Cвинокулебяки

Кулебяка is a traditional Russian dish: a big pirogue with some sort of filling. For the filling you can pretty much use anything (salty) you like: mushrooms, boiled eggs, spinach, cheese, rice, potatoes, cabbage, fish or whatever.

It's almost surprising how often it is made in the shape of a piggy.


A "svinokulebyaka" by meladan, posted in the LiveJournal community ru_piggy.


A sliced piggy-kulebyaka accompanies a recipe on the Russian recipe site kuking.net ...


This lovely kulebyaka was made by LarkinaL and posted on the photo community foto@mail.ru.

For an English-language recipe, check out Moti's Iraqi cuisine (he has a hammer and sickle variation).

Other popular non-abstract shapes include fish and crocodiles.

A pig-shaped three course dinner! With recipes!

Starters:
Nissin pig cup noodles!



Wye Jon Lee reports about the Nissin cup noodles with animal figures. There are dogs, pandas and foxes, but my favourites are of course the pigs! The soup doesn't contain any actual meat. Wye Jon Lee says the "heads" are pretty much tasteless, but the pig soup overall has an aromatic curry flavour.
You can find these instant noodles in Japan and many other Asian countries. Cup noodles are easy to prepare - just bring water to boil, add the contents of the bag to the water, and let simmer or stand in the water until the noodles are soft. Bon appetit!


Main course:
Pig pirozhki!



Saechka.ru features a recipe of Russian baked yeast dough pirogues in the shape of pigs, written by Anya (anette). The recipe is with meat filling, but you can substitute it with vegetarian alternatives. One personal favourite is a mix of potatoes, mushrooms, garlic and spinach. Saechka.ru is in Russian only, but russianrecipes.co.nz has an English-language recipe with the same type of dough. You just form the pirozhki into piggies instead, and give them "eyes" of black pepper.
To get more veggie action you can have sliced fresh cucumbers and tomatoes on the side, maybe with smetana? Of course, you can shape the cucumbers into pig form, too ...


Dessert:
Chocolate Peppermint Polka Dot Pigs!



Sarah at Once Upon a Cookie shares her recipe of lovely polka dot piggy cookies, adapted from a recipe in The Good Cookie by Tish Boyle. The mix of dark cocoa dough and white chocolate dots probably tastes as yummy as it looks!

There is more pig-shaped food!

I've been generally discouraged by the state of affairs for pigs in the world, so I haven't posted anything here for a while. However, the Russian pig lovers' LiveJournal community ru_piggy recently featured a collection of photos of pig-shaped food that I want to share ... Follow this link.

Censored pig cookie bum

Flickr user Carol Browne bought a Chinese pig cookie for New Year's 2007 from a local Asian shop in Vancouver, Canada. Guess where the bakers chose to insert the red bean paste ...

See more pictures of the pig cookie!



Censored pig bum
Originally uploaded by Carol Browne

Pig cake, Shanghai

A probably very yummy cake in the shape of a black piggy - with a ribbon! I wonder what it says on its back ...
Photographed by meckleychina on Flickr.


Pig of the Day - Jun 09, 2007 - Shanghai
Originally uploaded by meckleychina

Buta no bento!

Some Japanese wives and mums (probably also husbands and dads) with too much free time put a lot of effort and creativity in preparing the lunch boxes - bento in Japanese - for their family members. There are people (nowadays not only in Japan) who have it as a real hobby, and create amazing works of art in those lunch boxes. One of them is the author of the blog Bento Corner.

Here is a pig-themed bento she made for her daughter:



"Bu-ta-chan onigiri bento with gyoza, tamagoyaki, salad, and grapes.
My daughter is quirky sometimes. She took a look at the pig onigiri and said, 'No, I don't want this bento. The pig is scary. Please make me a new bento.'
But. The pig. Is. Smiling."

But then, mum suggested they could put a little ribbon on the piggy, and that made it less scary, and thus edible.

Here is a pig-themed bento of the wild variation:



It's from e-obento.com, which is filled with the most incredible food pr0n I've seen in quite a while ... (Click on the date links in the top frame here to browse all the great wonders.)

These bentos give a whole new dimension to the rule used by some vegetarians and vegans - "I don't eat anything that has eyes."

The Forest in Winter

From the directors: “This darkly comedic short film perverts a well-known fairy tale into a bizarre fable that is poised to traumatize a new generation of children and adults.”

Concept/design: Jake Portman, Bill Sneed
Story: Charlie Short
Music/sound design: Braincloud

They have obviously watched a lot of Yury Norstein animations. The subtitles don't do the Russian narration any justice, but that was probably fully intentional ...

Cheesypigs

Alison Scott has on her blog mentioned baking "Cheesy Orange Pigs". If you scroll down the page to the comments, she will share the recipe ...

Damn, I should really try to find the photos of the pig-shaped imo-mochi (potato mochi) I made once. They looked so cute frying in the oil.

Pig pie #3

I don't know where this comes from originally, because I've only found it randomly linked to in discussion forums and such. But it's another pig pie!

Kind of flat.

Culinary link 2

I found this more advanced variation on the "baked dough pig" on a Japanese blog:



Unfortunately I can't read much Japanese, except "buhibuhi" (oink oink), "raburii~!" (lovely) and "kobutachan" (little piglet), so I don't know what the filling is made of. But this blog has a lot of other stuff related to interesting food ...

Culinary link: meat-stuffed pies that look like pigs

I came across Daria and Puneet Mehra's website by chance ... On their travels across the world, they spent New Year's 2003/2004 at Daria's brother's dacha outside St. Petersburg and ate some meat-stuffed pies that look like pigs:



What a lovely form! For veggie versions, I can think of various fillings: mushrooms (mixed with rice, maybe), various vegetables, potatoes, soy or quorn based meat substitute - or berries, jam, chocolate cream, ...