I’ve always loved burnt sugar. I love the simplicity and rusticity of those hard, translucent lollipops that you can make by chilling burnt sugar syrup; they’re golden-brown like amber and smooth like ice. We found this recipe of burnt sugar sauce in our old Rumanian cookbook (I’ve mentioned it before). I’m used to trusting their recipes, but the first attempt with the sauce resulted in a very runny, thin substance, so we had to considerably reduce the amount of water and milk. Also, I found out that the sauce needed to be cooled well before serving: it’s still too runny when warm. The sauce tasted of milky caramel with a hint of bitterness – that mild kind of bitterness that you find in, say, coffee.
I’ve always loved apples as well. Tart or honey-sweet, green or red, almost any kind, as long they are hard (can’t stand those mushy sorts) and as long as they smell like apples. Not like apple candy, apple shampoo or apple bubble gum, but like real, organic apples! The smell of fresh apples is charming and modest, it’s delicate like silk and melancholic like autumn; it’s one of Nature’s greatest, basic perfumes.
These pancakes are made with local apples that smell of rainy days, and kefir* – sour fermented milk drink. That’s why the pancakes are pleasantly sour-ish.
*If you cannot find kefir, try using buttermilk or a sour thin yogurt instead!
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There’re some things from our childhood that we start to value only after we’ve grown up. Remember those novels and poetry from Literature classes back in school – a good deal of them seemed so tedious back then, but now as we’ve grown up we re-read them and finally discover all the sophistication, and the irony, and the beauty of language, and the vividness of author’s imagination. The same thing goes for food. A lot of my friends hated milk&noodles when they were children. One of the reasons might be that milk&noodles used to be a standing dish in nursery schools. Luckily, I never went to a nursery school, so I enjoyed my milk soup made by my Mom’s caring hands. And yeah, Mom always removed milk skins (the only cringe-making part about boiled milk, to my mind). Nowadays I still enjoy sweet milk soup with leftover Filinis as a comforting evening meal or lunch… just as much as I enjoy re-reading books from my teenage years. Read the rest of this entry »
On weekdays, I start my day with just a cup of tea and a tiny bit of cottage cheese. Even if I have something yummy in the fridge, I don’t care because I am usually too sleepy to enjoy food. The situation changes greatly on weekend mornings that bring you all the luxury of long and lazy breakfasts, with endless tea drinking and a slow, relaxed talk.
This plum tart was baked last night and, despite the irresistible smell of melted plum jam, it waited patiently until this morning to be served along with the wonderful Ginkgo tea I get from Slovakia.
The pie is absolutely easy and turbo-quick to make, as it uses frozen puff pastry and home-made plum jam (taken from Mom’s collection of preserves: tons of strawberry, cowberry, plum, cranberry, black currant, cherry and raspberry jam). The jam was strong, sour and even with a tiny note of bitterness. I served the pie with a drizzle of dark chocolate sauce, but unfortunately the photos turned out to be blurry when I viewed them on a large screen, so just believe me: it goes very well with dark chocolate dressing.
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