I've been doing my best to stay vegetarian while I've been here, but when the question is between getting enough calories to stay healthy and being veg, I'm afraid things don't look so good for our hooved and beaked friends.
At home in the Chajka, it's easy to eat what I want. I can get pasta and fruits and veggies all over the place. A few weeks ago, I tried to make soup from dried beans. The soup was great, but the process was totally not worth it. First you have to soak the beans, then drain them and cook them for an hour or so in fresh water. But since we think of the water here as poison (with heavy metals and giardia), I had to soak the beans in my precious bottled water. That meant I didn't want to throw out the soaking water and as we know, the soaking water is where beans' bad reputation starts. No problem there. Russia is a spacious country and I'm sure no one minds me having a little extra wind in my sails. So, since, dried beans are hard to work with, I eat a lot of canned beans. Plus, I make fantastic borshcht (n.b. don't wear white while making or eating borshcht.)
I've located two restaurants that are exclusively veggie (not a fantastic ratio for a city of 4.5 million). I've also found a second tier of restaurant (1) that is going for "organic," which I take to mean that if I eat the meat there, I probably won't get sick. Finally, there are some places that have vegetable-heavy options. These are exclusively asian restaurants where I can get noodles and some veggies -- "woks" are all the rage here and the Russians are acting like it's a new technology, recently arrived from Mars.
I don't feel food deprived and in fact I really enjoy eating in, but I do try to get out for lunch every day so that I am sure to encounter Russia -- after all, I can eat beans and pasta at home in San Francisco.)
My earnestness to keep my standards up was reinforced a few days ago when I got food poisoning in Novgorod. All of our meals were provided and aside from the occasional cucumber and tomato garnish, nothing was free of meat. I think it may have been the "salad" made from canned peas and chopped ham suspended in sun-ripened mayonnaise that did me in. Shudder.
The picture below captures a typical scene in my kitchen. I drink about one of these 5 liter bottles of water a day. And since our kitchens are free from any sort of storage containers, I chop the top off of an empty water bottle and use it for leftovers. I've said it before -- Russia is camping + paperwork.
This was my lunch recently at the organic restaurant. Pumpkin soup (great presentation, but weak on spices) along with some Hedgehogs (meatballs with just the lightest dusting of sour cream)
