Belarus: Draniki and Mazurka

Mazurka!

I’ll be honest, all I knew about Belarus before cooking this meal was that it’s an eastern European country and that the fictional character, John Wick, was born there (thanks, Ryan haha).

Fun Fact: Belarus used to be called Belorussia, which means ‘white Russia’ and Belarusians eat more potatoes per capita than any other country in the world! So I guess it wasn’t super surprising that most of the recipes I found had a main ingredient of potatoes!

For Belarus, I chose to cook the national dish of draniki (which sounds like the word for getting drunk at a tiki bar lol). Draniki is essentially a shredded potato pancake, similar to Jewish latkes, and one of my favorite brunch places (The Noshery in Denver) makes something similar so I really wanted to try making them!

A lot of recipes I found were meat filled, but I’m trying to go lighter on meat, so I decided to try a wild mushroom stuffed draniki. The potatoes were mixed with flour and egg, stuffed with a mushroom, onion and dill mixture, then fried. I topped these savory pancakes with a chive-y sour cream and it was SO good!

For dessert, I made mazurka, which is a flat almond cake, topped with fruit preserves and powdered sugar. It actually originates in Poland but is very popular in Belarus and it looks really pretty so I thought it’d be fun to make! It ended up being slightly on the dry side and I went a little crazy with the powdered sugar, but I still think it came out pretty good!