Kasha varnishke

Hello Confined Kitchen friends. I’m Kat and I'm here to bring you Ashkenazi comfort food with only four ingredients (and bad formatting - sorry).

Ideally you have goose fat (any fat will do, butter is great), onions (white are better but beggars etc.), pasta (farfalle are traditional but any are ok, though I think this works better with small pastas rather than long ones) and buckwheat (non-negotiable). [I will end up referring to buckwheat as kasha at various points throughout, because that's generally what I call it. It's not inconsistent, it's ~authentic~.] My optional extras are a veggie stock cube and those ready-made fried onions they put on hot dogs in Ikea (not pictured).

NB: This is one of the few recipes I make entirely by eye, so you may need to experiment with quantities.

Slice the onions and fry in your choice of fat until golden/whatever the equivalent is for red onions. You can be generous with the fat. 

Add the buckwheat. I do this by eye but here I have one large and one small onion and not quite a mug full of buckwheat. 

Mostly push the onion to one side and stir the kasha as it toasts and browns. You should be able to see and smell it - it takes a few minutes. 

Meanwhile boil a kettle. We need about one pint of water for the buckwheat and the rest to cook pasta in. 

If you have a stock cube you can add it to the former - I put mine in the bottom of a Pyrex jug and mash/stir it in after pouring the boiling water over it. Pour that over your kasha/onion mixture in your frying pan. That should now be on a low simmer and stay there for about ten minutes. Stir it occasionally if you get things sticking to the side of the pan but fundamentally you can leave it be. (If you're fancy enough to have a frying pan with a lid that would probably work well here.)

Boil water for your pasta in the meantime and make it like you normally would. (A note on amounts: the kasha/onion mix is enough for about three servings. It keeps in the fridge - not more than one day if I’m  around - and reheats well. I’m a single person so I make fresh pasta to go with it as needed.)

While we’re watching things cook let’s please talk about one of the greatest mysteries in the world, which is that farfalle are considered the only correct pasta for this. Did they have different shapes of pasta in the shtetl in the 19th century? Zumer-feygele? (That’s Yiddish for butterfly. It means “summer birdie”.) When I made this during my elimination diet I discovered that you can’t get gluten-free farfalle and it was All Wrong.

Anyway. You want your pasta al dente and your buckwheat about the same - taste to see how you like it. This should happen about the same time as all the water has been absorbed. You can add a bit more if you need to.

If you’ve made appropriate proportions you can mix it all together in one pan, otherwise just spoon some kasha mix over your pasta. Garnish with Ikea roasted onions if that’s the kind of thing you happen to have lying around. I rarely use salt when I’m cooking so you might want to add some. Black pepper and parsley are also very acceptable. 

Yes, this contains zero vitamins. You should probably eat some fruit for dessert. 

ess gezunterheit!