Ural cuisine is very rich and in this severe climate region, no vegetarian or low-calorie diet has been able to take root. One such filling dish is Ural shangi – rich open-faced pirozhki with various fillings that used to only be made in the summer - when hens lay plenty of eggs and cows give a lot of milk. People from the Urals would take shangi with them when working on the farm – one shangi with a fresh milk filling would carry them over until dinner. The wide variety of possible fillings for this pastry is simply shocking. They can be made with millet porridge, buckwheat and mushrooms, as well as with meat, fish and homemade cheese. In the Ural village of Nizhnaya Sinyachikha host Igor Maximenko prepared one of the simplest shangi filled with sour cream and cottage cheese.