For example, try to add to your every day menu some traditional Russian foods.
They are tasty, easy to cook and not expensive.
The most popular salad for Lent in Russia is cabbage salad. It’s ingredients are cabbage, carrots, also you can add apple. You can cook sour cabbage as an alternative.
Your Russian menu for Lent can include Russian cabbage soup and soup with mushrooms. These are amazing dishes and you will surely enjoy them.
Speaking about snackes, we cant help mentioning different picked vegetables. They are very popular in Russian during the Lent. Among of them pickled tomatoes, picked cucumbers and other dishes.
Russian ortodoxal church allows eating fish anly few days during the Lent. But if you are Roman you shoud know that it is allowed for you to eat sea products. You can enjoy calamari and different kinds of fish and caviar.

Take 1 kilogram of rye bread and cut it into pieces. Then put these pieces to electric stove and dry. Pound dried bread and fill up with 5 liters of boiling water. Wait for 6-8 hours and filter water, put in it 200 gram of sugar and 50 gram of dilute in 1 liter of water barm. Сover mix, in 12 hour fill bottle with kvass. Close bottles and let them stay in warm place for 24 hours. After that and can put bottles to the fridge and enjoy refreshing Russian kvass. Notice, kvass will have its best taste qualities in 4 days.
If you have no time to follow this recipe, use kvass concentrate to cook this beverage.
But of course, the easiest way to get kvass is to buy it. You can choose original taste free of any additional ingredients. Or try kvass containing berries or kvass with honey – it is really tasty and useful.

To cook shaslik you will need:

Fresh pork

Onions

Pepper

Lemon or glass of dry white wine

Salt and sugar

How to cook:

Take fresh pork with lard (600 grams for a person), cut it into pieces and put it into the deep dish. Cut and add onions (250 grams for 1 kilogram of meat). Then add juice of one lemon, salt, sugar, pepper. Leave this mix in place with room temperature for 4-5 hours.

Fry shashlik on open flame, using metal sticks.

Serve shashlik with lemons and fresh greenery. Spicy ketchup can be used as sauce.

Russians eat salads in addition to main dish or can use them as main dish.

The most popular salads in Russia are potato salad, vinegret, red-beet salad, “healthy” salad.

Potato salad Russians often name “olivie”. Of course, it is not traditional French salad which is famous all over the world. When Russians offer you olivie they mean potato salad which has boiled potatoes, carrots, eggs, marinated cucumbers, fresh onion, tinned peas and meat or sausages as its components. This salad also includes mayonnaise.

Other Russian salad which also has the name of frensh dish in spite of the difference between Russian and French version of the salad – vinegret. It consists of boiled red beet and carrots, popatoes, onions, marinated cucumbers or sour cabbage. As the seasoning of the salad Russian use vinegar and vegetable oil.

Among every day meals of Russians you can find salads which unclude mainly one component as the basis. For example, it is “healthy” salad which is consists of cabbage, and red-beet salad. In spite of the simplicity of these dishes they are very useful and tasty.

Also in Russia you can try “Primorsky” salad, herring and potato salad and others.

But when Eastertide comes, Russian usually have rich dinners with a lot of delicious foods.
There are some special traditional meals that are to be eaten at Eastertide.

In the morning Russians usually eat eggs of red colour. Russian women cook them the day before Eastertide. They make eggs red using onion peel for it. Red colour of eggs symbolizes Christ’s blood.

Second traditional Easter dish in Russia is paskha. It is made of curds.
There is hardy can be found Russian hostess that does not cook Easter cake for this day.
Traditions suppose that at Eastertide people gave coloured eggs as a present to each other , visit their relatives and have fun.
Of course, Easter is holiday of all cristians. Catholics, protestants have there own traditions of Eastertide celebration. But all the cristians cook eggs for this day. So you can try to cook them in Russian traditional way.
The simpliest recipe is:
Put onion peels into the water and boil till water get red.
Then add eggs and boil them in red water for 10 minutes. Eggs for Eastertide are ready!

A lot of Russian women use Kremlin diet to keep their bodies fit and slim. At USSR times this diet was a secret – it was used only by political heads of the state, Olympic athletes, Russian movie stars.
Since times when secrets of diet were opened, a lot of Russian people with overweight lot lbs. with Kremlin diet.

Kremlin diet is good for them who does not want to refuse of protein products – meat, cheese, etc. All this food can be eaten if you practice Kremlin diet.

Food you can’t eat while keeping Kremlin diet – carbohydrate products and meals that contain sugar.

Kremlin diet is based on accounting c.u. (level of carbohydrates) per 100 grams of product.

If you want to lose lbs. you should take 40 c.u. and then you can lose 8 lbs. in a week.
If you need keep your results, you should take 60 c.u.
To understand it easier you can look through standart Kremlin diet menu for one day.

Note that 100 grams contain approximately 4 ounces.

Breakfast:

Two boiled eggs dressing mayonnaise; (2 c.u.)
2 ounces of cheese (any kind) (1- 1.5 c.u.);
a cup of tea without sugar (0 c.u.)

Lunch:

Boiled meat (any kind) (0 c.u.);
2 slices of bread (50 gramms = 18 – 21 c.u.);
Salad (12-14 c.u.);
A cup of tea without sugar (0 c.u.)

Dinner:

2 ounces of nuts (7-9 c.u.) (any kind);
3 ounces of fish (boiled of fried) (1 -2 c.u.);
A cup of tea without sugar (0 c.u.)

As a result you will take 40 – 46 c.u. a day and keeping this diet you will loose weight.

Of course, frozing meals was possible only in winter, because no refrigerators were invented then.

The most popular frozen Russians foods – pelmeni (ravioli). It is very tasty dish made of meat covered with unleavened dough.

Nowadays Russian pelmeni can be bought in every shop in this country. But a lot of hostesses continue to cook them at home, because Russians think, that the most tasty pelmeni are hand made.

Frozen pelmeni are very easy to cook. It is nessesary to put them to salted boiling water and wait them to be ready. Russians prefer to eat pelmeni with sour cream.

Another kind of frozen food that is popular in Russia is vareniki. The main difference of pelmeni and vareniki – their fillings. Vareniki have vegetables or berries inside them.

In Russian the most popular vareniki fillings are popatoes and cherry.

Pelmeni and vareniki are traditionally frozen foods.

But today, when every shop and supermarket has refrigerators, Russian companies begin to froze different foods. Among of them pies, thin pankes with filling and some other popular meals.

Russian meals has meat as its main component. I think Russia is all like big piece of meat. Extremal weather, serious people… Siberians need to have power to live almost all year long in winter, so people in Siberia eat a lot of meat. In spite of eating a lot of meat, Russian have natural healthy diet. They eat meat with vegetables and never eat a lot, as in America people do.

Man from Great Britain:

In Russia I like their dairy products. They are all very tasty and useful. But the most interesting Russian milk food is milk soup. Nowhere in the world I met this dish! I tried to cook milk soup at home but could not. But sometimes it seems to me that Russians never heard about thing we name “healthy food”. They add mayonese to every dish they eat. It is so many calories there!

Woman from France:
Meals we buy in France every day in Russia are very expensive. Good cheese, meat can be bought only in elite supermarkets. But Russia has the tastiest fish in the world. In Siberia I tried wonderful salmon – you will not find such fresh fish nowhere in the world! In France sea products are expensive and not every man can buy them.

Mexican man: “In Russia it is popular to drink beer with vobla. At first it was strange for me and I did not like the smell. But once I tried it and beer with fish became my habbit. It is very funny to strike vobla on the table with the aim to make fish softer. The most crazy name of the dish I ever saw in Russian restaurant menu is “French meat”. The only French thing in it is the name. I visited France and never tried meat with cheese and tomatoes there. I think that the most tasty thing in Russia is long loaf. It is the symbol is Russia, I think, – white simple long loaf, that can be not so fresh, but it is always very tasty.”

Tourist from Argentina says: “In Argentina we never eat a lot during breakfast. Russians can eat soup in the morning! It looks like gluttony for us. On other hand, we have supper late at night. In Moscow people usually have supper at 19-20 p.m. Russian meals is very tasty, especially red-beat soup and ravioli.” As for the meat… there is no any compare with our meat at all.

Woman from Eсuador: In Russia I missed bananas very much. In Equador we have a lot of kinds of banana – little and big, green, red. In Russia people can’t cook Latin-American dishes well. The only thing that I like in traditional Russian meals is red-beet soup, because it resembles one of our soups. Russian food is very healthy. People eat a lot of vegetables. Russians drink tea constantly. They can drink it even in night club, during party. Water in Russia is of terrible taste.