Not all my travel stories are happy ones. After what happened to me, I cannot recommend that anyone visits the country of Belarus.

It all started well, as I flew into Minsk, bought the obligatory medical insurance, and found my hotel, which was previous a monastery (Monastyrski Hotel / Отель Монастырский).

I had a lovely dinner at the hotel restaurant, eating borscht and a couple of the classic potato based dishes, including mushroom stuffed mashed potato zeppelins.

In the morning, I went to the central train station.

Unfortunately, I do not speak Russian and I missed my train because the woman at the information counter gave me the wrong track number.

After spending 40 mins at the ticket counter with an unsmiling woman who looked like Colonel Rosa Klebb (From Russia With Love), I had to wait 8 hours for the next train. I had very little local money, about 9 rubles so I could not buy anything to eat. I had to pay 1/2 ruble just to use the toilets, which were quite scary, little more than a hole to stand over.

Things went from bad to worse about an hour into the train journey. Uniformed customs officers boarded the train and examined everyone's passports. Because they only spoke Russian, one of them enlisted the help of a man sitting nearby who spoke English to translate. Apparently, because of the laws set by the president of Belarus, if you fly in, you have to fly out. I did actually study their website carefully in advance of their trip and yet this was a complete surprise. So there I was, almost to the Lithuanian border, being escorted off the train by 9 customs guards, marched into the small rural train station, and forced to pay for a train ticket back to Minsk. One of them found me a spot on the train and they took turns watching me on the train until it left the station at 11pm. The people sitting around me on the train would not look at me or have anything to do with me, even after after I started sobbing.

Very scary, very Russian. Couldn't wait to get out of Belarus.

In the intermittent patches of 3G data while I was on the train, I was able to use my phone and my points to reserve a room at the Marriott in Minsk. It was that or show up at my previous hotel begging for a room. I arrived back at the now hated Minsk train station at 12:30 in the morning, hired a taxi, and arrived at what I hoped was a little piece of sanity. To my relief, the reception clerk fixed me up with a lovely room, gave me late check out for free, and sent up a snack. I was able to reserve a ticket on a flight to Lithuania for the next afternoon before I went to sleep. I'll admit that I was worried all the way until we landed that I would be stuck even longer on the wrong side of Europe, but I made it out!

view from my hotel room at the Minsk Marriott

Despite my bad experience traveling in Belarus, I did want to learn more about their food. Belarusian cuisine owes much to Jewish cooking as for centuries Jews had a virtual monopoly on inn-keeping. The Jewish culinary influence was most notable with potato dishes of German origin, such as babka and kugel. The potato became so common in 19th century in Belarus (there are more than 300 potato dishes recorded) that it came to be considered the core of the national cuisine. In Russia, Belarusians were scornfully called bulbashi or potato-eaters.

I have a recipe to share for a Belarusian version of lasagna.

The pasta in it are called lazanki or лазанкі. Lazanki arrived in the Polish-Lituanian Commonwealth in the mid-16th century when Bona Sforza, the Italian wife of King Sigismund the Old, brought high Italian cuisine to the duchy. This pasta is made from wheat, buckwheat, or rye flour. Belarusian cooks cut squares or triangles from flattened tough dough, boiled them and pour fried lard with onions on top. During the lent, they put ground poppy seeds or mashed berries into the dough. This recipe comes from the other way they are cooked, layered in pots together with meat or cabbage and baked with sour cream.

Ingredients for lazanki:

2 cups flour (can be wheat, rye, or buckwheat flour)
1/2 cup water
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon sugar
1 teaspoon vegetable oil

Ingredients for the filling:

300g pork shoulder
100g smoked sausages
1 medium-sized onion
1/2 white cabbage
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon ground black pepper
2 tablespoons vegetable or olive oil
300g cream
200g grated hard cheese

Directions:

Sift the flour, make a hollow it in, add salt and sugar, and vegetable oil for elasticity. Pour water on it slowly; knead the dough until it gets hard and flexible.
Roll out the dough; the layer should be 1-1.5mm thick, cut out in squares or triangles. Let the pasta dry a bit at room temperature. Boil the lazanki in the salted water for 5-7 minutes.
Chop the onion and cabbage.
Dice the pork and sausages and fry it until the fat starts melting. Put aside in a bowl.
In the remaining fat in the same pan, add onion and cabbage and sauté for 5 minutes. Season with salt and pepper.
Preheat the oven to 350F/170C degrees.
In the bottom of a medium size enameled iron casserole, pour the oil and swirl around to coat.
Layer the lazanki, cabbage and onions, meat, and grated cheese, ending with grated cheese on top. Pour the cream onto the layers.
Bake for 1 hour and serve.