French Fridays with Dorie - Corn Pancakes

Friday, June 29, 2012


I have a problem.
I love to cook and I love to bake.
It's not just the food but its creation that really excites me.

So where is the problem? Two words: Food Intolerance, and not just one but many. If we had one million euro for each food intolerance that Georgie and I have we could definitely pay off Greece's debt!!!
Start counting: gluten, lactose, eggs, corn, yeast, sardines(!), sole, rabbit, shellfish, peas, various kinds of seaweed and to top everything a few months ago I decided to stop eating sugar!

So what can I cook? A lot actually! There are hundreds of recipes developed by bmany super talented chefs and bloggers that cater to people like me and Georgie, and I always try to adapt other recipes (most times completely unsuccessfully) so that they don't tickle our very finicky digestive systems.

Still, once in a while I want to cook from a "traditional" cookbook and bake a three layer cake to get that particular high - if you know what I mean!

This is why I joined the French Fridays with Dorie online cooking group and every or so Friday I will try to cook or bake a recipe from a very "normal" and really good cookbook with delicious and easy to follow recipes.
As luck or really bad food karma would have it, my first recipe had three ingredients that were a no go for both me and Georgie: corn, eggs and all purpose flour. Under normal circumstances I would have never made those pancakes. But this was to be my inaugural post so I made them and they turned out great! My mum (she is visiting for 15 days) said so. And she ate them all! 

I cannot post the actual recipe on my blog but I can say that Dorie Greenspan's "Around my French Table" cookbook is truly worth spending the money.


"The Hunger Games"

Monday, June 25, 2012

Sometimes I am completely oblivious to what's happening around me! People might be going on and on about a new super cool gadget or an amazing "must read" book  but I wont give a damn. Anything with a "i" prefixed to it is to be avoided at all costs and books that are written and published with the sole purpose of becoming huge commercial successes, Hollywood blockbusters, coffee mugs and calenders will never find a place on my bookshelves. I avoid these things like the devil and in my eyes the bigger the hype around them, the better the reason for me to continue to ignore their existence. 

I have to be honest though. Sometimes I succumb to the hype. But only for books...because they are books after all! And I have something for books. Call it soft spot, call it obsession. I cannot force myself to endure the agony of seeing them showcased in virtual and real life bookshops and not getting my hands on them, flicking through the pages and deciding for myself if it is worth all the hype! And this is what happened with The Hunger Games. For the past year or so, I saw it everywhere! Featured on Amazon, The Book Depository, Foyles, plus on the windows and selves of all the bookshops in Zagreb. I refused to buy it or read a review. And then the movie was released and the whole thing became even hypier! And I was certain that this was not going to be a book that I was likely to buy or yet like on the off chance that some crazy buying impulse (usually driven by the fact that books have no sizes and can quench your consumerist thirst without trying them on!) forced me to click on the "Buy Now" button. 

But I clicked and there it was just moments later listed in the contents of my Kindl. At this point I have to clarify one thing: I use my Kindl to read what I consider to be "lesser books", books that I wouldn't mind terribly if I didn't own the hard copy to put on my bookshelves, look at and remember the plot and the characters and the feelings invoked by reading it. So before I read it Hunger Games was definitely a "Kindl book" and unfortunately it remains as such even now that I have finished all three of the books.

Maybe it is the genre - Young Adult is not my thing, hence, no "Twilight" on my selves; But then again I read all 7 Harry Potters and seen the movies and actually enjoyed them! Not to mention "Lord of the Rings", "Narnia" or "His Dark Materials" series, three of my all time favorites!

I cannot talk about "Twilight", since I have not read the book nor seen the movie(s), but I think the reason why "The Hunger Games" did not satisfy my appetite as a bookworm was because, apart from the really compelling storyline, it is not a particularly well written book! Its literary style is that of simple words and sentences, which by all means, though, maximize the reader's addiction and compulsion to continue reading. Katniss Everdeen' s character sometimes seems one dimensional at least in the first book. Yes she is strong, and independent and she does not care about such trivial things like love, and marriage and children...she is so young but leads a hard life being the sole provider for her family and having to face the evil of the Capital and unintentionally become the face of the revolution. In writing this I realise now that there are a few parts in all three books that could have been explored a little bit deeper and maybe this would have given the story a more emotive and multi-dimensional quality, but then again this is my simple opinion.

Recipe: Ratatouille with Ground Beef

Friday, June 22, 2012


This is not your typical Ratatouille. Ιt is not vegetarian! It has ground beef in it and I did not go crazy on the oil. 
The vegetarian/original version was and still is my mother's favourite summer dish! It's easy to make and we always had all the ingredients ready at hand thanks to my father's spring/summer hobby of growing his own vegetables. Peppers, aubergines, courgettes, tomatoes overflowing from our vintage Miele refrigerator, sometimes to the point we had to give them away to friends because we could not possibly eat them all! 

I made this dish a couple of weeks ago, when the temperature was dangerously close to the lower 10s Celsius and even though the calender said June it felt more like October. My attempt to lure summer into Zagreb.

Ratatouille with Ground Beef
Serves 4, ready in 30 minutes
Adapted from here
Ingredients

  • 4 aubergines 
  • 1 yellow onion, chopped
  • 1 yellow pepper, chopped
  • 1/4 cup white dry wine
  • 1 garlic clove
  • 4 tomatoes, chopped
  • 1/2 bunch of parsley, chopped
  • 500 gr ground beef
  • Salt & pepper
  • 2 tablespoons olive oil
Procedure

  1. Sauté the beef and the whole garlic clove in one tablespoon of olive oil on high heat for 5 - 6 minutes. Pour in the wine and let boil for 5 more minutes. 

  2. In the meantime, preheat oven to 180C. Wash the aubergines and partially peel them. Slice them thinly (I used a mandolin), arrange them on parchment paper in a baking tin and lightly brush them or spray them with olive oil. Bake for 10 - 15 minutes depending on the oven. 

  3. In another pan sauté the onion and peppers with 1 tablespoon of olive oil for 5 minutes and add the tomatoes. Finally, add the roasted aubergines and ground beef, season to taste and gently simmer for 10 minutes. Sprinkle with the parsley and serve.

While I was taking the pictures for this post I had an unexpected guest visiting my "state of the art" studio that doubles as a sofa...


Istria in June...

Wednesday, June 20, 2012


... is to fall in love with! And I have!

I'm gonna be honest here...I've been sitting on this post for the better half of this month. Procrastinating and doing odd things here and there just to avoid writing it. For a week I made it my mission to leave a comment on every single blog in my news feed. Why? Because it's good PR, experts say, but basically because I just wanted to avoid writing this post...

You see I am a terrible travel writer. No strike that. I am no writer at all. What a conundrum! How am I going to express the beauty and uniqueness of the places I visited those four days in June? It is impossible. I am completely lost for words and nothing I write here can ever be enough.

One night, as I was having drinks with a writer friend of mine, I had a "brainstorm". Inventing some sort of device which could download my scattered thoughts, pictures, smells and feelings, then upload them directly into said friends brilliant brain, to be put in order and start making sense, then returned back to me. But alcohol induced brainstorms rarely yield results, (in my case at least) even though I am quite sure that someone at Apple is working on it as we speak (the "iputyourthoughtstowords" app ) I was yet to find a solution for my problem.

A partial breakthrough came today as I was browsing through the hundreds of photos I took. Poor Georgie stoically waited for me to capture the perfect shot of a lavender bush for more than 15 minutes - I took a couple of photos where he has actually fallen asleep waiting for me!!!

So the solution to my problem is this: I will not write anything about Istria and all the small towns we visited - Novigrad, Umag, Sveti Ivan, Savudrija, Piran, Porto Ros, Capo d'Istria, Motovun, Porec, Limski Kanal, Rovinj - I will just post the photos I took and hope that they at least will be able to reveal to you the reasons why I fell in love with this land...



 
 

  


  


  


  


  


  



  

 


 


 

 

  


 


 


  


 

 

 

 

 



  

 



  


 


  


 


  


  


 


 


 

 

  


  

 

  


  

 

 




 


 


PS 1: If anything, Istria is ruled by cats, asparagus and Campaniles. There was not one village inland or by the coast we visited that did not have all three in abundance!

PS 2: Lately I've been obsessed with wooden doors and window shutters...and eggs. I have a burning desire to paint eggs and doors! The later I found plenty in Istria...for the eggs I have to look elsewhere....