On Easter Sunday, Sofya Hundt’s husband gave her an Easter basket. Contents: one chocolate bunny, one Cadbury creme egg, a couple mini Snickers bars, seven camo-pattern plastic eggs filled with gunmetal-gray M&Ms, and a two-pack of hunters’ turkey calls. “Our first year out turkey hunting!” she wrote later that day on her blog. “How very thoughtful of the Easter Bunny!”
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A year later she met Jacob Hundt, a new American transfer student from California’s Deep Springs College, in the university cafeteria. She helped him buy a ham sandwich and, in the course of conversation, told him her dream of country living—an unusual aspiration for most young eastern Europeans shaking off the privations of the Soviet era. He countered with tales of his childhood on a Wisconsin farm—and that was that. When Jacob graduated in 2003 and returned to his hometown, Viroqua, a town of 4,400 in the Driftless Area about 90 miles west of Madison, Sofya, who’d graduated a year earlier, came with him. They married in 2004; she became a U. S. citizen last year.
Hundt says that from the moment she met her husband she pictured them married and living in the country with a pack of kids. In 2005 they took the next step toward that vision, buying a ten-acre farm just outside Viroqua. They raise grapes and a few grass-fed cattle, which they butcher and sell, along with eggs and certified organic asparagus and elderberries. Jacob teaches at the Waldorf high school in Viroqua, and for a time Sofya taught classes in jam making, pickling, and bread baking at the Driftless Folk School, a nonprofit outfit teaching sustainable-living skills to the greater Vernon County region. (May’s calendar includes classes in blacksmithing, permaculture, and whole-tree architecture.) But the arrival of the couple’s first child put a crimp in her teaching schedule; they now have two children, ages one and four.
Like Drummond’s site, Rich Food for Lean Times features mouthwatering step-by-step photo instructions for artery-hardening delights, including venison-blue cheese stroganoff and dulce de leche fudge alongside Old World classics like hingal, a traditional Caucasian dish of boiled dough topped with browned beef or lamb, caramelized onions, and garlic-yogurt dressing.
The pelmeni were the most difficult. In retrospect, I think I didn’t roll the dough thin enough, and my dumplings were consequently pretty hefty. Once cooked, the meat—a mix of ground beef and pork that in the interest of keeping things local I bought at Green Grocer Chicago—was encased in a thick glove of chewy beige dough. Served with a dollop of sour cream, melted butter, salt and pepper, they tasted fine, but weren’t pretty. Hundt says this can happen even to seasoned cooks and recommends a honeycombed pelmeni mold to achieve thin, tender, babushka-worthy pelmeni.
