Showing posts sorted by relevance for query bosnian cook. Sort by date Show all posts
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query bosnian cook. Sort by date Show all posts

Wednesday, March 16, 2011

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.

Wednesday, April 20, 2011

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?

Sunday, December 05, 2010

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.

Saturday, April 23, 2011

Celebrating Easter

Our family has lots of Christmas traditions. It troubles me and David that we don’t have so many Easter traditions. And yet, Easter is arguably even more religiously significant that Christmas.

It’s tempting to say that we have fewer traditions for Easter because we’re trying to make it more holy, but the way it’s actually worked out is that Easter is just easier to forget than Christmas. So in the last few years we’ve been thinking harder about how we celebrate.

We spend our daily family scripture study during December re-memorizing and reciting the Biblical Christmas story from the gospel of Luke. About three years ago we started memorizing and reciting the Easter story from the gospel of John. This year, for the first time, it feels like a welcome, familiar tradition. I like the way the daily recitation gives shape to the season. It also prompts lots of conversation about tiny details of the story that deepen the significance of the season for me.

We’ve always colored Easter eggs. This year we did it in the traditionally Bosnian way, a tradition I’d like to keep, connecting up our family history to our religious history.

Another change this year that I think worked: we had an Easter meal the week before Easter. We’ll still have an Easter dinner on Easter Sunday, but why not extend the holiday? At Christmas there are lots of foods we eat throughout the month just because it’s Christmastime.


So last Sunday we had trout—fresh trout is plentiful, reasonably-priced, and delicious in Bosnia—and honeycomb that we had picked up at a honey fair (luckily we had a friend visiting who coached us on how to eat honeycomb—you spread it on warm toast). While we ate, we read the account of Christ’s eating fish and honeycomb after his resurrection and cooking fish on the beach to feed his disciples. 


“Next year let’s cook the fish over fire,” suggested Isaac. Just what I want to hear—my child suggesting an Easter tradition.

I’m curious about what Easter traditions work for your family.


I loved this article by one of David's former students about Easter at her house.  

Tuesday, June 20, 2006

Taking Taxis

Our plan was to catch a bus at a nearby midan (or plein, as Sam explained to Lucy who was having a hard time understanding our plans), but when we got there, we couldn’t figure out where to catch a bus. So we stopped a taxi and he said he’d take us for 10 pounds, which we figured would be about the same as the bus.

The taxi drove an amazing route, through little tiny, twisty streets. It looked nothing like the Cairo we are staying in. There were even stores with live chickens (and later in the day Ruth noticed another butcher shop selling cute little furry rabbits)! After a while, the taxi driver started leaning out of his window and asking people the way. “Why doesn’t he know the way?” Isaac asked. We weren’t sure. We drove around, pretty obviously lost for a while, but at last we ended up where we wanted to be. I paid him and he said I should pay him five more pounds! I gave him a couple more, but in retrospect, we should have just gotten out of the car and left.

We were at the Citadel, a fourteenth century castle fortress built by Saladin, the great warrior who drove the Crusaders out of Egypt. It’s up on a bluff overlooking the city, a great defensive position. Saladin modelled it after the Crusaders’ castle fortresses—crenellated walls and all, but inside there are big beautiful mosques. We visited a couple of them, one very old with most of the interior decorations worn off, but the second one was built in the nineteenth century and is still very much in use. Its huge interior floor, in fact, is covered with carpets. In both of them, we took off our shoes. Ruth and Lucy and I were happy to see that, while many Western women were given big green capes to put on over their immodest clothing (sleeveless shirts, shorts), everybody was fine with what we were wearing.

The mosque was really beautiful—stained glass windows with vivid colors, beautiful woodwork, and lovely inlaid mosaics. The courtyard, where you wash before you pray, was also beautiful, with lovely arched walkways. The fountain in it reminded us a lot of Bosnian mosques. There were a few people inside praying, especially close to the Eastern Mecca-wards wall, but mostly it was tourists, about half Western and half Egyptian, sitting quietly on the carpets looking around. Three women, two of them wearing veils and none of them speaking any English, came and sat near us with a very small baby girl, maybe two or three months old, and her sister, probably four or five years old (whom Ruth noticed was wearing make-up—eye shadow and everything!). They were enchanted by Eleanor and took lots of pictures of her and their baby as well as a very sweet one with Isaac and Eleanor together holding their baby. We took one of those pictures too. We couldn’t say anything to each other—well, they spoke to us in Arabic and we spoke to them in English--but it was a very sweet encounter.

We were all very glad we got to go into the mosque. It seemed to encapsulate so much of what is central to this culture, just as visiting cathedrals in Europe seemed to capture something about those cultures.

From one of the terraces inside the castle, there were sweeping views of Cairo. We could even make out, through the haze of air pollution, the three pyramids on the horizon. Ed pointed out that, while the people in the mosque were praying towards the East, all of the many, many satellite dishes we saw on the rooftops of Cairo were pointing to the West. In more ways than one. They were so consistently turned in the same direction that they looked like a field of huge, metallic sunflowers.

The real adventure of the day turned out to be getting back home. We didn’t know where to catch a bus back, so we decided to take a taxi, but the first two taxi drivers (who were at the tourist taxi stand) suggested what to us sounded like exorbitant prices, and they were unwilling to bargain. So we decided we’d take a bus, but as we walked down the hill, another taxi driver agreed to ten pounds, so we got in. We’d gone only a few meters, though, when he started asking drivers around him (while they drove!) the way! “Why doesn’t he know where to go?” Isaac asked. He stopped and looked at our map and seemed befuddled by it, and I decided I wasn’t up for that much of an adventure. So I gave him a token amount of money (he’d at least driven us down to the bottom of the bluff), and we got out.

We were right by what looked like a bus station without the building—minibuses (Volkswagen and Toyota Hiace vans) and big buses were zipping by. There were some produce stands nearby, so we went and bought bananas and oranges and mangos from a lady missing her front tooth. A tourist police officer told us the number of the bus we wanted. Several people tried to engage us in conversation (or sell us something?) but we couldn’t make out what they were saying and they couldn’t understand us, so we just sat down on the edge of a wall under a tree and ate some bananas while we watched for our bus number. It was great practice in reading Arabic numbers. The kids are much better at it than I am. We never did find it, so we finally decided to try a taxi again. This time a black Skoda with a Slavic language taxi meter stopped for us! The driver seemed unflapped when we told him where we wanted to go and offered to take us for fifteen pounds. We’d been hoping for ten, but at that point I wasn’t willing to argue and lose our ride, so we piled in.

“Does he know where he’s going?” was Isaac’s first question. And it appeared he did. We zoomed away on major city streets and pretty soon all of us recognized where we were from some of our previous jaunts around the city. When he got close to the end, he asked one taxi driver the way, but by then we could have even gotten out and walked. And he didn’t ask for extra money when we paid him at the end of the ride!

As he was driving us through downtown, we heard a siren. Six big huge blue vans with little tiny ventilation windows—paddy wagons—came barrelling through the traffic. We could see people’s faces pressed against the bars of the windows but, most remarkably, we could hear the people, prisoners?, inside chanting slogans. Everyone on the sidewalks stopped to stare. The six vans were followed by an open truck filled with army men with their guns at the ready. We felt very bad that we couldn’t speak enough Arabic to figure out what was going on. It was exciting.

We had the taxi driver drop us at a new midan because we wanted to try a new restaurant. Our hotel is in a good location for being a tourist, but I have often thought that if I were to live in Cairo, I would never ever want to live here in this neighbourhood. We were only about four long blocks from our hotel, but the feeling of this neighbourhood was completely different. There was a road blocked off to be a pedestrian walkway, so it was a little bit quieter, there were people eating and chatting at sidewalk tables, and there were produce and bread stands all around. It felt like a place people lived instead of a place people shopped. It was nice.

We found the restaurant recommended by our guidebook. It had a menu only in Arabic and none of the staff spoke any more English than we spoke Arabic, so we just told the waiter we wanted what the guidebook had recommended. He suggested some other things, we had no idea what, so I just agreed to them. We were a little worried because it was the same thing we had had for breakfast—fuul and ta’amiyah, but we discovered that the restaurant’s was much tastier than our hotel’s! And he brought a lot of wonderful accompaniments to go with it—cooked potatoes marinated in vinegar, and a potato/carrot/pea salad, and a baba ganoush that Sam and I absolutely adored. Ruth announced that she thinks ta’amiyah would be a good replacement for hamburgers, a similar food but a lot tastier. There were also French fries, almost all of which Isaac consumed by himself. They had brought us forks because we’re not Egyptians (the people at other tables just used their bread to pick things up), so Eleanor stood on a chair by herself (she does like being grown-up) and stuck the fork in the fuul and ate that. She also charmed both the waiter and the cook. At one point the waiter whisked her away to the hatchway between the dining room and the kitchen so they could take a picture of her (and he had won her over enough that she didn’t even cry!). He showed me the picture of her. It was very cute. Because we couldn’t understand the menu, we didn’t know how much it was going to cost. We were happily surprised that the entire charge was 33 pounds, or about 5 dollars.

After lunch, we went to the produce stand and bought some more bananas since we’d eaten most of them and Isaac and Ed had accidentally sat on the rest in the taxi. The apricots looked so luscious. We think maybe tomorrow we will buy some and try peeling them—laborious but maybe worth it. On the way home we passed a second branch of the wonderful bakery near our hotel, and Isaac suggested ice cream. Ed and I had mango and honeydew melon, Sam had vanilla and chocolate, Lucy had strawberry and chocolate, Ruth had mango, and Isaac had mango and chocolate. We got a spoon and gave Ellie tastes all around. We were surprised, when we walked home, how close this other neighbourhood is to our hotel. The kids are starting to worry that we have too many food places to take David in the one day that he will be here with us.

Isaac looks like a war refugee. He has several mosquito bites, and he is having a hard time avoiding scratching them, so I have put band-aids over the ones that he can get to most easily—the ones on his face. Then, this evening he and Ellie were playing and he slipped and fell and cut his head. We couldn’t figure out how to put a band-aid on the back of his head, so we tied a bandana around his head. Poor little guy.

We had a quiet late afternoon/evening here. We washed out some clothes in the bathroom sink, read, did Arabic studying, and played Sims (oh my; I think I will always associate Cairo with the Sims). For supper we ate oranges and bananas and mangos and leftover bread and almonds and raisins and ta’amiyah. Ruth and Ed and Lucy ventured out to the bakery and bought us more luscious chocolate cake for dessert. We managed to get Isaac and Nora in bed and asleep by 8:30 (of course, neither of them had napped). A good day.