Dr. Pepper

Still hot bean stuffed peppers

   ''The misleading name "pepper" was given by Christopher Columbus upon bringing the plant back to Europe.At that time peppercorns, the fruit of an unrelated plant originating from India, Piper nigrum, was a highly prized condiment; the name "pepper" was at that time applied in Europe to all known spices with a hot and pungent taste and so naturally extended to the newly discovered Capsicum genus.'' (Thank you Wikipedia:)

    

    Peppers came from Mexico, it was brought to Europe immediately after the discovery of Americas, around the year 1493. To be honest I can't imagine how Europe had looked before peppers came.

    Balkan people love peppers. They can't live without it even during winter times, so they stack their peppers in so many different ways. I'll try to list some of those here:

- they dry it and grind it and that powder they add to most of their dishes, in the west also known as paprika (name for pepper in Eastern Europe),

- they dry chili ones, smoke them, crush them and add them when they wanna make a hot dish

Drying peppers in Souther Serbian villages

- they pickle it and eat it as a salad,

- they make ajvar, spread made out of grilled aubergines and peppers and eat it as a side dish or a bread spread,

- they roast it and leave it in the freezer, so they can make roasted pepper salad in winter or eat it in an omelet,

- they put it raw in the freezer so they can add it to the dishes like đuveč (mixed vegetables in clay pot baked in an oven)

- and last but not least, they dry big pieces and keep them for making stuffed pepper dishes during winter time.

    Stuffed peppers are the Balkan's funkiest dish. You can stuff them with various stuffings, and make the vegan, vegetarian, tasty, nice looking... Coolest thing to bring out in front of your guests from foreign lands because it's so colorful. Dried stuffed peppers in winter is the thing you need to forget about the weather outside and start thinking about where you're gonna go when the summer time comes.

This is how dry peppers look like

    I saw big dried peppers long before I found out what people use them for. You can't miss them on Serbian markets. Although for a long time I didn't know what they use them for. One time my Mexican friend wanted to make some home made Mexican dish and bought those. He thought they are chili like the ones in Mexico, they weren't, so he needed to add some chili paprika to make his dish taste more Mexican. Few years after that i went to my friends place in Niš, southern Serbia. His mom made stuffed dry peppers (with rice and meat), and that dish was amazing. I made it immediately after I got home and since then I'm addicted to it, although I stopped adding meat to the original recipe after some time..

    I especially like peppers filled with beans. That's a traditional dish that's mainly eaten in southern parts of Serbia, as well as in Bulgaria and Macedonia. I changed an old recipe a bit, adding more onions and tomato pure. Since there's a sacred rule, that if you prepare oven baked beans you should add a lot of onions to it, I figured it's not gonna be any different with oven baked beans that's baking inside peppers, and I'm very proud to say I was right.

Ingredients:

- dried peppers, you usually get 10 in one pack you buy at the market,

Stuffing peppers with cooked beans

- beans (use white beans, I fucked up and bought some dark beans before, so I used in dish to get rid of it. I mean it was good, but white kind is better for these kind of dishes), 250 grams (8,8 oz),

- onions, one big one or two medium ones,

- tomato pure, 2-3 spoons

- garlic, thyme, chili, salt, bay leaf, black peppercorns...

1.  Put your beans to soak in the water the night before. 

2.  Do the same with your dried peppers few hours before start making this dish. 

3.  Take beans out of the water and cook them until they start falling apart from  their skin, you'll need around and hour maybe hour and a half if somebody cheated you and sold you beans from last year harvest. Take a casserole and put some oil at the bottom. 

Putting bean stuffed peppers over the sliced onions into the casserole

4.  Take a casserole and put some oil at the bottom. Slice the onions and spread sliced onions around the bottom of the casserole. 

5.  Take beans out of the water, add thyme, chili, salt, 2 crushed garlic cloves, grind black pepper and some oil. Mix it in a bowl. Take peppers out of the water and stuff one by one with beans, after you stuff each pepper hold two sides of the top tight for a second and put it on top of the onions one by one until you fill the casserole. 

6.  Take one cup of the water you cooked beans in add tomato pure to it and mix it with a spoon. Pour that mixture over the stuffed peppers, add some more salt, thyme, one bay leaf and some more whole black peppercorns. Leave it in the preheated oven for at least 45 minutes (hour is also ok) on 200 degrees. Check it from time to time.

Stuff peppers with parsley on top served with millet kasha

     If you are vegetarian you can eat this dish with one spoon of sour cream or cream cheese. If not it goes well with vitamin salad, cabbage salad, sauerkraut  etc.

  

*Photo of drying peppers is taken from the web site www.superodmor.rs

Summer of Cabbage Love

Vegan oven baked sauerkraut

''Metaphorically, bigos means "confusion", "big mess" or "trouble" in Polish.'' (Thank you Wikipedia:)

    Why Woodstock is such an important event in music history? It's not only because so many big names played there, it's also because it was one of the first massive festivals that gathered hundreds of thousands young people, with nothing else then music, peace and love. I visited some cool festivals too. In my city there's one really big festival, in the beginning it started like Woodstock, as part of political protest, but later it turned commercial, and now ticket costs more then 100 euros. Although line up is quite cool. The greatest festival I ever visited was Woodstock.

One of the first photos of the festival I saw on the internet looked something like this. When I saw it I knew I need to go there by any means necessary.

     I didn't do it with some time portal or by taking large quantities of LSD. I really went there, by train, from Berlin. I guess by now you already know, that I'm talking about Polish Woodstock. It's one of the biggest festivals in Europe. Like on original Woodstock entrance is free. You aren't gonna listen to Jefferson Airplane or Credence Clearwater Revival, but there are bunch of Polish bands you never heard of, who after a lot of beers, soft drugs and presence of 500 000 people around you sound like Jimmy Hendrix's Star Spangled Banner guitar solo.

    Anyway I was there, jumping around to sounds of Polish rock, eating cheap Hare Krishna vegan portions, drinking dusty beer, playing hide and seek with people camping near me and of course there were the mud baths. Everything one great festival has to offer. And the crowd around me was cool, some cute Polish girls from Lublin, squatters from Netherlands who came to the forest 2 weeks before the festival and were the first who set camp there that year, 2 Gothic chicks from Berlin and a guy with Polk High Al Bundy football jersey, some Polish hippie-like guy and a girl who dug 2 big holes in which they stand for the whole day, Hare Krishna guys who are aggressively smiling at people and bunch of festival freaks from different countries, that I missed to exchange numbers or facebook accounts with. After only one night there I knew I hit the right spot, and that this festival is like no other, at least in Europe.

I couldn't believe this is gonna be the place where I'll find sauerkraut dish

    In the middle of all that I see Serbian flag in the crowds. I was seeing that flag almost every day at the concerts, but I was always to fucked up to go check whose is it. One day I firmly decided to check the Serbian flag, I go there, and I see a friend from Belgrade waving the flag.... Wooow man, wtf, what are you doing here?!
After some beers, he tells me:

 -Do you know they serve podvarak at the food stands?

-Nooo shit? They eat it here too?!

-Yeah man, they call it bigos in Polish, and you get a good portion too, for just one euro.

I guess people who read this blog already noticed in this post, my appreciation to any dish that contains sauerkraut. Podvarak is a sauerkraut baked in an oven with smoked meat and is one of the things I really missed when I turned vegan. Until one day,  I decided to make vegan version of it. Just to remember my Woodstock days under the sun.Vegan podvarak turned out great, and here is the recipe:

Ingredients:

-sauerkraut, 1 kg (2,2 lb)

-potatoes, 2 big ones, or 3 medium size (around 600 grams=21 oz),

After puting onion slices in oiled casserole

-onions, one big onion,

-garlic, chili flakes (smoked) or sweet paprika powder, bay leaf, black peppercorns, thyme, salt, oil.

1.  Oil your casserole and put sliced onion in it, spread onion slices around the whole bottom of the casserole. Put some salt on the onion slices, crush the garlic and add it too. 

2.  Then put the first layer of sauerkraut on top. Cut potatoes in cubes and add them on top of the sauerkraut. After adding the potatoes sprinkle some salt, chili or paprika (depends do you like it hot or mild), thyme, drop few peppercorns and bay leaf on top. Then add second layer of sauerkraut, the potatoes again, and same spices go on top. Last layer should be sauerkraut, and after adding all the same spices on the very top, pour some oil on your dish. 

3.  Sauerkraut loves fat, so don't be stingy with oil. I usually use cold pressed sunflower oil. Cover the casserole with aluminum foil, tuck it in. Leave it in preheated oven for one hour on 200 degrees. After that take it out, take off aluminum foil, leave it for a minute or two to rest and then put it back in the oven for another 30-45 minutes on the same temperature. Watch your oven from time to time, so it doesn't burn.

After adding first layer of sauerkraut, potatoes and spices.

    Podvarak is a great dish, people usually prepare it in the winter when they pull out their first sauerkraut out of the barrel. It goes well with some yogurtif you are vegetarian or some cooked (pickled) red beets salad with garlic. You can serve it with black bread and some buckwheat or millet kasha.

    Only person who probably missed original 1969. Woodstock more then me is my dad. He was 16 at a time and he was all into each and every band that played there. Back then they were ordering records from London record stores by post, working hard in the fields to earn money for new records of: The Beatles, Janis Joplin, The Who and Joe Cocker and his favorite musician of all times was Carlos Santana. I think most of people from Yugoslavia loved him, probably because they could feel in a right way his distinct fusion of latino sound with rock'n'roll, so unique, emotional and new in 60's USA and since Yugoslavia already heard and loved latino music with Yugoslav mariachi music from the 50's that made him really popular among Yugoslav youth. So while making this magnificent dish, try imagining how it felt to be on dairy farm on Catskill mountains, near the hamlet of White Lake in the town of Bethel, state of New York, while Black Magic woman was played.

* Since all 4 days I camped on Polish Woodstock I was on all kinds of substances, I didn't took any photos there. Although I asked some of the people I met there to lend me some photos for this blog post. Now they are searching their old photo archives, looking for those. Until they find those I put some interesting photos of the festival I found on the internet, on web sites: roadeightyfive.com and deon.pl.

Enjoy vegan podvarak a.k.a. weganskie bigos.

De la Soul Food

Wheat is one of the first cereals that get domesticated, it happened around 10 000 years BC.

    ''In the Japanese Orthodox Church where rice is mainly eaten, koliva is commonly made from rice sweetened with sugar and decorated with raisins.'' (Thank you Wikipedia)

    Koliva is a sweet dish people prepare for religious feasts and funerals in Orthodox Christian countries. I liked it a lot when I was a kid and I still do. People don't expect much from the cooked wheat, but believe me it one of the best sweets I ever tried, plus is healthy unlike most sweet food you can buy these days.

    Custom connected with eating koliva on religious holidays and funerals comes from the ancient world. Koliva wheat in the Ancient Greek Parthenon symbolizes earth goddess Demetra. From Ancient times this custom passed to the  Byzantine world, and later people of all countries that accepted Orthodox Christianity, directly or indirectly from Byzantine started eating koliva. In Serbia today you can eat koliva on funerals or patron saint days (each family has their own patron saint), when every family organizes a feast at their home.

    Outside religion, you can try koliva at the old style confectionery shops. They usually serve old Balkan sweets like baklava, halva, koliva, šampita(creamy dessert) etc and drinks like lemonade and boza (refreshing wheat flour drink). 

    Basic recipe for koliva contains only wheat, walnuts and sugar, but I change it a bit to make it more tasty (to me, and hope to all of the people who are reading this blog). People usually put same amounts of uncooked wheat, walnuts and sugar in their koliva. I started eating it when I switched to macrobiotic diet, and I didn't put sugar in it at all. Since sugar is like cigarettes, one is too much in the beginning, but after some time you smoke 20 a day, and you want more. Actually wheat by itself is sweet, but we are all used to much higher amounts of sugar, that we take with other desserts, so to us wheat feels like tasteless. Although you can put as much sugar as you wish in your koliva, most of the Balkan housewives put the same amount of sugar and wheat, and it can't be sweeter than that. So my recipe goes like this:

Ingredients:

-wheat, one cup, 250 g (7,7 oz),

Some necessary ingredients for making koliva

-water, 3-4 cups,

-raisins, 50 g (1,2 oz),

-walnuts, around 50 g (1,2 oz),

-some cinnamon, some lemon zest, 2 cloves, some lemon juice,

-you can put as much sugar as you want, or eat it without sugar like I do. If you have some money to spare you can also put malt sweetener instead of sugar.

1.  Put raisins to soak in water and leave them like that for few hours.  

2.  Put water in the pot, when it boils, add the wheat and turn down the burner to the lowest possible temperature. Cook until wheat soaks up all the water from the pot. 

3.  Take a blender, put cooked wheat in it and blend it good, after that put the wheat in a plastic bowl, add the raisins, cinnamon, some lemon zest, crush 2 cloves with a pestle and add them too, add sugar if you want and few drops of lemon juice. Put the koliva on a nice plate grind the walnuts and sprinkle them over the koliva. Save some whole nuts to decorate your koliva.

Koliva with ground and whole walnuts, raisins and cloves on top.

    As i said earlier people usually eat koliva in ritual purposes, but as it's very tasty and healthy dessert you can eat it when ever you want. You can also use all kinds of dry fruits or nuts for your koliva such as: dry plums, dry apricots, peanuts (which is not actually a nut, blah, blah, blah...), almonds, cashews etc.

    This recipe can completely can fit into macrobiotic diet. You shouldn't use sugar, but I think you shouldn't use malt sweetener either, first because it's expensive (although tasty), second because wheat and raisins are sweet by themselves and in my opinion don't need any additional sugar when you use to it, and if you fallow this kind of diet I guess you already ate a desserts that are even less sweet. Be careful with walnuts, sprinkle only a little bit on top. Enjoy! 



    Koliva will make your afternoon tea great, it's also high energy food, so it will give you enough strength to go do some workout in the afternoon, go play football, basketball or go clubbing in the evening. This is a literately Balkan soul food, and it's prepared with ingredients that almost every house has in the whole world.

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. :)