Latvia - September 29th 2007

At the risk of sounding repetitive, I have been quite busy in the past couple of weeks and so I haven't had a chance to write about my latest culinary adventure in Latvia (by way of my stove and my dining room) until now. I wasn't only busy because of work, though, as last week end Eric and I made a trip to San Francisco. What a wonderful week-end, we went out on a boat with his friend Scott and other fun people, saw the Blue Angels perform aerobatics in the sky, went flying to Half Moon Bay the day after, I flew a plane (yes, it's true, I have pictures to prove it), we did a couple of aerobatics ourselves (not me on the pilot seat, I was sitting at the back of the plane being really scared) and had really good food as always! I could write about this for a lot longer but it really doesn't relate to Latvian cuisine, so I'll put a sock in it.

I had no idea about what a Latvian typical meal might have been like; I figured probably meat and potatoes, hearty, not too elaborated, and I think I was almost correct with the exception of the "elaborated" part. It appears that Latvian cuisine is anything but plain and simple. Very rich in my view but not overwhelmingly so.

And so it is that about 7 months after I started writing about the Latvia's dinner, I finally found again the time to write on my blog. But of course not much I can remember about the dinner now.... although thankfully I still have the scoring. It is a shame since we had a new friend over for dinner (and with this I mean someone who had not come to an alphabetical dinner before) and I had talked about the blog and blah blah blah... Well, it's work, what else can I say?

But here is the menu and the scores:

Appetizers
Silke Cepts Ar Sipoli Merce (fried herrings in onion sauce): 6.25

Main Course
Taidetud Vasikarind (roast stuffed shoulder of veal): 9
served with
Belviu Maltinai (fried potato patties): 8.5
and
Porskinti Raudoni Kapustai (braised red cabbage with sour cream sauce): 7.75

Dessert
Aleksander Torte (raspberry filled pastry strips): 6.75

Next round: Madagascar