Blini is a gateway drug

The first blini I had, a little over a year ago in Saint Petersburg, were filled with mushrooms and potatoes. I’ve actually come to like mushrooms. They’re like a gateway vegetable; I never used to do vegetables, but ever since I tried mushrooms I’ve experimented with all kinds of other vegetables: first onions, then venturing into spinach, broccoli, and finally I even tried asparagus. It was a dark day, a dark and wonderful day.

My experimentation with mushrooms led me to even try to (re)create that very first gateway concoction, blini. I’m thinking, since the holiday is big with frying (and also, apparently, potatoes) that I’ll even try making them sometime this week, and chalk the whole venture up to “observing the holiday”, Eastern European style.

Blini with Mushrooms and Potatoes

Ingredients
14-16 crepes (see here for recipe - I usually use a recipe similar to this, but without - obviously - the sweeteners)
3 potatoes
1 carton (about 10 oz) baby bella mushrooms (or any mushroom of your choice)
1/4 onion, chopped finely
oil (uhh, enough to fry them? let’s say 4 tbsp - two to start frying the veggies in, and an extra two when you fry the whole blini)

Instructions
So, first and probably most obvious, wash and peel the potatoes. Then, slice your potatoes into roughly 1/2 inch cube-ish bits - not so small they turn into mush, but small enough that they could be mushed easily with a fork - think chunky hash browns. Slice your mushrooms as thin as you like them - I usually dice them fairly small, try to keep them about 1/4 inch at their longest dimension. As for the mushroom, the smaller you can dice them, the better - if you have a food processor, it might be easiest for you to just use the pulse function for a few whirls. I’ve personally never had once, so try this at your own risk - though even having mushroom mush couldn’t be all that bad.

Then, fry everything together, adding in salt, pepper and other seasonings as you like. When the potatoes are done, pull them out and let them cool enough to handle them.

With your (hopefully still warm) crepes ready, put a little strip of your mixture into the end of one side of the crepe, in about a 3″ by 1.5″ rectangle. Fold the tops over the longer edges of the rectangle, then roll it forward to the other end of the crepe, so it’s wrapped all perdy-like. Then, place it in the frying pan (seam down to start with) and switch sides after you see the crepe turn a light golden brown - the goal is the teeniest crunch, but not too much crunch (you’re still going for crepe-iness, not chip-iness). Poof! You have (my version of) blini! It goes well alone (best warm), but you can also serve it with sour cream or ketchup. This is a good indicator of what your finished blini will look like, hopefully with a little less of the brown crispiness. But again that’s up to you.

What’s that? You’ve only ever had blintzes with sweet cheesy filling, or you only know blini as pancakes upon which caviar is served? Alas, friend - while these are all fine ways to eat blini, nothing can quite compare to a warm, fried blini, whether you make it on your own or get it on one of the little blini fast-food places on a back-road in Russia.