopping at Family Dollar.”

The announcement repeated several times in the ten minutes I was in the store always beginning in Spanish and ending in English. As I glanced around at my fellow shoppers, I noted that the majority were Hispanic. What a contrast from my stop by Hy-Vee after work, in which I was not a minority, all the announcements for dinner specials were in English, and everything was stocked and displayed in a tidy manner.

As I walked West down University back to my apartment, I felt as if I were walking through a different community entirely, although 801 Grand, which is the tallest building in Iowa, illuminated against the darkening sky, reminded me that was still in Des Moines.

How many Des Moinesians understand that this community exists in their city? Of what benefit is it to me to live in this part of my city? How should it impact my view of my community and world?

This year I am listening to the Daily Audio Bible podcast each day with the goal of listening to the entire Bible by the end of December. I read through the Bible in a year while in college, but I always seemed to get behind and had to catch up at some point in the year. Listening to the Bible has erased this problem for me because I can always listen as I am brushing my teeth in the morning or cooking my supper or doing my dishes! Listening to Brian read from the Old and New Testaments, Psalms and Proverbs on the Daily Audio Bible is actually one of my favorite parts of the day. It is so interesting to see how the different readings link together, illuminating each other and the larger story God is telling throughout His word – a story I am apart of.

Today I was struck by the relationship between Matthew 26:47-68 and Psalms 32:1-11. In Matthew 26 Jesus is betrayed and arrested, sent to trial before Caiaphas the high priest and then beaten and mocked. It is a sobering set of verses. Psalm 32 begins with David exclaiming, “How blessed is he whose transgressions is forgiven, Whose sin is covered!” It is only because of the suffering and death of Jesus, which is just beginning at this point in Matthew, that I can make this statement with David and experience this blessing. What a profound, humbling and impacting truth it is! Saying I am thankful for this truth doesn’t even begin to adequately convey the depth and intensity of my thoughts and feelings to this reality in my own life.

“For if the blood of goats and bulls and the ashes of a heifer sprinkling those who have been defiled sanctify for the cleansing of the flesh, how much more will the blood of Christ who through the eternal Spirit offered Himself without blemish to God, cleanse your conscience from dead works to serve the living God?” ~ Hebrews 9:13-14

The Other Turning

January is ending on a very warm note – at least here in the Iowa! It is only 10:30 am, and I believe we have already hit the mid-30s! I know winter is not over yet, but it certainly is nice to have a bit of a respite and to have some of the piles of ice and snow shrink before more arrives. (I don’t know when it will come, but I’ve lived in the Midwest long enough to know that it is certain to!)

A month ago as I was thinking back over 2008 and looking ahead to 2009 my mom mentioned a quote to me from a sermon by John Henry Jowett in which he says that we may make decisions in our lives which take us in a direction we wish we had not gone. God, however, is not limited by our failings and can bring healing and restoration even in the midst of these decisions. Jowett terms this regret of ours and desire to have made a different choice, “the other turning.”

While he speaks of “the other turning” specifically in relationship to choices we would like back again in our regret so that we may make a different choice, “the other turning” seemed an appropriate phrase to apply to life’s journey in a broader sense, especially at the start of a new year. As I look back over my life, there are a number of instances where significant decisions were made that set me on a trajectory that has brought be to this place, to my little apartment in Des Moines, Iowa. If another decision had been made at one of those junctures, is it possible that I would be writing this post from a completely different geographical location than I am now?

For example, when I was 10 and living in Scottsbluff, Nebraska, my dad had applied and interviewed for high school counselor positions in Colorado Springs, Colorado, and Lincoln, Nebraska. He decided that whichever school offered him the position first he would take. Lincoln Christian offered him the job first, so off my family moved to Lincoln where we/they have been ever since. Living in Lincoln certainly impacted the experiences and relationships I’ve had since then.

The second example that comes to mind, my senior year of college I applied for internships at both Living History Farms and at Deerfield in Massachusetts. Both were great programs, and I would have loved to go to either museum. I was accepted as an alternate at the Deerfield program and offered a position at the LHF program. I had to decide about LHF before I would know for sure about Deerfield. I accepted LHF and then was told a few days later that someone had dropped out of the Deerfield program, and there was a spot for me. I’d already sent in my acceptance to LHF, so off to Des Moines I went and here I still am.

I certainly see God’s hand in both situation, guiding my family and I to the places He wanted us to be, but sometimes I wonder what my life would be like if my dad or I had taken “the other turning.” Now I suppose one could become paralyzed wondering which direction they should turn, trying to figure out all the possible outcomes of either decision beforehand. Fortunately though, God calls us to live in faithfulness to Him each day, and as I do that, He will direct my steps in the turning He has for me. As I follow Him, I need not regret my decisions or wish I had taken “the other turning” because the plans He has for me will bring me purpose and fulfillment and Him great glory.

As I prepare to embark on this second month of 2009, I am excited to see what God has for me as I walk in faith, listening to God, trusting Him to guide me to take the turnings He has for me this year. Now they could be quite normal, mundane things, or perhaps it will be something completely life changing. No matter the case, a year from now, I know will be able to rejoice in His faithfulness and not regret the other turnings. I anticipate the journey and am looking forward to sharing it with you on my blog.

New Year's Prayer

"O Lord my God, to you and to your service I devote myself, body, soul, and spirit. Fill my memory with the record of your mighty works; enlighten my understanding with the light of your Holy Spirit; and may all the desires of my heart and will center in what you would have me do. Make me an instrument of your salvation for the people entrusted to my care, and grant that by my life and teaching I may set forth your true and living Word. Be always with me in carrying out the duties of my faith. In prayer, quicken my devotion; in praises, heighten my love and gratitude; in conversation give me readiness of thought and expression; and grant that, by the clearness and brightness of your holy Word, all the world may be drawn into your blessed kingdom. All this I ask for the sake of your Son our Savior Jesus Christ. Amen."

~ The Divine Hours: Prayers for Autumn and Wintertime
Compiled by Phyllis Tickle