Chestnuts & Xmas trees

So here are my long-ago promised pictures of chestnuts. These are a local variety that grow around these parts. They are not too big, and they are kind of a mellow-yellow colour inside. I roasted up a few in the oven and really meant to have pictures of them all toasty and golden, but I ate them before I could take a picture. One of the great winter treats around here though is to go to one of the chestnut roasters on the street and buy a cone filled with these fresh roasted wonders.

Here's a picture of the chestnut roaster on one of the corners the week before xmas. If you look closely, you can see a stack of white paper cones to the left of the cart. This is how they serve the chestnuts. You can't see, but on the top of the cart is a metal roasting pan that sits on top of hot coals. Of course, you can't tell from the picture, but the aroma coming from the chestnuts is incredible.

By the way, this is how they sell Xmas trees in Zagreb. About a week before Christmas, trucks arrive from everywhere and deposit Christmas tree vendors on corners throughout the city. They've got trees of all kinds.


You just pick out a tree, pay for it, then a guy (like the one to the right of the picture below), puts your tree through this big tube and wraps the tree in a tight netting so you can carry the tree home.



Yup, for real. You just carry the tree home like this:



It is a great system: first you pick out your tree, then you have it wrapped, then you stop and buy some chestnuts, eat the chestnuts, pop into the coffee shop and have an espresso, then work off the calories from everything while you carry your Christmas tree home.

Grab your defibrillator, it's CVARCI time!!!

There is a special snack eaten in these parts around this time of year that is made from pure pork fat. Yup. Just plain old fat. The snack is called CVARCI (Čvarci pronounced chvartzy) and involves pork fat getting cut into cubes, deep fried, pressed, dried out, then eaten usually at room temperature with a bit of salt. Normally, people add a bit of milk to the hot oil to give the cvarci their golden brown color, but I can't handle the milk, and often can't eat cvarci prepared by others because there's a great chance of gluten cross-contamination due to the incredibly delicious pairing of crusty bread with the cvarci. So, if I want to eat these yummy snacks, I need to make my own (no bread for moi.)

Here's the recipe. Method. And pictures.

Ingredients:
Pork fat

Equipment:
Big pot
Slotted spoon
Potato ricer (also known as a squeezer)
Big bowl lined with paper towel
Large pan lined with paper towel

A special note: DO NOT EAT these in large quantities. There's a seeeeeeerious amount of fat and cholesterol in these babies. One handful is good as a serving. Also, DO NOT add salt to these until you are about to eat them because the salt will make them rather rubbery and kinda mushy. Only add salt to the handful (one handful) that you are eating.

Here's what the pork fat looks like. These pieces weigh about 2 pounds or 1 kg each. I bought 5kg for my session. Make sure that the skin has been removed.



The fat is about 1 inch or about 3cm thick.




Slice the fat into strips about 2 inches or 3 cm across. Then cut those strips into cubes about 2 inches or 3 cm. Don't worry if some are slightly bigger or smaller.




Put all the cubes into a cold, empty big pot. My pot holds 8 litres, and I filled it to the 6 litre line. Don't over-fill because you need to leave quite a bit of room for the fat to render out, and bubble up.




Once you have all your fat cut up into cubes, and you've put all your cubes into your pot, move the pot to your heat source, and put the heat up to about medium. You'll have to watch the heat constantly and adjust accordingly to keep this to a medium heat. Don't let it get too hot or else everything will burn. Using a large spoon or spatula, keep turning the cubes so that they don't stick to the bottom. It'll look like this:



Keep turning them, and after about 15 minutes, you'll be able to see the fat bubbling up like this:




Keep turning the cubes. They will start to brown. And they'll look like this after just another 5 or 6 minutes:



Until finally they will get really golden brown (but not burnt!) and they will float to the top like this.:




Using a slotted spoon, carefully scoop out the cubes and put them into a big bowl that is lined with paper towel to soak up some of the oil.



Now, you've got to scoop 5 or 6 cubes into the squeezer. Hold the squeezer over an empty bowl, and squeeze out as much oil as you can. Be careful because the oil will be very hot.




Then open the squeezer, and using a fork, loosen the flattened cubes, and shake out onto a large pan lined with paper towels. Remember DO NOT salt these.




In batches of 5 or 6 cubes, squeeze the oil out of all the cubes. Shake all your squeezed cubes onto the paper-towel-lined pan, leave the pan out on a table and let everything cool down and dry somewhat. You can eat the cvarci at this point...however, it is best to let them cool right down to room temperature for best results. In about an hour, they'll look like this and be ready to eat:






Once all cooled down (after a couple of hours), put the cvarci in a ziploc bag or in a container and keep them in the refrigerator. I've kept them for 2 weeks in the fridge with no problems.

Enjoy!

Nano final tally

Official tally for Nanowrimo 2009: 32,580 words. Okay, not quite 50,000 but still quite respectable. Now, on to more writing and editing.

Nanowrimo 2009 update

With three days to go, I'm just squeaking past 23k words in the November race to 50k words. So in the end, I'll make it half-way. This is a victory of sorts for me because I made it quite far, and this time around the quality of my writing was at a much higher standard. I went back to using the old pen and paper and somehow my writing was free, easy-going, more natural. So in years past when I made it to (or close to) 50k words, most of it was pretty bad and got lost in the ensuing edits. This year it is different. Maybe I'm finally making it past that mythical 10,000 hours of writing needed to get the hang of this thing. I sure hope so.

To anyone else riding the Nanowrimo train: I salute you. And see y'all again a year from now.

Nanowrimo 2009...time to prepare....

I can't believe that Nanowrimo 2009 is just around the corner. I'll be participating this year and am planning on winning. I think I have a great idea to start with...but I'll know more as November progresses and I get past that magic page number 50. Until page 50, I don't know if I've got a novel or a short story on my hands. I don't know if the characters are interesting enough. I don't know if I have enough of a story to last another 250 pages. Yes, it can be heartbreaking to reach page 50 and realize there isn't enough there for an entire novel...but it is much easier to handle than to reach page 200 and realize there's nowhere left to go.

So, I'm looking forward to a month of butt-in-chair, fingers on the keyboard, creative marathoning.

Long time no see....

Merry christmas/new years/valentine's day to everyone! Okay, so it has been a while since I last posted. I'm finding it tough to keep up with all the web-based things I've got to update: blog, facebook, knitting sites, meetup groups, etc. I'm going to pare it all down somehow so that things don't get left dangling for too long without attention!

Anyways, I'm learning the fine art of eating fish whole. This beautiful branzino was fresh caught, then grilled over a wood fire. Served up with olive oil and a side of swiss chard and potatoes. It weighed in at about 3.5 pounds...and I ate HALF of it!

Before:




After:

No local chicks with sticks :-(

I've been trying to get a knitting group together in Zagreb. I've only found one person who likes to knit and who thinks it is cool. But she's not a local gal; she's actually from California! We meet up at the bookstore cafe about twice a month and we spend a good 2 hours chatting and knitting and drinking really good espresso. It is really great fun, and relaxing and so creative. But we're having a hard time attracting new members because knitting is not cool here. Nope. Nobody believes me when I tell them about all the knitting groups throughout North America, and all the knitting cafes and knitting shops, and well just everything knitting related that is so popular over on 'that' side of the big pond. And while smoking is still legal here in the cafes, I'm not so sure about the knitting. I've taken my projects to various cafes, and am met with looks of bewilderment, raised eyebrows and sometimes a wee bit o'curiosity. I'm hoping that I inspire people to go home, take out their old knitting needles and knit up a nice hat or something....and rediscover the joy of knitting. Seriously!

Skinny Pigs

Something strange is happening with the pigs. First...let me explain a bit about a tasty snack food they have here called Cvarci (pronounced chvartzi). Cvarci is made from pork skin that has a layer of fat and a bit of meat attached. They cut the skin up into little squares, then they fry them up in a hot pan, add milk to the whole thing (don't ask me exactly how), then they take the crispy fried pieces and put them through a press to get out the excess oil. Then they set them aside to dry up. When they are nicely dried, you add a bit of salt and then eat. And eat. And eat.

Cvarci normally is in season when it is sausage and prosciutto-making season (which is the cold months of November, December and January.) So everyone waits for this time of year to enjoy the cvarci. Except this year.....there are signs up everywhere that there is NO CVARCI. I kept thinking that this just meant that they had run out of cvarci, and that there would be more coming. So I kept coming earlier and earlier to the market to get my share.

Finally, I asked the butcher(s) about the missing cvarci. Did they run out of pigs? Well, to my utter shock and dismay, the answer was: Yes...well, sort of yes. A few different butchers explained that this year the pigs were TOO SKINNY. They all had thin skin, and too little fat under the skin, which made it close to impossible to make the cvarci. By the time the little pieces of skin were fried up and then pressed, there wasn't much left but some crumbled bacon bits.

So why are the pigs too skinny? Well, the lowfat phenomenon has made its way to this part of the world, and now they are breeding lean pigs. Really lean pigs. I'll try and get a picture at some point and post it here so that you can see how lean they are. Lean, lean, lean. They sort of look like muscles and bones covered with a thin bandaid for skin.

I'm saddened by all of this because I have a feeling that they'll be doing here what they do in other parts of the world when they start breeding lean meats. First they make the animals too lean. Which results in a tough and dry meat. So then they start having to extra-process the meat by adding things to make the meat tender and juicy. Which usually makes the traditional way of smoking and drying meat impossible because of all the added moisture, so then they have to extra-process the smoked and dried meat to counter the moisture. Then inevitably this leads to the need to add anti-bacterials, and anti-fungal agents, and all sorts of other anti-things.

Sad. Sad. Sad. So I'll try and enjoy the last moments of traditional food while I can. Because I know from experience, that when it is gone, it is gone. I hope I'm wrong about all of this. But right now, the writing is on the wall......

Calamari season

It looks like calamari season is in full swing. You didn't know there was a season for calamari? Neither did I. But it is here, and runs from now until about January. I don't have a picture of how they look raw (mostly because I didn't think to take out my camera). But I have a picture of them cooked.


What I did was slice up some fresh white potatoes, and wash the calamari. Then I layered potatoes, calamari, chopped parsley, chopped garlic, olive oil and a bit of water. I layered until I ran out of ingredients. Sprinkled it all with salt, and popped it into a hot oven for 30 minutes.



It came out so nice. And tasty. We ate the WHOLE thing in one sitting.

Boo!

Croatia does not celebrate Halloween....so I just wanted to say "Happy Halloween" to myself and to everybody!

More food files to come.....

Italian tippy-tap shoes

I have been on the lookout for a pair of black and white ladies oxfords since my tap dancing days of yore. Imagine my delight when I discovered that: a) oxfords are back in style, and b) black and white oxfords are in style! How righteous is that?!!



So I got myself these puppies. They are Italian. And quite shiny. And they make me wanna dance! The shop girl told me that the tippy-tap dancers wear these. Tippy-tap. How cute is that term. So I have tippy-tap shoes, minus the taps. Although, I could imagine myself tap dancing my way down to the coffee shop for some nice espresso. Now that sounds like a great idea!

No chestnuts :-(

I have been dreaming about chestnut season all summer long. And this past weekend was to be the highlight of my autumn because it was supposed to be the weekend of the giant chestnut festival in Lovran, which is near the beautiful seaside town of Opatija. Imagine my surprise when we drove all the way to Lovran only to find that there were NO CHESTNUTS! I don't mean that they were all eaten, or that we were too late to have any. NO. The story all up and down the coast is that it was too dry this summer and resulted in the chestnuts failing to grow.

So I don't have any wonderful pictures of giant yellow chestnuts roasting over hot coals. Or pictures of chestnut puree balanced beautifully on a spoon with a puff of whipped cream on top. Nope. Nope. Nope. I only have hope that Mother Nature will apply a bit of her green thumb to the chestnut harvest next year.

Nanowrimo 2008

I just signed up for my third National Novel Writing Month (nanowrimo). In the month of November, the goal is to write 50,000 words of a novel. Sounds a bit crazy, but it has lots of merit because it gets you to put pen to paper. If anyone else is interested in giving it a try (free) just go to:

www.nanowrimo.org

Happy Canadian Thanksgiving!

Hmmm. Kinda forgot it was thanksgiving. Therefore forgot to purchase turkey. So I went to the market rather late in the day and most of the butchers were closing up. So I manged to get 4 chicken legs. With thighs! And some roasting potatoes. And as I type, the chicken and potatoes are roasting in the oven with lots of olive oil, sea salt, thyme and rosemary. In about 45 minutes, we'll be having our own little Canadian Thanksgiving in Zagreb. Then afterwards we'll hunt down one of the street vendors cooking up some local chestnuts.

Cheers!

Butter cream buildings

The old part of Zagreb, filled with historical buildings and cobblestone roads, is going through a transformation even as we speak. All of the buildings are being restored. The results are sometimes just breathtaking.

So for example, a building like the top one, will be painstakingly restored to its original glory to something like the building below it. Note that I'm saying 'restored.' It can take a year to carefully bring the facades, the masonry work, the bits and bobs back to their original form.



The following building is almost finished. I walk by this building site everyday on my way to the market and I've watched the guys doing all sort of things by hand...like smoothing and forming the texture on the outside of the building. Even mixing the cement by hand! They've gotten to the point where they're choosing the paint colour. If you look closely, you'll see they've painted several stripes of yellow on one of the blocks. I really like the yellow on the furthest to the right. I've seen it in the sun, the shade, on a grey day, and in the rain, and it always looks buttery. Usually when they go with a yellow, they'll use white for accents. The result is what I call 'butter cream buildings' because the buildings look like they've been iced with creamy dreamy butter cream frosting! As soon as this building is unveiled, I'll post a picture.



I LOVE the butter cream buildings. But they also have lots of other great colours. Here are just a few more colours:





So, in a couple of years, all of the old town will look like this. In the meantime, I'd say it is about 60% of the buildings are done. Another 30% are in the process of getting done. Wow.

My daily stairs

I do lots of walking. I mean lots and lots of walking. On purpose. And much of that walking is done going up stairs in various parts of town. Here are just some of the stairs I go up and down every single day at least once. Most days I do these two, three and sometimes four times.

These are the ones going up to the house:


And these also go up to the house:



Followed by these: (and I'm not making this up. I want you to imagine me carrying bags of potatoes, apples, onions, etc. from the market UP all these stairs!)



These next ones are special stairs that go up to the upper part of the old town. I couldn't fit all the stairs in the picture. This is about HALF of them!



And these last two shots are very special to me. I have named them the "Krumpir" stairs. Krumpir is the Croatian word for potato. If I ever eat french fried potatoes, I make myself climb these stairs. It usually takes care of keeping the old blood sugar in check ;-)



Whew! I have one more set of stairs that I do pretty much every day. They are called the Salata stairs and there are 146 of them. My picture didn't turn out. So I'll post them on another day.

Stairs: good for the body. Good for the soul!

Don't name your spiders...

I know. I know. You want to name them. The spiders. Well, not all of them. But the big giant dark brown one with long legs and eyes that dangle off of those antennae thingies...and the same one who has been coming to sit on the outside of your bedroom window every night to get a bit of heat off the glass. Yep, that's the one you'll first be horrified about. Then you'll be less horrified. Then, like me, you'll start looking for him each evening (because he disappears every morning). And it'll feel natural to think of him as a sort of pet and give him a name. A human name, like Harold. That's what I called my horrifying spider. And it made him a little less horrifying. I never let him into the house, but I accepted him staring through the window each night.

Except Harold has been missing these last few nights. And it has been cold at night. And I'm feeling guilty for not letting him come inside to warm up a bit. Poor Harold. I hope he's actually off to Ibiza for the winter. On one of those all-inclusive trips. He'd like that. Especially if he hooks up with some of those monstrously huge spiders they grow in tropical places. Yep. If Harold is indeed in Ibiza, then he's going to be okay. I'll look for him to return next spring.

Go Harold!

Buckwheat is beautiful...

I came across an interesting tidbit of information when I was surfing the net while looking for polenta recipes. I discovered that polenta was not originally made from corn. No. Up until about 150 years ago, it was made from Buckwheat. Apparently buckwheat is way more nutritious than corn, easier to grow, and easier to digest. But it won't grow in a high nitrogen soil. Corn and wheat grow insanely well with high nitrogen fertilizers. So when farmers figured they could grow more corn or wheat per acre with fertilizers, they quickly put buckwheat on the back burner. There's quite a bit of history attached to the whole transition from buckwheat to corn...but if you're interested in that, you can just do a search on the net for more info.

I was amazed to learn that it was buckwheat porridge, or polenta, that fed the ancient Roman soldiers, and millions more people over the last few thousand years. How cool is that!

Until recently, I really didn't know what buckwheat was. I can't eat any kind of wheat, so I guess the word 'wheat' in the name is what turned me off. But I learned recently that buckwheat isn't a wheat at all (so why the heck don't they change the name???) It is actually considered a fruit! Well, it is the seed from the buckwheat plant and the plant is related to the rhubarb plant.

Anyways...buckwheat is nutritious, simple and fast to make and it tastes terrific!

Here's what it looks like when you buy it dried and whole. They call these groats. You can get them raw or roasted. Roasting them intensifies the flavour. I like mine unroasted. Notice how they are like little tiny pyramids. I included a pen here just to show the relative size.


And here they are, just 10 minutes later, all cooked and soft and ready to be eaten.


You cook them just like rice. I usually rinse the groats and drain off the water. Then I boil water in my tea kettle. Then I add about the same amount of water to the buckwheat in a pot. Put the pot on the stove and let it boil for about 2 minutes. Then turn off the heat. Add a pinch of salt. Put on a tight fitting lid. And leave it there for 10-15 minutes. Then just fluff with a fork. It comes out all soft and delicious. Ready to be used like rice. Or...instead of cooking in water, you can cook it in hot milk. When it is done, add brown sugar and a bit of butter plus some cinnamon, raisins and a handful of nuts, and you've got a quick, nutritious and delicious hot breakfast cereal.

Yum. Yum. Yum.

The Simpsons in German

So I was watching some TV...a rare thing for me for many reasons. There isn't much in English here, and lots of American shows are dubbed in either Croatian, German or Hungarian. I came across an episode of The Simpsons and it was hilarious what types of voices they chose for the characters. Marge sounds like a man. And Homer sounds just like Yoda! Which kind of makes him sound intelligent....and it makes for one bizarre viewing experience.

Crochet time

I forgot to add these pictures to my last entry about our trip to Hvar. Since the chilly weather would be soon upon us (this was happening in late September), I took my latest knitting/crochet project along with me. I was the only one on the ferry with a crochet hook. But many women walked by and looked at me with that "now-why-didn't-I -bring-MY-knitting-project-with-me?" look on their faces. The ferry is quite big, holding about 100 or more cars, and probably about 300 people. It has a big indoor deck with a cafe bar and food, and also an upper deck that is open to the elements.

Here I am on the ferry with my beloved zig-zag afghan:


And here's a shot of my afghan, as I was sitting by the pool. The day temperature was about 24C, but by late afternoon, when I took this picture, it was getting a little chilly at about 17C. People were coming out of the pool shivering and looking at my wooly afghan with longing in their eyes.

Hvar pictures

Hvar. In case you are wondering....yup....it IS that pretty.


Here are a few pictures from our trip to the island of Hvar, a beautiful and rugged ancient island covered with olive trees, grape vines, stony houses, and crystal clear lagoons. For hundreds of years, people have traveled to Hvar for the health benefits of the lavendar-perfumed air and the crystal clear waters. You can see clear down to the bottom of the sea. While standing on the rocky shore, I caught sight of an octopus nestled down in the rocks. He was trying very hard to look like a rock, but when I started talking, and threw some pebbles in the water, he sort of started changing colours...first white, then grey, then white and grey, then he went back to being stone coloured. How COOL is that???

Now, one of the things that makes Hvar so incredibly incredible is that it is a 3 hour drive from Zagreb to Split, then a 1.5 hour ferry ride from Split to Hvar. That's it. Really accesible. Stunning how close it is.


The water is so clear that the boats look like they are floating in the air!









Portrait of the artist...fuzzy hair and all...


View from our hotel room at sunset


Ahhhh, that's it for now.