FRIDAY - Lunch at the State Tretyakov Museum

FRIDAY - Got to do our first cafeteria experience today. Instead of the small restaurant feel of a diner in the US where you can get decent food for a low price, in Moscow there are little cafeterias that serve this purpose, and the one in the Tretyakov is very similar to those around town, we had to try it.

I got an entree called "Meat served in the French Style" and I'm still not sure what the heck that meat was or what they meant by 'the French style', but it was TASTY. It was topped with a fluffy cheese sauce with onions and a slice of tomato. Seriously good stuff! I don't care what that meat was!






Also had a nice little pastry that had apricots in the middle.









Irina ate with us and recommended this baked apple dessert. It was a cored apple filled with a dark sugar in the middle, baked, and then dressed in an apricot jam in a dish with sugar around the rim. Nice!






Without question though, my ballsiest dish of the day was this. An aspic. If you don't know what these are, they're often featured in French and european cookbooks, but haven't really been served in the US anywhere since the turn of the century.

Why? I dunno, but what they are is... well.... You know when you get Spam and there's that 'Spam jelly' in the can? That gelatin is cooked down with the meat and then turned out in a form (usually pretty firm, like normal jello), and that's an aspic. Traditionally they have meat or fish in them with the aspic made from the bones and stock of the animal and are served cold. Yup: meat jello, you got it.

I loaded a huge spoonful of the beef and aspic from this, frankly beautiful dish, and popped that in my mouth. The gelatin... not good. It's like jello soup, but with out any salt... Wasn't goin' down well... But then the gelatin eventually disappeared and the meat inside was fantastic! I thought, "well, i just need to get used to it." I did another big spoonful... not good. This is not right. I tried two more times thinking I just needed to really get my feet wet, but it just wasn't working. This aspic just wasn't my thing, but the rest of the meal was very tasty.