Spring Fever

   Who doesn't love spring? Although winters aren't what they used to be, we all anticipate that 21. March, officially the first day after which we start thinking about BBQs and hiking. Sometimes winters are light, like this one. It had spring temperatures, and that was really cool, but it kind a sucks out the spring fever. I mean, is there anything better then putting your first piece on the grill and opening a beer in the same time? Well, when that thing comes in January, it's somehow not the same. That's maybe the only good reason why I wouldn't live in those places of eternal spring. I mean where is the magic of anticipation.

Dolac Market in Zagreb, Croatia, coolest market I've ever visited.

    On markets on the other hand, spring is all present even in January. Lettuce, spinach, even tomatoes are there flirting with you, and it's really hard to stay on the right track. Then sometimes you  are not strong enough and you buy some of those, you make a salad, and you are like wtf, those are not spring veggies, it tastes like shit. That's why you should eat vegetables only when they are in their prime season. Just go to the market and by cheapest vegetables there and you'll be alright.

When spring comes to markets in my city.

    In April, you start eating spring veggies. There's lettuce, spring onions, radish and spring cabbage. There's also fresh parsley, celery and dill. You buy all those and mix them all up. That's what we call vitamin salad in Serbia. There is no definition for vitamin salad, it's basically every salad that contains more then one vegetable, that's not shopska salad. I experiment every spring and few days ago I found an awesome combination.

Use all spring onions, green part is also great.

Ingerdients:

-lettuce (half if it's small, or quarter if it's bigger)

-spring onions (one big or two smaller ones, together with green parts)

-radish (3 small, or 1 big one)

-spring cabbage (one eighth of one middle sized cabbage)

-celery

-dill

-salt, olive oil, lemon juice or wine vinegar and some black peppercorns, water.

    You will need one big bowl. Shred your cabbage in it, cut the dill and add it to the bowl, then put some salt on it. Take a pestle and hit it hard until juices start to come out. Then cut the celery, radishes and spring onions, grind some black pepper into your salad and cut lettuce leaves in stripes and add them too. Put some more salt on it, pour some olive oil on top, some lemon juice or vinegar and half a cup of water in the end and you got your salad.

    Serve it fresh, together with some grilled bread rubbed with olive oil and garlic (a.k.a. bruschetta) or in smaller quantities on the side with some other dish.

Meet your new favorite salad :)

First two photos i found on web sites of www.zagreb-touristinfo.hr (Tržnica Dolac (Autor fotografije: P. Macek) and www.rtv.rs. Thanks guys! :)

Liberty cabbage

    Did you know that: during WW1, due to concerns the American public would reject a product with a German name, American sauerkraut makers relabeled their product as "Liberty cabbage" for the duration of the war. (Thank you Wikipedia)

    Sauerkraut is one of the healthiest stuff you can eat. It can literately rise you from the dead, without any candles and spooky rituals. I experienced that so many times, when after  getting shit faced and that ''please kill me now'' feeling in the morning I become Superman after just one glass of sauerkraut water (in Serbia also known as rasol).

    Sauerkraut is part of food that we call winter food (zimnica) in Serbia. That's food made out of processed vegetables that you prepare in the autumn, so you can eat it during winter time. Even when i was a kid, vegetables in shops and supermarkets during winter weren't so common, and if you even find them, they were quite expensive. Since Serbian people are used to constant economic crises and money shortage, they invented ways how to process vegetables while they are cheap (or free if you grow them on your own) so they can last during periods when they become expensive and kind of luxury (winter).

Serbs like their cabbage

    The most important member of winter foods family is definitely sauerkraut. My family used to prepare 100 kilos of sauerkraut every winter. We ate it every day. It's the thing that made us healthy, it's also the food that cured biggest health problem of early explorers, scorbut (lack of vitamin C). So if it was good for my family, Captain James Cook and his crew,  it's good for you too.    

    In Serbia they say that the best cabbage for making sauerkraut is the one from village called Futog. This place is all about cabbage, they have cabbage festival in the autumn, people selling cabbage on the road side etc. I'm not sure you can find that kind  of cabbage outside Serbia, but the main thing is to choose some cabbage that's lighter in weight. Making sauerkraut is cheap and fun. Like in video games there are 3 levels of difficulty easy, medium and hard. Last one needs little more labor, but the taste of the sauerkraut is so much better that way.

Autumn in Serbia, selling cabbage on the roadside

Ingredients:

10 kg (22 lbs) of cabbage,

200-300 g (7-10 oz) of salt,

water, black peppercorns, bay leaf.

1. Easy  

    First you need to find a clean plastic barrel with a top (in Serbia also known as katsa), some white cloth, few wooden boards that can fit in the barrel and one heavy stone.

Heavy stone is the most important piece of equipment.

You take how much cabbage you intend to put in your barrel. After buying it you leave it for a few days on the cold (outside). After that you take off outside leaves from each head, and you carve out the cabbage root with a knife, in a way that you get a deep hole. After that make few centimeters (an inch) deep cross mark on the cabbage with your knife. Center of the cross should be the hole where the cabbage root once was, and it should go all across the back of a cabbage head.

Cabbage head, properly carved up.

Fill the hole where the root was with salt. Then put your cabbage in the barrel, so the part with a hole is looking up. Some of the smaller heads you can cut in half one or two times, rub some salt on them and put them in between the other heads to fill up the void. Then put some more salt on top and in between cabbage heads, some black peppercorns and some bay leaf. Then pull some water over the cabbage, cabbage should be sunk in water, tuck it in white cloth, then put the wooden boards and the big stone on top, which you washed first. Leave it like that in the basement or somewhere else. Bigger the temperature in the room where cabbage is, it's gonna ferment faster, and if you leave it on some hot place it's gonna become too sour, and later it's gonna become rotten, so watch out where you keep it. After approximately one month, you can try your sauerkraut and feel proud of yourself..

Salted cabbage heads in the barrel before pouring water

2. Medium

    If you prepare your sauerkraut this way, you will make two different sauerkraut products. One of those two are the sauerkraut heads, which you can use for sarma and other is shredded sauerkraut, called ribanac in Serbian. To make ribanac you will need a cabbage shredder. Do all the same like in the easy mode. Leave cabbage you bought on the cold for a few days, then separate it in two piles, depends which kind of sauerkraut you like more, you can put more whole cabbage heads in the barrel or more shredded kind. With cabbage heads do the same as written in the easy mode manual, cut all cabbage from the other pile with your cabbage shredder, put it in-between cabbage heads, when you fill up all the void, start putting it on top, put one layer of cabbage, then add some salt, then take your shoes and your socks off, wash your feet and step on the cabbage in the barrel, you can jump on it as well (I told you it's fun), just watch out not to flip over the barrel. Then add some black peppercorns and bay leaf. Do the same until you use all the shredded cabbage (cabbage, salt, jump,pepper and bay leaf, repeat).

Shredding cabbage

    In the end give it some really good stomping, if cabbage didn't let out enough water to cover it, add some water, put the cloth on top, wooden boards and of course the heavy stone. Ribanac cabbage needs less time to become sauerkraut then cabbage heads, so you can eat it sooner. Check it from time to time.

 3. Hard

    This is a hard core way of preparing sauerkraut for really dedicated people. It's basically the same as the medium way, only difference is you need much more stepping and jumping on your cabbage. Main idea is to make cabbage  let enough water so it can be sunk and pressed without adding any additional water to the barrel. This is the best you can get, and believe me, after a month of anticipation, you will be amazed and very proud, and all the hard work you put into it will pay off. It's also important to chose right music for this kind of work.

    In the end I would like to mention some of the stuff you can do with your sauerkraut. You can eat it as a salad with some ground paprika on top, roll stuff in its leaves and make some veggie sarmas, bake it in the oven and make dish called podvarak (I was amazed when i saw the same dish in Poland where it's called bigos), cook it in the pot (preferably made out of clay) and make a dish called svadbarski kupus (wedding cabbage), fry it in the pan and serve it with some cooked potatoes for example, or as a side dish, drink saurkraut water (a.k.a. rasol) from it when you have a hang over (it helps, i tried), make a soup with it by using some sauerkraut and some water etc. There are infinite possibilities. Some of the dishes i put on this list are not vegetarian, like svadbarski kupus for example, but that's why i made this blog in the first place, to show people how they can prepare all those without any meat, and enjoy their food.

Photos: First two from kurir-info, forgot where the third is from, fourth is mine, fifth one is from coolinarka and the last one from the web site called mostarskaraja.

    

Roasted Wild Boars a la Obelix... on rare occasions.

People ate much less meat in the past, before mass production of food started.

  So, how I realized I shouldn't eat meat?
    As I said in my earlier post I always liked to explore history of things. It's probably because I'm a historian. I was always interested on human diets during different history periods. On the first sight it looks like it's not it all hard to find out how people were feeding themselves for example 300 years ago. Of course it is, especially considering that the average peasant only 150 years ago was usually illiterate, so he/she wasn't writing down recipes, or reading it from cook books or magazines. Recipes from the past that we can read in some early cook books are usually recipes used to prepare food for nobility and we all know they didn't work much and their dietary habits were more guided by their hedonistic urges then by food that will make them healthier. They were rich and fat, and they didn't give much of a fuck about it (also rules of attractiveness, and medicine was quite different at that time).
    Closest source from which i could find out what ordinary peasants (because Serbia was always predominantly peasant country) from Serbia were eating, were stories that my dad was telling me since I was a kid. He was born on 1953., beginning of a modern day era in Yugoslavia you could say, he lived in years of mass migrations from country side to industrial cities, beginning of mass production of food, and meat crave that struck Balkans as no other region in the world. His thoughts about his childhood are somehow idyllic, but food that he mentions from that time is completely different then what we imagine peasant people ate back than.
    When Serbian people think about village food, especially village food from northern parts of Serbia (Vojvodina), first thing they think about are different meat products: home made bacon, prosciutto and stuff like that. Truth is, yes people ate all those a lot. Once a year they slaughtered a pig which fed the all family for the all year time. In my fathers words, those meat delicacies people eat only outside the house. They eat it usually in the fields, when they go to work. That was a hard food which was saved for days of hard labor. Even bacon, Serbs like to eat bacon raw, they don't fry it together with eggs as much as English people do. Although Serbian bacon is different, it's much closer to Italian pancetta, it's much more smoked and dry. Prosciutto was eaten on the field as well, or it was served as a meze when some guests came. It was accompanied with rakia, Serbian national drink. It was a food for special occasions, not a thing you eat every day in sandwiches. Today when we work in offices and cubicals, not only we don't need bacon, prosciutto and stuff like that, it actually makes us fat and unhealthy.

Hard work-hard food

    Their breakfast was usually made with eggs or some diary product, whole grain bread (white bread was more expensive, and people ate it only when they wanted to show off in front of their guests, same as prosciutto), scrambled eggs, sometimes french-toast (prženice in Serbian), proja (corn bread), palenta with milk, sour cream, kajmak (milk spread very popular in Serbia) or white cheese, spring onions in spring and all kinds of different bakery products. Breakfast wasn't an important meal it all. They say in medieval times there weren't any breakfast. It was just something to put in your mouth before you go to work in the fields, to hold on to before the first break.
    Lunch was cooked for the whole family. It was usually cooked in a big pot. It was the most important meal, when all family gets together (accept in some periods of the year when everybody was in the fields for the whole day). It was usually some of Serbian dishes like: beans stew, cabbage stew, green peas stew, green beans stew, stuffed peppers, potato stew etc.

In stew-like dishes every plate got one or few bits of meat

In those dishes you had minimal amounts of meat, enough for everybody to get one really small piece, or in some cases like with beans they would just put some smoked bones so dish get specific smell. On some days they would prepare oven baked dishes like: moussaka, podvarak (sauerkraut and smoked meat oven baked), prebranac (oven baked beans), oven baked stuffed peppers, đuveč (oven baked vegetables similar to Moroccan tagine) etc.
    Dinner was light. Sometimes even simmilar to breakfast, palenta with milk and sugar, bread, jam and milk, popara (usual dish in poor Serbian peasant homes, basiclly steamed bread with cheese), bread and milk, sutlijaš (dessert that originate from Otoman Empire, rice pudding with milk and cinnamon) etc.
Only real meat day with roast or rinflajš (cooked beef or chicken eaten with cooked vegetables and sauce) was Sunday, or the day when some guests drop by.
    It's important to know that my dad grew up in communist times. So back then influence of Serbian Orthodox Church was very weak. Orthodox Christian faith also deals a lot with people's eating habits. So Orthodox people have few periods of the year they call fast (or lent). During those periods or specific days they don't eat meat (accept fish), milk or eggs. Basically they become fish eating vegans for some periods of the year, when you put those days all together there are around 250 fasting days in one year. So more then half of the year Orthodox people are vegans (who eat fish). Before WW2, these rules were common even in lives of regular people. Later only really faithful people, monks, nuns etc continued with these healthy habits.
    To sum it up, Serbian people were almost vegan for 2/3 of the whole year, and on those other days they ate roast only on Sunday, Christmas and other holidays and on the days some guests came by, and on regular days they ate like one piece of meat a day. And we all think we can't live without meat?! We can't sit around in our offices, pressing buttons without burgers and steaks?!

Intro

    Just 4 or 5 years ago, my thoughts about food were no different then thoughts of most of the people from my country and this part of Europe. Meal without meat is no meal. If by any chance you would even think about preparing some dish without meat and serving it to me, you would need to use massive quantities of cheese, eggs, sour cream etc if you wanted me to like it. Although I always like salads, especially fresh salads made with homegrown Serbian veggies (some people say tomato here, tastes like tomato), I never considered them as a full meal, when they are not accompanied with meat, or at least with some cheese. Tomatoes, cucumbers and onions, without some white cheese on top, NO WAY PEDRO!

    I always liked Balkan cuisine though. It was always good by itself. In Serbia, and I guess in some other Balkan countries you have people that never even tried any foreign dishes. Number of Balkan people on question: What food do you like the most? would answer: Homemade food (domaću kuhinju). So why Balkan people love their food so much? Especially now when you have so many opportunities to try stuff from far away lands, dishes made out of veggies that don't even grow on your continent, prepared by foreign chefs in restaurants decorated to reflect all beauties of their foreign and exotic lands, why do they stick to their homemade food? Because they love their momma? Well yeah, that's maybe one part of the answer. But the other part lies the fact that Balkan peninsula is a great historical mixture of languages, cultures, music and of course cuisines.

    On Balkan peninsula you can taste refreshing Mediterranean salads, kebabs brought on swords of people from Central Asia, healthy sauerkraut hangover curing dishes from German parts of Europe, beans that held Serbian army man warm for last few centuries and there are stuffed peppers too. And all that stuff we make at our homes, from ingredients we buy at our local peasant markets, no deli-stores, no fancy restaurants, no small expensive packs of fruits and veggies with weird names.

    People learn new stuff every day, as I've always been a Curious George,  like to ask questions, explore history of stuff etc. after long time of examining my attitudes towards meat consumption i completely changed my way of thinking, and which is the most important eating. First days of my vegetarian and later vegan and macrobiotic diet were very hard. I missed all those nice homemade dishes i used to eat. New vegetarian exotic and expensive stuff couldn't replace Balkan dishes in my book. Also the costs were big, all money that i used to spend on meat, milk and eggs, i start spending on all kinds of soy products, plus all kinds of exotic fruits and veggies with weird tastes to replace all those dishes i missed so much. After some time of hunger, overspending and dreaming of sarma, podvarak, and shopska salata, i decided to cut the bullshit and start eating all that Balkan home made food i liked so much, but without meat, eggs, dairy products and milk. It was one of the best decisions of my life. :)