Ukrainian Easter Myths

We got back from skiing late Easter Saturday evening and very little time to put the usual 4 baskets together (1 for each child, plus the family one which carries all the "icky" stuff the girls don't wish to contaminate their baskets with, like horseradish, mustard, butter, etc..). Luckily Halya had baked the paska for me (the traditional Easter bread), because I had no desire to sit up until midnight and beyond doing it myself. Over the years, I have found that most traditional Ukrainian food is very:

1. Time-consuming - as if to perpetuate the chauvinistic attitude of keeping women in the kitchen, Ukrainian food preparation must have been invented by some cossack intent on keeping his women subservient. It takes hours to make any of the recipes I've been handed down, and there have not been any labour-saving devices to minimize the effort it takes to present a plate of pyrohy that will be gobbled up in 10 seconds flat. Plus that fact that most Ukrainian mamas and babas will sneer upon any attempt to short-cut and recipe by using new technology.

"Hunky Bill's Perogie Maker?? Ty zdurila (Have you gone mad)?? When I was child on the kolhosp, we had to stay up til the crack of dawn until it was right!"

2. Labour-intensive - forget tennis elbow! Have you ever had to knead and stretch paska dough? Man, it's a killer! It seems an awful lot of sweat-inducing back-breaking work for something that's ended up looking like a hockey puck instead of this:

2. Fiddly - almost any recipe I have ever tried seems to miss one minute step or one vital ingredient to as to make yours look and/or taste like nothing your mother-in-law has ever presented; thereby perpetuating the myth with the men in your life that "There's nothing better than Mama's borsht!" (I think this one was dreamed up by Ukrainian women, not the men. It keeps the men dependant on them for the rest of their lives if they want a "decent meal".)

Anyway, got to church at 8 am the next morning with said basket to be blessed by the priest, only to find that we were an hour early for Mass and that there was almost nowhere to sit. Luckily, they had reserved the first few rows for children and senior citizens (with police tape, no less) and we were able to wait it out sitting down. Two and a half hours later, it took me 15 minutes to get me and my precious load out of church, as the next Mass was starting at 11 am and just as many people were pushing to get in as were pushing to get out. What chaos! I'm surprised there weren't any serious injuries with a sharpened kabanosy, or something!