Our Virtual Vacation Weekend in St. Petersburg, Russia

Since we could not plan the sorts of international trips we would normally take right now, I came up with the idea of doing virtual vacations. In this time of the Covid-19 pandemic, it is important for us to assert our will against the disease. There are so many things we cannot control, including the mental health damage living with the pandemic can cause. But we can use our imagination to lift our spirits and, at least for some moments, show that we are not completely in the thrall of this worldwide calamity. For our first weekend of this sort, I chose St. Petersburg, Russia.

Why St. Petersburg? We have never been there, are not sure if we ever will visit there, but it has quite a lot to attract us. The Hermitage Museum, The music of the Kirov Orchestra and Opera Company, and Russian food for starters. Also, my wife adopted our daughter from Russia more than two decades ago, so the country will always have a special place in our heart.

While I put myself in charge of preparing the food and planning the entertainments for the weekend, I asked my wife Therese to decorate our living room and dining room to give them the proper ambiance, so that we might imagine we had really gone for a weekend to St. Petersburg. She did a lovely job, in my opinion.

Another reason for wanting to decorate the house was my concept for the weekend – not to simply enjoy things that could be found in St. Petersburg, but to actually pretend that we had gone there for a visit. For example, I decided that for our trip, we would stay in the Hotel Astoria, a very posh hotel right in the middle of the oldest part of the city, within easy walking distance of the Hermitage and so many other attractions. I reasoned that, if we stayed there, we would probably eat at least one meal at the hotel restaurant, the Astoria Restaurant. As a result, I decided to take as that restaurant’s menu as the inspiration for our weekend’s menu.

Now don’t think that on Friday morning, I just got up and started throwing together Russian food. There was quite a bit of preparation necessary for carrying off this weekend, and I was happy to do it – it kept my mind off of things like percentages of positive cases in South Carolina. As I describe below the many different recipes I executed, you will see the outcomes of this preparation, but let me first give you some idea here of what it entailed.

First, I thought there might be some prepared ingredients that I should get from an authentic source. Two things came to mind: caviar, and smoked meats like kielbasa. For the former, I considered several that came to me via Facebook advertisements (I must have mentioned caviar), and decided on getting some from Calvisius. Then as it came to the kielbasa, I noted that there were other specialty items that I might get from Russian Food USA, and so I placed an order with them.

One of the first items on that menu at the Astoria Restaurant that captured my imagination was the Pelmeni, small dumplings that might constitute a very fine lunch. In consulting recipes, I discovered there is a characteristic mold used for making the dumplings, and was able to get one from Amazon!

So on the Thursday, the day before the St. Petersburg weekend was to begin, one of the things I did to prepare was I made the pelmeni dough. And can I tell you, I am glad I did this the day before. In order to get the dough’s stickiness down to a manageable consistency, I had to add about 1-1/2 cups more flour than the recipe suggested. And I was adding it just a tablespoon or two at a time! Even then, it was still very sticky, but I thought, well, that must be the way it’s supposed to be. And sure enough, after refrigerating it overnight, it was much easier to handle the next day, even though it was still very soft and sticky.

Friday, August 7th

The pelmeni made for our first meal, and wow, they were a big hit with both of us. The simple filling made from ground turkey and pork and chopped onions with salt and pepper, the slightly chewy dough covering, and the creamy butter and sour cream (both vegan) dolloped on top made for a super yummy beginning.

We began our entertainment as we ate lunch with a 2003 film called “The Stroll” about an attractive lady who convinces two young men to accompany her on a walk halfway across St. Petersburg. We loved it. We followed that up with a film version of “Anna Karenina” – there are many versions, but the one we picked was the one with Sophia Marceau from 1997 – it was filmed in actual buildings in St. Petersburg, adding an element of gravity to the film.

I had made our dinner for that night, Solyanka, that morning, before I made lunch. So all I had to do was heat it up. This is one of these kitchen sink sort of dishes, with all sorts of ingredients including ground veal and pickle juice. The resulting amalgam of flavors sticks to your ribs for sure, but it is also so full of depth of flavor.

Our first day concluded with watching a performance of the Swan Lake Ballet performed by, you guessed it, the Kirov Ballet – filmed, however, in England, during a tour of the Kirov not long after the fall of the Soviet Union. A young Valery Gergiev conducts the orchestra, already using those bizarre flickering of his fingers in his conducting, which must make him impossible for the players to follow. The ballet was very beautiful, the music quite wonderful, and we went to bed that night feeling quite transported, and very well-fed indeed.

Saturday, August 8th

I reasoned that even in St. Petersburg, a cosmopolitan hotel restaurant like the Astoria would probably make English breakfast available to its non-Russian guests. So I prepared such a breakfast for us. Bacon, eggs, mushrooms, stewed tomatoes and baked beans, with toast of course (with Miyoko butter). Very filling – in fact, I don’t think either one of us had an appetite for lunch until well into the afternoon that day!

Another of the inspirations for this virtual weekend in St. Petersburg came up – a 5 hour long virtual tour of the Hermitage Museum on YouTube. We found this back in May when we were searching for things to distract us from the pandemic. It is absolutely mind-blowing. The camera follows numerous actors and dancers around the museum, pausing languidly to take in all the architectural details and sublime art, as if it were simply following the gaze of the actors who stand in for us. As for the dancers, they are dressed as if they would be middle class people – students, etc. – visiting the museum. There is also an older man with a cane, a sailor in uniform, and so on.

When we were finally ready for some sustenance, we brought out one of the highlights of the weekend – one of our containers of caviar and our half-bottle of champagne. I made blinis and hard-boiled eggs and we had a mini feast. What was supposed to have been merely a pre-amble to dinner threatened to make another meal seem unnecessary.

As we puzzled over whether more food would be needed, we moved on to the first chunk of the evening’s entertainment. I have seen Tchaikovsky’ opera “Queen of Spades” (aka Pique Dame) performed at the Metropolitan Opera in New York twice, and it was brought to New York by, again, Valery Gergiev, longtime director of the Kirov Orchestra in St. Petersburg. On YouTube there are I think more than one performances of this opera. I was keen to share it with Therese and see what she thought of it. The plot is a pretty off-the-wall, but the music is sheer genius.

After watching the first of three acts of this performance, we paused and I put together a pretty simple but once again wholly satisfying dinner. On Thursday I had prepared Pozharsky Cutlets and froze them, so on Saturday evening all I had to do was defrost them and fry them up in a pan, and make the mushroom gravy. Since we were not crazy hungry, a couple of small chicken cutlets each was just right.

After eating and cleaning up the kitchen (thanks, Therese!), we finished up the opera and the evening. The Tchaikovsky was just as genius as I remember it – Therese got it, and we both enjoyed the opera tremendously.

Sunday, August 9th

On Sunday, our focus wavered a bit. We spent most of the day doing decidedly non-Russian things. I worked for much of the afternoon on created the dinner, which was a couple different kinds of piroshkis. They looked lovely when they were done, and they tasted yummy as well, but I would say that in the future this is a dish I am happy to let someone else make and me eat. A lot of work.

We saved one of the great entertainments from Russian literature for Sunday night – David Lean’s production of “Doctor Zhivago.” I must say – and Therese will back me up on this one – that during the movie, I was not won over by the story. There were just too many plot elements I was not buying, and the poor treatment generally speaking of the beautiful heroin was not to my liking. But by the end I had come around. It is a devastating film, but also so beautiful, and there isn’t an actor in it I don’t think who doesn’t give the performance of his career, even Tom Courtenay as the totally unlikeable revolutionary leader. And Omar Sharif and Julie Christie are just amazing.

With that evening, we had concluded our first virtual vacation weekend. The next day we went back to our regular humdrum, pandemic-filled lives. Was the weekend a success? Did this “virtual vacation” concept work, as a respite from and recharging against the vagaries of the pandemic? The answer to both those questions was a resounding yes! We had learned a lot from this weekend how to make the concept work even better, and we looked forward to the second weekend, starting just 5 days later, when we would “visit” the ancient ruins of Petra, Jordan.

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