I ate a lot of pelmeni on Saturday. I don’t eat them all that often, because, well, meat wrapped in dough isn’t exactly on the top of my list of Nutritious Things I Should Eat for Dinner. But I do like them, and they’re still kind of a novelty since I just moved back to Estonia and they’re SO common here but not so much in the States (I’ve never looked for them in America actually, but I’m sure they can be found in Russian or Eastern European grocery stores).

But anyway, Saturday’s first dumplings came along as a substitute for pizza. My companion asked me as we walked into town, “Do you know a place for cheap pizza?” and I responded “No… but I know a place that’s cheap!” So we ended up at Café EAT, the “dumpling and doughnut café” on Sauna tänav in Tallinn. I wasn’t really hungry as we walked there, but we were on our way to see a two and a half hour long movie (Love in the Time of Cholera), so I figured a few potato and meat dumplings were just the thing for staving off possible hunger during the evening.

I had a few meat-and-spinach pelmeni and a few potato-stuffed ones, topped with a sweet chilli sauce, and also a small scoop of creamy potato salad. The potato salad was quite bland, and I preferred the meat-and-spinach pelmeni to the potato ones (whose filling was a not-very-appetizing shade of gray). But the whole mini-meal (in Estonian you could say kõhutäis—a bellyful) cost me 28 kroons, which is dirt cheap by Tallinn standards, especially within the tourist-filled Old Town (Vanalinn). And the comfort food factor was also appreciated, considering the wet, windy weather.

Fast-forward about 10 hours. The evening contained a movie, some murakaliköör (cloudberry liqueur), a toasty Reval Café, a St. Patrick’s with horrible music but a good running special on beer (4-for-3 works well when you have 4 people), and a sweet honey-flavored dark beer at Olde Hansa (where we also got complimentary shots. Nice!). The night did not include dinner. I had expressed an interest in eating at some point, but instead we just kept drinking, albeit with some standard bar snacks alongside (küüslauguleivad [Estonian garlic bread] and potato skins).

On the way home, I wasn’t really interested in eating anymore. I felt quite full. After passing by Hesburger and Burrito Buss, my friend asked about the food possibilities awaiting at my apartment. I said, “We could make sandwiches, or I have some pelmeni in the freezer.” Pelmeni it is… again. I was all ready to boil them, which is how I usually prepare them, but he said we could just throw them right onto a frying pan. I thought that would only brown the outside and leave the insides still cold, but what do you know, it actually worked (even though I cook a lot, I can be kind of a dolt as to how different cooking techniques work…). Some butter and onions went into a quite-hot pan along with the dumplings. Once again, even though I wasn’t really hungry, I ended up eating some, with sour cream (which is traditional) mixed with Tabasco (decidedly non-traditional). I liked how I got the flavour of Tabasco, but the sour cream mellowed it out so I didn’t go to sleep with my mouth burning. And the pelmeni themselves were tasty, even though I usually buy one of the cheapest brands in the supermarket freezer. Mmm. Tallinn’s late-night eating options are few and far between, so until the situation improves, it seems wise to keep my freezer stocked with pelmeni at all times.

(I don’t know how to format text yet… it bothers me… but it’s too late to figure it out tonight. I need sleep.)

(EDIT: Yay, I may have figured it out… kind of…)