Easter Eggs

In order to be fully prepared come Easter time, you need to start early. 

Traditionally, Serb women start saving discarded onion peel more than a month before Easter.

Yet another old-school method of coloring Easter eggs requires a "wax pen" i.e. a funnel-like contraption made of steel with a wooden handle.

You put small chunks of wax in the funnel, then melt it over a candle and use the molten wax to write or draw images on fresh eggs. This takes forever as the moment the wax starts to cool it stops dripping through the funnel so you have repeat the process over and over again. The turtle-shell egg was the only one my mother painted with the wax before she declared the "wretched thing altogether useless" and abandoned it. I gave it a go as she switched to a different, albeit no less tedious, technique (eggs wrapped tightly in a nylon stockings with a clover, flower or a herb of choice pressed between the egg and the stocking, all this cooked in onion peel or a store-bought coloring agent to leave the image of the flower or a leaf on the egg).

The problem with the wax pen technique is that you cannot possibly know if the egg will turn out as desired until it is fully cooked and safely out of the pot, by which time it is too late to do anything about it.

In spite of my best intentions to mark the Olympic year...

...the result was hardly Olympics-worthy.

Our neighbour Zorica's basket:

Another neighbour Vera's basket:

And this is how all those eggs eventually fared, both the pretty ones and the ones not as quite...

Pajama egg-knocking party is a standard affair every Easter at Grahovac residence...

Some of the food we had them with...

In keeping with FFFF's no-mass-produced-food philosophy, here is some homemade pepper chutney or ajvar (second bowl from the top), then an eggplant-pepper chutney or pindjur (third from the top) and ramp in yogurt (top and bottom).

What??? Easter without a pork roast, you might ask? Of course not, there was lots of it and it was nice and crispy, but I was already in food heaven, too busy (not to mention my fingers too greasy) to take pictures by the time it arrived at the table. This is what it usually looks like:

Hello, georgeus!

Orthodox Easter lent. My take.

During lent, Orthodox Christians abstain from eating meat and any food of animal origin, eggs and dairy included. I am not really a fan of potato pie day in, day out, so I prefer to use this time to prepare and eat more Asian dishes. Hummus is lent-friendly and so is my pickled kale and beetroot salad.  

 Indian palak paneer, a spinach - cheese dish in a traditional cumin-red chili-tomato masala made with tofu instead of cheese, here with homemade eggless rye noodles.

 The picture does a great disservice to this dish! It tasted a zillion times better than it looked. 

Of course, you will not see many Serbs eating either hummus or palak paneer at the time of Easter lent (or at anytime, for that matter). 

Dry fruits and nuts comprise some of the more standard lent foods.

My mother's take: mushroom pie made from homemade buckwheat crusts...

...with lots of pepper! The Pie of All Pies, if you ask me, though I am no authority on the subject. 

And then her breads...

One more buckwheat-rye affair or....

... this peasant's pogacha (sourdough bread). It doesn't get any simpler than this. 

Flour, salt, water and baking soda. That's all.

A thing of beauty.

Baked.

All my independent pastry-making efforts can be classified either as chapatis, rolls or  breads,

all more-or-less invariably made from rye with some buckwheat and/or some wholegrain wheat flour .

All other sweet and savory wholegrain or white-and-wholegrain or white-flour-only kneading and baking projects such as sourdoughs, strudels, croissants, pies, buns, pretzels, rolls, muffins etc. are strictly managed and supervised by

the Grand Master (aka My Mother) and this post does not include any of those.

They will be subject of many a post to come.

It's been both a blessing and a curse to have been brought to this world by a woman who does wonders with a sift and a rolling pin  yet has the willpower of steel not to stuff herself silly with all that baked goodness, unlike her younger, more fallible version.   

On the other hand, when I do bake or make pastries on my own, I tend to keep things simple. God forbid I should ever throw away food, bread especially, so I also have to take into account the fact that whatever quantity of bread or pastries I make

a) I would either have to eat myself, unless I have friends or guests visiting or staying over or b) would have to be frozen with debatable results once defrosted.  

By the way, in the Balkans  it's considered a sin to throw away bread, 

not that I am superstitious but I AM a true Balkan girl, so there you go...

These are the chapatis I made recently (a blend of rye, whole wheat and buckwheat flours with just a dash of cumin).

I roll them out and then grill them in an oil-free pan,

pressing the edges with a dry spoon until they start to puff and blister...

The final result...

 The rest is up to you. I like mine with a typical PB&J combo,

except that the J here is my mother's no-added-sugar homemade apricot jam

(the no-added-sugar part explains its bright color)...

 ...or my all-time-favorite homemade plum jam (made from unskinned plums, of course!)
 and locally made organic peanut butter. 

Another ball of unleavened dough, intended for a batch or two of spring rolls...

 (this time I mixed rye and whole wheat flour with a sprinkle of olive oil) 

After I separated the big ball into tiny nut-size balls, I rolled each one out into paper-thin sheets

 and prayed to the God of All Things Baked that they do not break or tear as 

I stuffed them with a spring-roll mix ... 

 ...straight from my kitchen blender (shrimp meat, soaked rice noodles, spring onions, carrots etc.)

...cooked some right away, stuffed the rest in the freezer for later.

And, last but definitely not least... 

...what I thought would be just another rye bread was too plain and ugly once I put it in the baking tray, so I tried to jazz it up with some sunflower and flax seeds. Here it is before it went in the oven...

 ...and when it just came out:

I mixed the seeds in the dough too so here is the cross-section of my 

clumsily named but aptly made Rye Buckwheat Sunflower Flax-seed Bread:

Wonder what I had it with??? You'll never guess.....

Our daily bread...

Slava bread or slavski kolac is an important part of the religious aspects of Krsna slava or the celebration of a Serbian family's patron saint day (that is St. George in my case or May 6th as Orthodox Serbs adhere ot the Gregorian calenderI.In many homes, parish priest comes to home to bless the bread before any festivites can begin. Alternatively the bread is taken to the church to be blessed in the mass.
Now, my mother is a woman of many skills and baking happens to be just one of them. All the breads in tihs post are made by her, two of us together. Only recently have I started baking witohut her strict guidance and supervision. Now that i do, I make sure she is not around to taste the end product for the fear she will find it subpar.  Laugh all you want, but when it comes ot baked goods, my mother is able to detect even the slightest  flaws. Take this slava bread for example.


The picture on the left is the unbaked bread, brushed with egg  yok, resting before going in the oven. The crosses, braids etc. symbolize prayers for a good, fertile year, peace and stability in the family etc. Other decorations may be added like grapes, wheat crops etc. 
The picture on the right is what it looked like when my mother took it out of the oven. She was furious that the bread creased a bit near the middle and blamed it on her oven's volatile nature.

That slava, and I think this was in 2010, we had a selectioon of other baked goods.The slava bread was made from white wheat flour so it was nice ot have some whole-grain varieties to choose from.

Like these whole-grain and white rolls baked together and smackfull of buttery goodness. You see there is an empty corner??? That's becuase I snatched a wholegrain roll as soon as it came out of the oven.

Here is one other Slava bread.

 

This is Orthodox Christian Christmas bread. It usually hides a golden or a silver coin (or any coin in any currency, depending where you live) that is believed to bestow profit, wellbeing and good luck upon the lucky finder.

 The 6-week-long Christmas fast is broken on Christmas morning, when the family gets together, exchanges Christmas wishes and gets together to eat. They next turns the bread three times (with every member of the family holding the bread like in this pic) and breaks it. Whevever there are children involved in the process, it's recommended to put a coin for each child to avoid fights and tantrums.  

 

Ahh... the Flower Bread. Very soft and tasty as every section was separately stretched out, its numerous layers rolled out, then liberally buttered and  flipped back and secured with toothpick during baking to resemble a flower. The centre is covered with poppy seeds and "the leaves" with white sesame flower. I could live on this bread alone.

Corn muffins, the regular kind... another variant is the kind with spinach and crumbly cheese...
The spinach makes them light as air and perfectly fluffy...

Easter bread.... Looking forward to seeing what we'll come up with for this year's Easter....yummmm.

Rye breads....

Want more? Coming soon, I promise.