DINNER 59 #58 (In Support of Ukraine)

Cooked from recipes on pages #59 of various cookbooks & magazines.

2.27.2022 Hosted in Montclaire, NJ by Olga Zaikina-Kondur and Alex Kondur, in anticipation of the 59th day of 2022.

Cooks: Irina Danilova and Olga Zaikina-Kondur.

Decoration: Olga and Alex Kondur.
Participants: Olga Zaikina-Kondur, Masha and Alex Kondur, Irina Danilova, Hiram Levy, Giacomo Tagliabue, Dasha Filippova, Julia Tulovsky, Nikolay Malinin, Phillip Tefarikis.

MENU:
Ukrainian Borscht, Lviv Bread, Salad "Mimoza", Baked Eggplant With Cheese, "Draniki" (latkes), Kyiv Cake, Kharkiv chocolate cake “Triumph”, home made Pertsovka (Ukrainian vodka with added hot peppers).

The first post-pandemic, zoom-less, in person Dinner 59 #58 was almost swept away by the unprecedented war in Ukraine when Olga proposed to turn it into a Ukrainian Dinner of support. Ukrainian Borscht became a major symbolic dish. The recipe was not easy to find in the collection of pages #59. Ukrainian books offered other dishes. In Russian books were unusual variants “mushroom borscht”, etc. Finally one was found on the Internet on a Ukrainian cooking site and it was great. For Irina it was the first borscht cooked in 14 years. She stopped cooking borscht after her mother, who made great borscht, died. The rest of the recipes were taken from Ukrainian Cook Books. Some of them were collected during visits to Kyiv and Kharkiv, Ukraine.