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Bonnie Morales – A Return to Russian Cooking

Bonnie Morales Kachka. Photo credit Carly Diaz

I grew up really being pretty embarrassed of the food [Russian food} I grew up with. I didn’t want to have anything to do with it. I wanted to eat what my friends were eating at home. Everything my mom made was obviously from scratch because it was cheaper at the time. And as a kid, you think that it's not as good. When we were dating, I brought my (now) husband over to my parents house, just you know the normal sort of stuff and, whenever I had any friends or a boyfriend or anyone coming over to my parents house I always gave them a warning about the food. So I gave him all those same sorts of warnings and then afterwards he thought it was amazing. He loved everything so much. He thought it was delicious and he loved the way everyone were together and the camaraderie. The first few times that he would say stuff like that I just assumed he was saying it to make nice. And it just kept happening and my mom caught wind of this and she started inviting us over for dinner just because she was whipping up some dish that she hadn't made since before they immigrated. He basically sort of lit this fire in her and then in me too, to sort of re-evaluate and rediscover what I just took for granted for so long.

What we covered In this episode

Her parents emigrated from the Soviet Union in 1980 and she was born the year after. She grew up speaking Russian first.
The family was from Belarus which really wasn't its own independent country until very recently.
Her grandmother escaped the ghetto during World War II and Chef Bonnie Morales explains how the name of her restaurant Kachka is linked to her grandmother story.
She started rejecting the food she grew-up with like many first generation of immigrated parents.
It was her husband (where they were dating) made her rediscover Russian food.
Chef Bonnie Morales explains how she was re-interpreting Russian recipe when she attended culinary school instead of looking for the authenticity and the simplicity of a dish.
She went to school for industrial design and in her first job she realized that her passion was in cooking.
She explains the advantage of opening a restaurant in Portland versus somewhere in the US.
The density of food trucks in Portland (one of the highest in the country) makes people want to try something new and at the same time they are very quick to move on to the next shiny thing.
She mentioned the complex aspect of managing people and the fact that when she first thought about opening a restaurant she didn't think about personnel.
She talks about the menu at Kachka: zakouskis, dumplings, rabbit in a clay pot, and Russian grill.
Chef Bonnie Morales and her husband took a part of their staff on a trip to Belarus to experience the food and the people.
Five rapid-fire questions.

Misconceptions about vodka and caviar

We can't talk about vodka in an intellectual way but I would just like to mention that it has a lot of characteristics to it. You can taste differences. You know I think that is the biggest misconception. And then with caviar man there's so many it's hard to pick just one. But I think probably my biggest one is that it has to be served ice cold. It drives me crazy when I see it served on crushed ice. Everything tastes better closer to room temperature and if you're spending that much money why would you want it to be numbingly cold. So serve it at room temperature. I mean obviously you want to store in the refrigerator but when you're serving it you should actually spend some time letting it come to room temperature so you can taste it more.

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Chef Bonnie Morales – People have a very negative connotation of Russian food they think of the food shortages and lots of spoilage and they think of canned vegetables.

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There aren't any other restaurants that do what we do in Portland. I would say that at this at this time I have yet to see anybody doing what we do in this country. – Chef Bonnie Morales

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Chef Bonnie Morales – I have this dish that I know and I grew up with and I liked it but there were problems with it. I view this as a design problem. I identify what those problems are and I fix them.

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