Beware your food

Health warnings printed on advertisements originated in the US, but they've adopted them here in France as well. All alcohol ads contain warnings like this one, "Alcohol abuse is dangerous to your health. Consume in moderation."

But French health warnings don't end with cigarettes and alcohol.

Down at the bottom, these say, "For your health, eat less fat, less sugar, and less salt.

This one urges, "Eat a varied diet. It's better for your health."

And this soda pop ad reminds, "For your health, avoid snacking between meals."

We may be in the land of cheese and butter-filled pastries, but it's also the land of nutritional awareness.

Reading labels

We buy mostly the store brand at the supermarket where we shop. We've been very impressed with the quality, and the cost is significantly less than other options.

Buying the bargain brand, we expected bare-bones packaging, but Eleanor--no surprise it's the youngest of us all!--noticed that most of the packages we buy have Braille labels. 

Now it's a game to find the Braille on each label.

I'm impressed that the brand has such a commitment to accessibility for all its customers. My customer loyalty has just increased.

Behind the Scenes

One of the great things about spending some time nearly every day in the park, is that we get glimpses of the magic that goes into making it so gorgeous.

So beautiful!

Sucre ou sale

"Salt" means something different in French than it does in English.

The brasserie across the street advertises: "Complete Breakfast, Sugar or Salt."

It would never occur to me to call a savory dish I prepare a "salt" dish. But that's how you say it in French.

Yesterday Emma Lucy, one of our resident French experts (who just tested out of all the French grammar classes for her first year of college! Woo hoo!), started smiling as she read the label on our salt. "It's a story!" she told us.

My translation (errors not Emma Lucy's fault): There was once a sick little boy who refused to take his medicine, it was so insipid. A bird, called by the child, went in search of the purest salt, and he put it into the medicine, so the child took the medicine and got well.

Basically, a spoonful of salt helps the medicine go down!

Cooking the Pantry

The end of our stay in Bosnia is nearing (sniff), and we're getting ready for more European adventures. I've been cleaning out my drafts folder as well as our apartment. I wrote this at the end of October and was waiting to post it until I had a photo. We did indeed eat Mujadra all winter, and I apparently never did take a photo of it. Image source.  



The thing about shopping European style--daily or nearly daily--is that I run out of food, especially produce, pretty regularly. It's not a big problem since we live close to the produce market, but often dinnertime is approaching and I don't want to head out to shop, so I find myself cooking the pantry.

The day it snowed, we all wanted something warm that wouldn't require yet another trip out into the snow.

Mujadra.

Absolutely to die for. The girls at the table all liked it with feta cheese and roasted vegetables stirred in. The boy at the table was a purist and kept things separate.

I think we will be eating this a lot this winter.

Mystery Solved

Earlier, I wrote about mystery greens I bought from a sidewalk vendor.

I recognized them in a New York Times article about foraging for food in the forest. Ramps!



Mystery solved (and lots more recipe possibilities now that I know what to search for online).

Mystery Greens

I usually buy produce at the open air produce market. There, dealers buy from their regular suppliers and they show up every day, just as if they had a bricks and mortar store.

Near the official produce market, people--often scarved women--set up shop on the sidewalk to sell stuff from their gardens. This spring I've been buying greens from the sidewalk vendors.

We tried stinging nettles. (Do you really grow these in your garden? Maybe they were gathered from the wild.) My new Bosnian cookbook (and many Internet sites) handily explained how to cook them so they won't sting you when you eat them.

And we tried these, too. I don't know what they are. The Bosnian friend I counted on to tell me didn't know either, but lots of people are selling them on the sidewalk. The woman I bought them from told me not to cook them but to serve them in a salad. They're slightly spicy.

Anyone know what it is we're eating?

Dolmas, or Stuffed Vegetables

Our new Bosnian cookbook bristles with sticky-notes reminding me and Isaac where there are recipes we want to try. Dolmas, or stuffed vegetables, are one of the most typical Bosnian dishes. They're on practically every restaurant menu and have always been one of the dishes Bosnians serve us when we eat in their homes.

So, we tried stuffing peppers and zucchini and tomatoes. My photography isn't as luscious as the cookbook's, but the dolmas, especially the zucchini ones, turned out well.

Gurabije, or Bosnian Biscotti

Our new Bosnian cookbook has a several recipes for "Gurabije" in the Sweets Section. The recipes are quite different from each other in both ingredients and techniques. I think the word must roughly translate as "cookie." Always on the lookout for low-fat cookies, I tried this recipe. It's not low fat (sigh; no cookie recipes ever are) but its only ingredients are nuts, flour, sugar, salt, and eggs.

I really liked them. David and Emma Lucy thought they tasted like biscotti. Eleanor said they were too hard, but she ate three of them in one sitting. The cookbook said that gurabije are often served for breakfast with tea, so we had them for breakfast too, and with our favorite cranberry/raspberry herbal tea.

Cookies for breakfast. An idea whose time has come.

Little House in Sarajevo

Another blogger is occasionally illustrating passages from favorite books with photos from her own life. I like the idea. She gets her passages from serious novels, but the books I'm loving the most and spending the most time with are children's books. From our current read-aloud, Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House in the Big Woods:

For breakfast there were pancakes, and Ma made a pancake man for each one of the children. Ma called each one in turn to bring her plate, and each could stand by the stove and watch, while with the spoonful of batter Ma put on the arms and the legs and the head. It was exciting to watch her turn the whole little man over, quickly and carefully, on a hot griddle. When it was done, she put it smoking hot on a plate. 

Bosnian Cook

For Osmi Mart, my family gave me a gorgeous Bosnian cookbook, translated into English. It's Bosnian Cook by Lamija Hadziosmanovic. It is full of photos, and so far we've liked everything we've made from it. Eleanor and Isaac have proposed that we eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner exclusively from its recipes until we leave Sarajevo.

When I started to put the book away, I said, "Oh! They printed the spine backwards."

"No," David told me. "That's the way they do it here. You just turn your head the opposite way when you look at the bookshelf."

So I got out all the books we've bought by Bosnian publishers. Sure enough, their spines are all printed bottom to top instead of top to bottom.

A rose by any other name...

Our family has a conflicted relationship to oatmeal. I loathed oatmeal when I was a child and would eat the tiniest portion I could get away with for breakfast. For many years, when I was old enough to choose my own breakfasts, I chose things other than oatmeal. Then when I was all grown up with

children, David started making oatmeal for us, and I discovered that with apples and dried fruits and nuts and milk, I actually like oatmeal. Maybe even love it.

So I felt the tiniest bit of sympathy when our second son decided he hated oatmeal, but I also felt sure that if he just added the right stuff, he would eventually love it too. This was not true. He still hates oatmeal. He's moved away from home now, but his attitude has slowly drifted down to the other kids. Every time I make oatmeal more and more is left in the pot until, recently, David and I are the only ones who eat more than a spoonful.

I'm not ready to give up oatmeal as a breakfast option, so I decided bold steps were in order. A couple of weeks ago, I announced that the next morning we were going to have Apple Crisp in a Bowl for breakfast. I made oatmeal as usual, including the cut-up apples I usually put in it, and I stirred in sugar and cinnamon and nuts and dried cranberries, instead of putting them on the table separately. I also put our can of whipped cream on the table. Isaac was enthusiastic from the start and ate two huge bowlfuls topped by tufts of whipping cream. Eleanor was dubious. "Isn't this just oatmeal?" she asked suspiciously. But she ended up having seconds too. Only Emma Lucy remains unmoved.

And last week Isaac was the one to suggest we have Apple Crisp in a Bowl for breakfast.

Another shopping mistake

We were making pizza, and Isaac asked for sausage. So he and I "chicken sausage" in a tube, like you buy bulk sausage in the US. It even helpfully says, in English!, on the label, "No. 1 Chicken Sausage in Europe."

This is what we discovered when we opened it up, ready to put it on our pizza.

Bologna?

(In case you missed them before, you can see other grocery store errors here and here.)

Spinach for breakfast

I suspect the rest of the world already figured this out while I was doing something else. Spinach for breakfast!

I tried some different recipes online and eventually came up with a green smoothie we like: 1 c. pineapple juice, 1 c. pineapple, 1 frozen banana (the banana didn't make it into the photo), 2 c. packed spinach leaves. Puree with the hand blender David gave me for Christmas (oh, how I've missed our hand blender...).

Christened: Popeye Punch.

Which goes well with the Bosnian Popeye videos we've been watching to work on our language. So maybe it's actually Popaj Punch.

Surprise!

Tortillas

You can buy Mexican food in Sarajevo! This is new. So new that they had to hire someone to dress up and stand next to the shelves so people would know what it was,

Of course, you have to go to the big fancy grocery store to get this high-priced Mexican food. The big fancy grocery store is way too far away or us to walk.  And we are definitely not going to spend a large portion of our food budget on Mexican food that may not even taste that great. So we haven't had Mexican food in three months.

But yesterday I had a big batch of cooked pinto beans in my fridge and I decided it would be perfect for refried beans. So I made some salsa--not such a stretch since I've done that before.

I also found a great recipe for flour tortillas--something I've never before made.

They were really good and turned out to be simple to make. Maybe next time I'll even make them half whole wheat.

Thanksgiving, late

We had Thanksgiving dinner with American friends who had gotten a Butterball through the embassy, but we also wanted to cook a turkey for ourselves. What's Thanksgiving without leftovers?

I tried to pick it up two days before Thanksgiving, but my Bosnian utterly failed me, and I came away empty-handed. The next week, though, we went back, and arranged anew for them to order us a turkey.

It was big--7.7 kg. It had never been frozen or brined. It had no little shot thing to pop up when the turkey was done. And it appeared to have no fat at all on it. I was pretty nervous about cooking it.

I looked at lots of websites about how to cook heirloom turkeys and figured out a strategy. One which included herbed butter (so much for fat-free meat!).

I forgot to photograph it when I took it out of the oven, but it was beautiful and probably the best-flavored turkey I've ever tasted. My family thinks that may be because all food tastes better in Bosnia, but I suspect the turkey has something to do with it.

Wrong food, yet again

I bought an envelope of yeast so we could try these waffles. But when I tore it open, I discovered that I hadn't bought yeast.


Baking powder? Baking soda? The picture on the envelope should have tipped me off--cakes don't usually need yeast--but the envelope threw me. I just expected to find yeast in envelopes.

Later, when I went back to the store, I checked the picture on the envelope and checked the word in my dictionary before I bought. Yeast!



The waffles were delicious.

They LOOKED like huckleberries

Our church group had an ice cream social tonight. We were in charge of toppings--chopped nuts, whipping cream, chocolate syrup. And I figured I could make fruit sauce, too,if there were still huckleberries at the produce market.

This morning I found a wrinkled old lady perched on the sidewalk just outside the produce market, selling plastic bags full of the berries. They were only 2 KM, about $1--a fraction of the price I'd paid for huckleberries I bought a few weeks ago at the produce market. "I'll have to always buy from the people on the sidewalk," I thought to my frugal self. I bought 2 bags, figuring I'd freeze one for our family.



Then I took them home and sat down to sort through them before I started cooking. That was my first hint that something might be wrong. One of them was connected to an evergreen needle. And they seemed a little hard. I stuck one in my mouth and bit down. Instead of that succulent burst of huckleberry juice, it was grainy, and my mouth filled with the taste of Christmas tree--not gingerbread or candy canes but tree.

I think they're juniper berries. (At least last time I bought mystery food it was on purpose.)

Luckily our neighborhood supermarket had frozen cherries and berries, and I
cooked up 2 very nioe fruit sauces. But now I have two big bags of juniper berries. Any ideas?

I've been using Orangette as my go-to cooking source here, but she's no help on this one.

Buying produce in the fall

The few tomatoes left at the produce market are mealy and spotted, but all sorts of wonderful things have replaced them.



This was my haul on my last big produce shopping trip: root vegetables, big bags stuffed full of spinach, and cabbage. There are great mountains of cabbage, 1 KM, or about 75 cents for a head of cabbage.

I find myself buying stuff that I don't recognize. The vendor called this "black turnip" or "black chard" or possibly "black beet"--my handy dictionary is not so handy with vegetable names.



I'm pretty sure it's rutabaga, but not positive. Anyway, it tastes wonderful roasted with turnips, beets, and carrots.