Mushrooms
I am still enjoying the videos of the "widow" from Ukraine. She appears to have a fairly large network. Different people keep popping in and helping her.
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| Eastern Europeans love their mushrooms. |
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She is collecting them from what appears to be a managed forest of Pinus sylvestris (commonly called Scotch Pine, a Eurasian species) and Quercus rubra (commonly called Northern Red Oak, a North American species). The Boyarka Forest Station is one place that is documented as having that combination of trees but I am sure that combination exist in many other places.
There are many places in Michigan and Pennsylvania where you can find this combination. The difference is that the Pinus sylvestris is from abandoned Christmas tree farms and the Red Oak is the native.
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| Mistletoe in trees circled in red |
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| Mistletoe population density in Ukraine. Lifted from a peer reviewed academic paper. |
Given that she prepares Chicken Paprikash (a classic, Hungarian dish) in this video and the prevalence of mistletoe, it is a decent guess to assume she is in not in the eastern half of Ukraine.
Kettles
The widow has a cooking system. The stove in the outdoor kitchen has a side-draft fire-box.
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| Called a "Chugunok" |
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| The shape of the kettle means it can be fit through a hole in the top of the stove and more surface area is exposed to the heat than a square-bottomed kettle. |
The rolled-in top means that it can be picked up with a very simple tool that doesn't rely on pivots or grip strength. Large, heavy ones can be lifted by two people with nothing more than a couple of poles.
Gathering firewood is a time-consuming task, especially if you cannot use power equipment. A nice thing about hand-tools is that they always start and hand-saws are not very loud.
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| Her indoor cook-stove has inserts that can be removed to create a hole that is sized to the pan or for gentle heat, she can rest the pan on top of the inserts. |
Cooking systems that reduces the amount of firewood needed on a daily basis can save hundreds of hours of work a year.
Apples
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| Yes, I am an apple nerd. These look like "Idared" apples. |
Many of the apples grown in Europe are of North American origin. Idared is a popular storage and cooking apple in Europe. The trees are precocious and productive. The fruit are large, keep well and is relatively tart. Unfortunately, the tree is very susceptible to fire blight. "Enterprise" is a good substitute for Idared.
Icons
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| The Ukrainian widow whose videos I have been enjoying appears to follow the Orthodox practice of Christianity. I am unfamiliar with the shrouding or decorating of icons for Advent. If memory serves, those icons were not shrouded before Advent in earlier videos. |
I’m making a wild, uninformed guess: the shrouding could be related to our church in Advent has some restrictions. No flowers on the altars, no Gloria in Mass, I think other things I can’t remember now. No decorations yet. The readings and homilies talk of a coming event, waiting, a little bit of darkness in the world before the Light comes, on Christmas.
ReplyDeleteSouthern NH
Neat cooking system. That the chungunoc is designed to be inserted into direct fire use is very much like I saw in Nepal. Very efficient and cheap to build locally except for the plate top with those multi size lift plates.
ReplyDeleteIn Nepal I saw 2 sizes of holes and simple plates to cover.
Michael the anonymous
Interesting that many of the apples grown in Europe are now of North American extraction.
ReplyDeleteI had a friend, now deceased , who worked for a government ag agency who went over there on an assignment and loved the place and then a girl so he came back, got divorced, said good bye to his friends and spent the rest of his life there. Got some occasional mail (snail mail-pre computer) and he was very happy there. --ken
ReplyDeleteI'm truly surprised the chungunoc didn't migrate over here in the 1800s. It makes a LOT of sense.
ReplyDelete