My husband, Pasha, told his family to come over to the dacha for a backyard barbecue, but ordered me to buy all the groceries. The celebration was over before we even made it to the grill.
My husband, Pasha, told his family to come over to the dacha for a backyard barbecue, but ordered me to buy all the groceries. The celebration was over before we even made it to the grill.
“Five kilos of prime beef!” Pasha blurted out cheerfully, hurriedly zipping up his windbreaker in the hallway. “Mom said to buy the absolute best for the barbecue—she invited Aunt Raya and her husband to our dacha. So get the ribeye. We’re living large!”
I froze in the middle of the hallway with a cup of morning cocoa in my hand. My inner lead analyst, who usually woke up after the second sip of a strong, hot drink, snapped to attention instantly. The air suddenly smelled distinctly of a financial scam.
“Five kilograms of prime beef?” I asked, using that polite, icy tone people use when asking phone scammers which exact security department they’re calling from. I carefully set my mug down on the end table. “And I suppose Mom also asked to pick up a couple of kilos of fresh truffles, a snowy owl feather, and a crate of vintage nectar harvested by virgins on a south-facing slope?”
“Well, Edik is buying the drinks,” Pasha brushed it off carelessly, mentioning his sister’s husband.
The convenient male ability to hear only what doesn’t complicate one’s worldview.
“And Olya sent you a little shopping list on Messenger. Vegetables, cheeses, snacks, stuff like that. Mom wants to make sure we don’t look bad in front of Aunt Raya; they’re coming from the capital, people used to a certain level of service. I’m heading to the hardware store for some wall paneling, I’ll see you at the dacha!”
The front door cheerfully clicked shut. I unlocked my phone.
A message from my sister-in-law, Olya, glowed on the screen in a long, endless scroll. It looked more like the rider of a finicky rock band on tour than a modest grocery list for a family picnic on a quarter-acre plot.
“Lenochka, sweetheart, pick up some blue cheese (only not the cheap kind, Mom can’t stomach it!), capers, large pitted olives, fresh trout for my boys (heavy meat doesn’t sit well with them), and ripe Hass avocados. Oh, and that beef, the prime Black Angus—Mom asked for at least five kilos, Edik loves to eat. And about ten cans of non-alcoholic beer for Edik, otherwise he gets all bloated from the regular stuff. We’ll settle up for the money later, we’re family after all!”
I re-read that last phrase twice.
The amazing property of family duty: it’s always declared a shared burden, but the profits from it somehow remain strictly individual. The phrase “we’ll settle up later” when uttered by my husband’s relatives historically meant a non-refundable donation to the bottomless pit of their stomachs. The sacred tradition of this family was that everyone else enjoyed a fun, loud, and hearty vacation, while you were solemnly appointed the executive sponsor of the event at the end.
I quickly did the math in my head on Olya’s “little shopping list.”
The total came out to a sum comparable to the annual budget of a small municipality. Five kilograms of premium beef plus trout, imported cheeses, and expensive drinks—that was half of my paycheck advance.
Throwing on my coat and grabbing my car keys, I headed to the supermarket.
I am an adult, intelligent woman, I work with numbers, and I know how to budget six months in advance. And I honestly do not understand why I should sponsor someone else’s big-city pretensions out of my own debit card.
Upbeat music played in the aisles, encouraging people to part with their savings easily and effortlessly. I confidently wheeled my shopping cart past the gleaming dark wood displays, where steaks with beautiful marbling lay against black backgrounds. The price tags on them looked like phone numbers.
For Pasha and me, I chose two kilograms of excellent, fresh pork neck with a neat layer of fat. Right behind it in the cart went rosy tomatoes, crunchy pimply cucumbers, a huge bunch of fragrant cilantro, sweet Crimean red onions, and a few sheets of freshly baked lavash. This was our honest, delicious, straightforward, and self-funded dinner.
Then I parked that cart by the register and grabbed a second, empty basket.
It was time to assemble the grocery cart for our dear—in every sense of the word—guests.
Edik, my sister-in-law’s husband, always aroused my anthropological interest. He possessed the grace and gastronomic discrimination of a bottom-feeding catfish. At the dacha, he usually quietly settled down at the bottom of a plastic lounger in the shade of an apple tree and methodically, without blinking, vacuumed up everything edible that floated past. He made absolutely no taste distinctions between expensive ham and third-rate bologna. The main criterion for him was volume.
Aunt Raya lived on eternal, aggressive diets that miraculously paused precisely for the duration of free family banquets.
And my mother-in-law, Zinaida Markovna, simply had a physical need for people to fuss over her, wait on her hand and foot, and hang on her every word—preferably while holding a tray. What mattered to her wasn’t the taste of the steak, but the mere fact that her daughter-in-law had scurried off to buy it at the snap of her fingers.
In the aisles of the hardcore budget section, where the lighting was dimmer and the price tags screamed in toxic yellow, I found exactly what I was looking for.
My gaze fell on the bottom shelf. Sitting there, looking abandoned and forlorn, were chubby plastic buckets with the life-affirming label: “Dacha Barbecue. Red Tag Special.”
Through the semi-transparent plastic, I could make out harsh, stringy cuts of some animal unknown to science, generously drowned in a murky marinade the color of stagnant autumn puddle water. Floating in this magnificence were sparse rings of softened onion.
With a deep sense of inner satisfaction, I loaded two such buckets into my basket.
To them, I added a log of the cheapest processed cheese—that very legendary kind smelling of liquid smoke, which in hard times could easily be used to nail fences together.
Instead of trout for Olya’s boys, I grabbed two packs of “Student” hot dogs, whose ingredient list proudly and honestly featured soy and mechanically separated poultry meat.
Instead of the elite beer for Edik that supposedly didn’t bloat him, I snatched a crate of sale-priced light brew in plastic jugs.
And as a final touch, I topped it all off with a tin can of cheap squash spread. Domestic delicacies, so to speak. If we’re going to splurge, let’s really do it.
While I was ringing up two separate receipts at the register, my phone chimed. Olya.
“Lena, are you at the store? Grab some cherries too, only the hand-picked southern ones, large size. And cold-pressed pomegranate juice. Money’s as agreed, we’ll settle up later!”
I smirked, dropped my phone into my purse, and walked out to the car.
I arrived at the dacha first. The weather was gorgeous, and the June sun was warming up the fresh green grass.
After unloading the bags into the summer kitchen, I lovingly and leisurely marinated our pork neck. I sliced the onions into rings, squeezed them by hand until the juice came out, poured in kefir, and generously added freshly ground black pepper and basil.
Snapping the lid onto the glass container, I securely hid it in the very back, unseen corner of the refrigerator, blocking it with pots of yesterday’s side dishes.
The cheap plastic buckets of “Dacha” shashlik were solemnly hoisted right to the center of the kitchen table. Around them, I artistically arranged the plastic jugs of beer, placed the brick-hard log of cheese right in its factory plastic wrap, and set out the packs of hot dogs. The composition was crowned by an unopened can of squash spread.
The continuation is in the first c0mment
