Kamchatka in the time of coronavirus -- Гречка!

Please note that I am having trouble accessing my own blog, curse Google.
For earlier blogs, see Paleotsunami travels (the original)

Grechka! Гречка! [buckwheat groats]

  [a kind of kasha, or cereal, and specifically called “kasha” in the U.S.]

Today I am cooking grechka, or buckwheat groats.  It is the staple grain/cereal for most of my Russian friends and colleagues. Personally, I tend to favor pasta or rice, but because now (coronavirus) I am trying to limit my shopping excursions, I figured I should cook some of the few pounds (1/2 kilos) of grechka that are in the flat (about a kilo was left here, and I bought more before I knew that).

My grechka story

Way back when, c. 1993, before I knew much at all about Kamchatka (or tsunamis!), I had a visitor from Novosibirsk.  Slava (Viacheslav) Gusiakov was a tsunami mathematician, who came to the U.S. to visit colleagues. He had written via the infant e-mail service to Brian Atwater (USGS based at University of Washington in Seattle), who referred him to me – I was at the time stationed in Washington, D.C., at the National Science Foundation. Through the new miracle of internet/e-mail (Slava wrote “You have no idea how much a miracle it is until you have lived in Siberia”), he arranged to visit me.  I offered to host him at my apartment/flat, as would be the custom.

Slava had been to Kamchatka and was promoting it as a place to do field work on tsunami deposits. I had been working on such deposits since 1986, with field work in Washington State, Chile and Nicaragua (post-tsunami field survey in 1992).  One day at home, he asked to cook for me; he made grechka.  As I tried it for the first time, he studied my face – when I liked it (at least ok), he smiled happily and said, “If you like (can eat) grechka, you can do field work on Kamchatka!”

Our team in 1998: Vanya, Roma, me, Sasha, Tanya

A later trip, collecting brusnika

 My first Kamchatka field season, in 1998 (Tanya, Sasha, Vanya, Roma, me), we lived rough, with limited food supplies we carried with us, plus fish we caught in the field, as well as berries and a few other gathered foods. [e.g., see my blog on eating wild plants on Kamchatka]

Cleaning fish

Near the beginning of our trip, Tanya and Sasha caught a lot of fish in the nearby lake, so we had fish breakfast, lunch and dinner.  I began to smell like a fish. Then we hiked/bushwacked to the Pacific, arriving in a driving rain to a small dug-in cabin where we lived like the sardines we smelled like.  That night, we ate whatever was around without starting a fire.  So—I am told that in the middle of the night, in my sleep, I was saying “I want kasha!”

Cooking fish

The next day, a fire was built in the cabin stove and a huge pot of grechka was prepared.  The simplest way to eat it would be with some (cooking) oil, which we had.  We did not have butter or mayonnaise, both more tasty alternatives.  Eventually, we would make sauces to put on the grechka.

Vanya cooking on the cabin stove

Back to the present, 2020, I was thinking that my life now, though not as officially constrained as it could be (I am not yet required to remain at home), is a bit like life the field.  What you have is what you’ve got, as we say.  No going to the local shop to buy what you want, any time you want  [though at times on the beach in the field we have found: a can of beer, juicy fruit gum, a jar of jam, orange and lemon peels, the latter from a ship anchored offshore]. 

Today's grechka, 25 March 2020

 

 At least in the field you can catch fish and collect mushrooms, etc.  One year’s journal has a bunch of dinner menus including our fresh catches.  And that year we had a “French chef,” Kevin Pedoja (a scientist, of course, who happened to be French and a good cook). And we had a fair amount of rice, because we had several nights of "plov" (pilaf), an Uzbeki dish that is a Russian favorite -- of course we did not have lamb, so really we were having something a bit more like paella.

 

Here is Wikipedia on grechka [under the name “kasha”]:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kasha

Here is a great blog with more about grechka, with a small Russian lesson.

Glory to Buckwheat