On 12th of April Olha and our friends cooked and ate Ukrainian traditional dumplings-varenyky with smetana. It was such a great party! We played playstation and ate a lot of dumplings and did Karaoke. I loved varenyky with smetana (also Mexican source Ferando had made). everything was so nice!
This year Ukrainian orthodox Ester was on the 12 of April.
Though, I am not a christian, sometimes it is nice to remember some traditions of your country when you are living abroad for a long time. So, on Easter Sunday we decided to arrange a combined EOTO again with 2 study-pairs: me and Hyun Ssong and Olha and Yoon Soo.
Also we invited our other friends to make it more fun. So, as a result, we celebrated Ukrainian Easter with people from Ukraine, Russia, the USA, South Korea, China and Japan.
Though our traditional Easter food is Pasha, it would be very difficult to make it by ourselves, so we decided to make it easier and just cook traditional Ukrainian dumplings stuffed with potato and mushrooms called “varenyky”.
Because of the lack of cooking experience, they weren’t the best varenyky I ever ate, but stil our friends liked them a lot.
Also our friend Fernando made a spicy chilly sause and to my surprise, Korean girl Yoon Soo couldn’t eat it, as it was too spicy to her. It was funny, as Koreans are famous for eating very spicy food, but even for me that sauce wasn’t very spicy 🙂
Anyway, we talked a lot about different traditional dishes of our countries and it was nice that our EOTO friends could experience at least a small part of our ukrainian culture, as national quisine is a big part of it.
After that we sang karaoke and played a nice music quiz game. We spend a really good time together, but I was a little bit sad, that our EOTO meetings are coming to an end quite soon, as our new friends will go back to South Korea and Japan.
Yesterday, on April 12th, was Ukrainian Easter (as in Ukraine the main religion is Orthodox Christianity, we have it 1 week later then Catholic Christians). We decided to celebrate it together, so I can share my country’s traditions to Yoon Soo. My Ukrainian friend Inga and her EOTO pair Ssong, Victoria from Russia, Fernando from the USA, Yi from China and Ayano from Japan also joined us. We all gathered at Fernando’s appartment.
Me and Inga decided to cook Ukrainian traditional dumplings – varenyky – with potato-mushroom filling. Fernando helped us a lot, as he lived in Ukraine for some time and know how to do them. We made 100 dumplings!!! Varenyky are served with sour cream (smetana – Ukrainian traditional souce), but also Fernando did traditional Mexican souse for spicy eaters.
Yoon Soo and Ayano cooked extraordinary dessert – tortillas with garlic, honey and apple. The ingredients’ combination seems crazy, but it was very yummy!
After eating we played PlayStation games and sang karaoke together. What a great evening!!!~
22th March, we had our 4th meeting with Ssong and Inga in Inga&Olha’s house. this was a my first time visited her house . she cooked borshch, and me and Ssong cooked 불고기 볶음밥 and 된장찌개(doenjang jigae), which is general sub-meal in Korea. especially doenjang jigae is sold every restaurant in Korean street. doenjang (된장)is one of representative ‘jjang’ in Korea made by beans.
doenjang (된장)
we put a word jjang(장) which are made by same method such as 고추장, 간장..etc. this is made by fermenting method.(you can easily imagine, if you imagine yogurt) so in traditional house they have a lot of jangdokdae(장독대), pot making jang for long time. and general food culture is eating rice with 5 or 7 sub-meals. so sometimes sub-meal is a little bit salty, since it is for eating with rice.
bulgogi (불고기)
doenjjang jigae(된장찌개)
< image by google seaching>
empty bowls show how it was delicious! 🙂 
cooking Olha *-*