Building A Life Out of Egg-Blocks

In order to anwer the many questions I've been asked about what I've been eating here...

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The school gives us money each week for breakfast and so we eat your typical breakfast foods at home each morning- eggs, bread and jam, yogurt, and cereal (only the cornflakes here are actually delicious because they don’t get soggy really fast like American cornflakes do).

The school feeds us lunch and dinner each teaching day. Since the other girls were sick today, the cooks sent me home with lunch and dinner for them when I came to eat. Taking the food home gave me the opportunity to have a photo shoot of it.

A typical lunch usually consists of the following:

Soup. The broth is pretty much the same everyday, but the meat changes. Today it was chicken-noodle. They always serve it with khleb (bread).

Some form of salad. This one was carrot-apple, but the cooks other favorites also include beet, potato-pea, and cabbage. We eat a lot of cabbage; it's actually a little surprising when a meal doesn't have cabbage in at least one dish. I pretty sure that I've consumed more cabbage in the past week than I've consumed in my entire life's worth of cabbage-eating experiances prior to Russia combined.

We also had boiled potatoes today at lunch. Potatoes are another Russian staple, butI didn't take a picture of them because I think you all probably know what boiled potatoes look like.

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Egg-cubes. Actually, I'm not totally sure what they're made out of, but we probably average eating them once a day. They appear to be eggs that have been whipped together with sour cream and whatever leftovers the cooks happen to feel like putting in them and then poured into a pan and baked. Yeah, pretty weird. I'm still not sure if they're a typical Russian dish, or just a Russian lunch-lady invention. So far, we've had chicken egg-cubes, various vegetable egg-cubes, and salmon egg-cubes (as was the case at lunch today). I'm starting to get used to them, but I don't think I'll ever be a huge fan of them. I told Elise (one of the teachers I live with) that I might try frying up a left-ever cube in a pan for breakfast tomorrow and eating it with ketchup. She told me she'd be happy to speak at my funeral and explain the cause of my death.

Dinner is always small because lunch is the big meal of the day here, which I personally think makes a lot more sense then eating a huge dinner like we do back in America. Our dinner tonight was a very typical one for us. We had:

Chicken-potatoe salad and...

...EGG CUBES!! Yum! Yum! Carrot- my favorite!