Last night we played dinner hosts to a couple of good friends who will shortly be getting married. He is from the Netherlands and she is from Russia. I decided that I wanted to cook something that reflected both of their heritages. For an appetizer I made Pikantny Syr which accurately translates as 'spicy cheese'. As Russia is a big place, I wanted to do at least one thing which reflected her Siberian birth-place and this dish is very traditional in Siberia. It's made by finely grating cheddar and gruyere cheese and then mixing in some sour cream, mayonnaise, fresh garlic and cayenne pepper. The recipe called for using 10–12 cloves of garlic which I though was a little excessive so I scaled that back. It's traditionally served on dark rye bread and here's how it turned out:

I was pretty impressed with it, a light texture with a strong spiciness from the cayenne pepper. It ideally needs to chill overnight (I could only manage about 4 hours). Luckily we will finish off the remainder of this today and so at least some of it has had the chance to chill for >12 hours now.

For the main course I cooked a Russian side-dish with two Dutch main dishes. The side-dish was boiled potatoes with pickles. You basically just fry up some small pieces of boiled potato with some chopped pickles and onion. I was surprised by how much the pickles influenced the overall flavor. The first main dish was leeks baked in a mustard-cheese sauce. I followed the recipe to the letter and cut the leeks length-ways though I think I prefer leeks in smaller pieces (cut cross-ways). The final dish was Slavinken, which are home made sausages wrapped in bacon. The sausage meat should be an equal mix of pork and beef, and this recipe throws in some soy sauce, worcester sauce, and a dash of nutmeg. Overall they had quite a gamey flavor. Put all together the meal worked out really well. Though I didn't quite imagine that it would take as much preparation as it did (finely grating cheese took a surprisingly long time). The following picture makes it look a little bit more sloppier and greasy than it was; take it from me it was a bit more attractive than this:

I also wanted to make the occasion more of a celebration about their future life together and so the first thing I did was learn how to greet them both in their respective languages: van harte welkom and dahbroh pahzhalahvaht!  Because of the similarities of the Russian and Dutch flag, I thought we could make something which represented those two flags merging together. I gave this design brief to @fairymel and she made a fantastic effort and came up with this mosaic-based image:

My final idea came from the fact that their initials 'M & N' are rather similar to 'M & M'. So I purchased two bags of the aforementioned chocolate treat and with a little bit of surgery, made the following:

Good luck Marijn & Natasha. We hope you have a long, and happy life together!