A few weeks ago we attended the birthday party of a little girl whose mother is from Russia. The party was held at a football stadium — it was a tailgate party — and on a perfect autumn day a couple dozen people of all ages milled around the tables that had been set up and arranged with a massive spread, not even counting the chocolate cupcakes. One of the centerpieces of the menu was a smoked trout, which was both delicious and a thing of beauty. I said, “Wow, look at that, where’d you get that?” and it turned out that the Russian mama was a regular customer at a tiny grocery store about two miles away from our house. “You know about Lina’s Grocery, right?”

I did not know about Lina’s Grocery. “Tell me everything,” I said. “They have everything,” I was told. My husband listened intently — he is always interested in learning where he can get smoked fish — and we said we would go there as soon as we could.

The day came recently. We piled into the car and drove out to Hamden. “Where is this place?” my husband asked. “It’s off Dixwell, kind of near the big malls,” I said. We headed north and we only made one wrong turn and we got there in about ten minutes. “It’s on a bus line,” I observed approvingly. We parked the car and walked in. The exterior of the store was not too promising looking: Lina’s Grocery is a tiny doorway adjacent to a big home care services operation (also called Lina’s); walking in requires a small leap of faith. However, it is totally worth the leap.

Lina’s Grocery is an imported food shop that focuses on Eastern European food. That’s all they’ve got. If you want anything else, like a box of Froot Loops or a bottle of shampoo, go elsewhere. But if you want huge jars of beautiful peaches, relatively obscure teas (they have the Ahmad tea my husband loves), German butter, access to dozens of different kinds of Russian and Polish penny candies, or Eastern European breads and cookies, this is the place to go. I walked around for a solid fifteen minutes before I even thought to get a basket. Lina’s is a tiny store, but there’s a lot of data to absorb. The whole place is crammed with tinned, jarred, or otherwise packaged food. There is a tiny deli counter where you can buy your smoked fishes (many types) and deli meats (I haven’t absorbed any of that stuff yet). There is a wall of refrigerator cases where they have bottles of kefir, stacks of different butters, and cheeses. You can buy bottles of kvass, jars of pickles, tins and bottles of eggplant and pepper spreads; if you have ever, ever wanted to buy a tin of sprats, Lina’s is the place to go.

It is, actually, a little overwhelming for the novice. I wanted to understand what the goods were like before I started making my selections — was I, in fact, going to buy anything at all? What were the prices like? Did it look like they had good turnover? Did Lina’s even take credit cards? It seemed like the kind of place where it was quite possibly cash-only, which would mean making more careful selections, because we only had so much cash on us. The shop was certainly busy – there were maybe six other people in there, when we first arrived, and in that space, six is a lot of people. I moved slowly, deliberately, until my daughter said, “Mama, LOOK!” and grabbed a can off a low shelf. The label read “Coffee Sweetened Condensed Milk.” And there was a vanilla one, and a caramel one. “Oh my god,” I said. “We need these.” I finally went to get a shopping basket, and put one can of each into the basket. Made in Lithuania.

And then the ice was broken. I debated buying one of the massive, beautiful glass jars of peaches, but held off: I’m not sure we have use for that quantity of canned peaches. But they are beautiful, and as soon as I can think of an excuse to buy a jar, I will. I did break down and buy a package of Marmalade Snails, which we haven’t tasted but look like a cross between a Goetz Bullseye candy crossed with Chuckles (the snails are fruit-flavored jelly rolled up with a creamy white filling, to look like tiny slices of jelly-roll, or snails — made in Belarus). We bought a loaf of a very dark rye bread, a pack of chocolate sugar wafer cookies, two Polo bars, and some kind of chocolate candy that I should have made a note of, but didn’t, which I regret, because it was really really good.

We happened to have some pastrami already at home, and once we unpacked our haul from Lina’s my husband got right to work building himself a handsome pastrami sandwich on the rye bread. “Do you think you could learn to make this?” he asked me. “Bread like this?” I read  the list of ingredients and said, “Probably.” And I probably could. But I’m not leaping to do it. The fact is, the groceries at Lina’s are very reasonably priced, and so long as we don’t mind trekking the two miles to go stock up on things, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t just give them our custom. And anyone else living in the New Haven area who feels a strong need for Russian or Polish candy, or coffee, or pretty much anything else they miss from the old country, should head out there straightaway.

My husband told me that he heard people speaking Russian in the store — in fact someone addressed him in Russian, clearly assuming that anyone who’d go to Lina’s would speak the language. I’m not sure how big the Eastern European community is around here, but it is clear that Lina’s is meeting the needs of an awful lot of people. The cans and jars on the shelves all look fresh and clean — this is not stuff that’s been sitting around forever waiting to be bought, it’s stuff that turns over frequently. And right now, of course, there’s tons of stuff that’s in, special, for Christmas — all kind of fabulous gift packaging of things. Tins of tea that look like Victorian decorated cloth-bound books and so on. Packages of frosted wafer cookies with extra-fancy icing decorations. And, let me say again, the prices are good: we loaded up our basket with lovely things and came out having spent only about twenty dollars.

I have been thinking very vaguely about having people over on New Year’s Day and I strongly suspect that if we do, a hefty percentage of the menu will be straight from the shelves of Lina’s. I owe that Russian mama a debt of gratitude.
Lina’s is at 119 Sanford Street, Hamden, CT. They’re open Monday through Friday from 10-7, Saturdays closing early at 3 o’clock. Closed Sundays. They do take plastic.

This year, we went to New York City for Thanksgiving: it was pretty much the usual gang of idiots, just in Manhattan instead of New Haven. My parents were there, my brother and his family, my aunt and uncle, my cousin and his family. We were all happy to see each other. We had a fabulous meal, in my aunt and uncle’s apartment. The meal was prepared by my cousin and his wife, people who know their way around a kitchen and who are able to plan a Thanksgiving dinner, long-distance, with extraordinary skill.

We went to New York mid-morning, on the train; we hung around the apartment for a few hours; we ate ourselves into a stupor; and then we staggered back to Grand Central Station, dozing most of the way home. When we got back to our apartment, we cracked open the Ziploc bag of leftover smoked turkey that we’d been given as a parting gift, and made sandwiches. “This is really good,” we all agreed, “but it’s too bad we don’t have leftovers of the other stuff.”

So it was that at eleven o’clock on Friday morning, we could be found at our local butcher’s counter, buying a ten pound turkey to take home and roast. While I chatted with Jimmy about the turkey — Jimmy and I had talked earlier in the week, and he knew the odds were pretty good I’d be coming in to buy a small turkey come Friday — my husband collected the other items we needed. A loaf of semolina bread, celery, onions, to use in the stuffing; some green beans, because everyone agreed we’d want a green vegetable. We bought more eggs, so I could make corn pudding, and my husband added some russet potatoes so he could mash them. My daughter threw a bag of potato chips. When I protested, “Why the hell do we need potato chips, if we’re about to cook all this food?” she said, “But I need a snack!” So we bought the potato chips.

We got home, turned on the oven, and immediately got to work. My husband and I don’t exactly work seamlessly together in our kitchen, but we do pretty well. We managed to get the stuffing assembled within 40 minutes or so (long sautéing of celery and onion, then quick combining with bread cubes, dried cranberries, parsley, and some beef stock we had sitting around) and the turkey was in the oven by 12.30. All afternoon we worked in fits and starts. We had to take breaks to take care of other pressing matters (there was a movie to return to the video store, for one thing; and our daughter’s little friend who came over to play needed a snack, and I needed to tell my daughter, after the little friend left, that if she didn’t clean her room she wasn’t going to get a bedtime story), but we were all seated at the dining table at 6.45, which is pretty much when we normally sit down to eat.

In the end, we were too exhausted from cooking to want to bother trimming and cooking the green beans. “Do we need to have the green beans tonight?” I asked. “Screw it,” said my husband. “We’ve got plenty of brown food here.” And we were gluttons. There were mashed potatoes done with sour cream and butter. There was turkey, which my husband had complained looked overdone, but which tasted wonderful and didn’t seem overdone to me at all. There was corn pudding, which my husband said was the best corn pudding I’d ever made (possibly because I messed up and used four eggs instead of three, but we’ll never know). There was the bread stuffing, which was a little bland to my taste, but which was still very satisfying. And there was gravy, which is my husband’s enterprise entirely — I refuse to have anything to do with it — and for once, he didn’t complain about it being wrong.

We ate and ate and ate and then we cleared the dishes and cleaned up and we were only a little sad that I hadn’t gotten around to making a dessert. “What we really need is a chocolate chess pie,” my husband observed. “I could make one tomorrow,” I suggested. But the weekend has come and gone. I haven’t made that chess pie. But we have eaten most of the leftovers. It feels pretty good. We had our Thanksgiving and ate it, too.

The Story of the Stromboli began because I had some random ingredients that I had to put together somehow to form a Meal. This is how many kitchen victories begin. It is, of course, also how many kitchen tragedies begin, but let’s not dwell on that right now.

I had thawed a 1 1/3 pound package of pizza dough. (This was homemade dough I’d put together last week. I deliberately made a vast quantity of dough, and used 1/3 of it the day I made it, and froze the rest of it, divided between two plastic tubs.) I had this notion that if I rooted around in the fridge, I would find that I had what it would take to make a novel dinner, with the pizza dough as a base. Unfortunately, I struck out. I had Parmesan cheese, but the jar of roasted red peppers I’d thought I’d use had gone moldy. (Whoops. Kind of a big jar, too,  which sucks to waste, but — sometimes these things get away from us.) I had half an onion in the fridge, and a half of a bag of frozen spinach. I could make pizza, sure, but…. wouldn’t it be more fun to make a stromboli?

But: meat. The only meat in the house that I needed to use up was pot roast. Could I make pot roast stromboli?

I suppose I could. On Facebook, where I voiced my query publicly, one person suggested making a stromboli using challah dough, and stuffing it with kasha and pot roast. I think I’d add some smothered cabbage and onions: an idea worth exploring another day.

But on realizing that I lacked mozzarella — without which I feel there is no stromboli — I decided that the thing to do was stop at the grocery store and find some other meat to put in the beast. Pork products were out of the question, and since the store didn’t have any beef salami (which would have been ideal), I opted for pastrami. My daughter, who has never seen me buy pastrami before, said, “Yuck, what’s that?” I said, “You’ll love it.” She scowled at me, but we walked home with our groceries and I told her my plan.

“I’m gonna sauté some onion and garlic and cook spinach into that too, and then I’m gonna roll out the pizza dough, and I’m gonna put cheese and pastrami and the onion and spinach and garlic on, and then I’m gonna roll it up so it’s like a jelly roll cake [something she’d seen made on the Great British Bake Off] and then I’m gonna bake it.”

“That sounds good,” she admitted.

“Ok, then,” I said. We got home and I got to work. I grated cheeses (mozzarella, Parmesan, provolone) and I cooked the vegetables and I greased a big cooky sheet. In the meantime, I texted my husband and said, “Pastrami stromboli for dinner.” He wrote back, “not sure what that is, but you had me at ‘pastrami.'” When he walked in the door, I was starting to assemble the thing itself.

Two weeks ago, I baked two dozen bialys. I baked one dozen toward the end of the week, and then two days later I baked another dozen. The first batch was mostly a failure. Well: the first half dozen were a failure; the second half dozen were a little better. By the second go-round, I was starting to get the hang of shaping the bialys correctly, and by the end of it all I thought, “When I do this again, I’m gonna be on top of it.”

I haven’t made bialys since. The last two bialys went moldy before we had a chance to eat them, which is my own fault, because obviously I should have just put them in the freezer. But for a few days, there, everyone here was gleefully eating bialy after bialy. We had bialys with butter and bialys with pimiento cheese and bialys with cream cheese and red onion. It was a good time, and well worth the work and angst involved in making the bialys. No one here said, “Uck, Mama, no more.”

Since making all those bialys, I have made chocolate chip-butterscotch chip oatmeal cookies, and I’ve made a lot of evening meals, more than a handful of lunches and snacks, and I’ve baked some white sandwich bread and one really good Aunt Velma chocolate cake with coconut frosting. In a couple of days I have to get ready to bake a birthday cake for my father, to bring to Thanksgiving dinner. All of this is to say, I’ve been doing a lot of cooking and a lot of baking and it’s all fine. No one’s complained.

But yesterday, as my daughter and I were unpacking a grocery delivery, she asked me, “Mama, have you ever eaten an Oreo?”

I was taken aback. Oreos are one of the essential cookies of my childhood. I’ve eaten more Oreos than my daughter has had hot meals. “Sure,” I told her.

“Can you buy some Oreos sometime?” she asked.

This, on a day when we had a remarkable homemade chocolate cake with coconut buttercream frosting just sitting on the counter. Right there. Cold milk in the fridge waiting to be served alongside the cake. Right at that moment, my daughter wanted to know if I could buy her Oreos.

And I thought, “Why am I doing this?”

So I’m going go stop baking nice things for a while. We will eat up the cake we have, and the leftover Hallowe’en candy, and I will buy a box of Oreos one of these days, and my daughter will love them. (In fact, she HAS eaten Oreos; she has not reached the age of 8 1/2 without experiencing Oreos. That would be disgusting. It is true, I think, that she’s never had to suffer through eating Chips Ahoy. But we’ve made sure that she knows about Nutter Butters and Oreos and Fig Newtons and other American cooky classics.) (I can’t recall if she’s ever had Entenmann’s chocolate chip cookies; we should get a box, just to be sure she’s well-rounded.)

I can’t decide if she will care that I’ve stopped baking for the household. It may be that she won’t care at all, and that she’ll be more than happy to just have Oreos or maybe some Keebler chocolate covered graham crackers, when she wants something sweet. But I bet one day she will sidle up to me and ask, “How come you never make those brown sugar coconut cookies anymore? Or those chocolate sandwich cookies? Those were really good.”

And I’ll say, “Chocolate sandwich cookies? You mean, the ones that are just like Oreos, except like even better?”

Yesterday I went to the public library to return my copy of the new Shirley Jackson book, which was due (appropriately) on Hallowe’en, but which I returned a day late. I paid my 20 cent late fee and ambled off to browse for something I could pay late fees on in the future. The books that fell into my hands were Michael Wex’s “Rhapsody in Schmaltz” and “The Gefilte Manifesto” by two hipstery sounding young Members of the Tribe named Jeffrey Yoskowitz and Liz Alepern. In case you are slow on the uptake: these are very different works on the same subject: Jewish food.

Wex’s book is of course primarily a work of prose, a cultural history, and the Yoskowitz/Alpern work is a straight cookbook. I began to poke through them both today, with some difficulty, as we acquired two new cats last night and this morning they’ve decided that it’s totally ok to jump up to wherever I am sitting and make it impossible for me to read.

But I can confidently predict a few things: 1. I will really enjoy the Wex book and 2. the cookbook will simultaneously drive me insane and make me feel a need to do things that will surely qualify for immediate cataloging in the Museum of Tsuris. They’ve got a recipe for sour cream, my friends. Sour cream. An item many of us keep in the fridge; an item almost no one in their right mind would make from scratch at home. I will accept this challenge. Apparently all I need is cream and buttermilk. How hard could it be? I am already very, very loyal to both Cabot sour cream and Arethusa Farm Dairy sour cream. But if I can make a comparable product on my own, at home? I might be willing to do it, once in a while.

More likely, I will wind up with some putrid-smelling yellowy-white glop that I have to rush out to the dumpster. But, it occurs to me — I had no great high hopes with my yogurt making enterprise, and that turned out quite well, so… Sour Cream, here we come.