Blee-NEE and caviar

I had a great time just hanging out at Svet's place last night. He cooked dinner for us, too, making these big, thin pancake-thingies and getting out the good Russian caviar—a red caviar, in this case—so we could have blini. Of course, the first thing he made me do was learn to pronounce the word correctly. I've always called them BLEE-nees, but the correct pronunciation isn't plural and puts the accent on the last syllable: blee-NEE. When it was time to eat, he spread a pancake with butter and added a couple of generous spoonfuls of caviar, spreading it around the middle of the pancake. Then he rolled the pancake up into a tube and proceded to eat it. For the second blini, instead of caviar, he used fruit preserves (he seems to be quite partial to black currant). Since this is Масленица (Maslenitsa), the pancake week which is the Russian Orthodox Church's pre-Lenten equivalent to Carnival or Mardi Gras, it was an appropriate and traditional meal.

The Orthodox don't start Lent until Sunday, unlike those of us from liturgical denominations of the Western church. So, while I've already started my Lenten discipline, Svet wasn't the least bit sympathetic, and on the second day of Lent made me break my food rules already! I'm being vegetarian and giving up meat, fish, alcohol, and desserts for Lent, but he insisted that I had to eat some Swiss milk chocolate infused with orange essence, Lent or not. And, the jury's still out on the issue of whether or not eating caviar violated my prohibition on meat; I submit that it did not, however, on the grounds that I'm being an ovolactovegetarian and can eat chicken eggs, which means that caviar (fish eggs) is just another "ovo" food. Fortunately I'm not Orthodox like Svet; according to strict Orthodox tradition, meat, fish, dairy, and eggs are all forbidden during their Great Lent!