Holiday food

Last days of New Year's holidays. Real work 2010 start tomorrow. It's been sublime. In terms of cushiness. Oh, man. There is no f**ing way to lose weight around here. Seriously. Dieting is like swimming upstream a rapid with a freight boat tied to one foot. If I wasn't holding myself back so drastically, I'd gain 11 pounds.

On the New Year's eve, we went to Piček's family's place. His sister made a late diner for the lot and this is what we had:

- štruklji (it's a cottage cheese roll in gummy dough boiled in salty water, wrapped in cloth (then removed)), some with boiling butter poured over bread specks, others put into a glass pot, covered in cream with cheese, extra baked.

- With that we had thin slices of pork meat in their own sauce, cooked with onions and spices, served with rings of pine apple

- Cooked vegetables; two salads; rice cooked in spicy water and other creams.

- For desert there was the chocolate moussé with squeezed orange juice and 'princesses' - the vanilla cream and whipped cream between two halves of a puffy baked dough and powder sugar on top.

We were so full that our "chasing for the fireworks spot" was more a tranquillized pinball action in slow motion. (There was fog lifting and rising so ourselves and some other people in cars had to drive up and down between the city and the castle in various stages to avoid it. It was fun, but we were stoned on food :D)

The next day we went to my parents' for lunch and had 'raklet'. This is an indoor electrical grill plate in two stories. On the first one you put thin small slices of meat (optional - in our case we had pork) and grill them, quickly. You push slices of bread between them and around, so they get crunchy and tasty with the tiny drops fat left behind. Then you take minute frying pans from the lower story and place few onion rings on each and a slice of the almost-done meat and smear cream with cheese crumbs in it and baked that until it turns yellow.

           There were also mum's 'filled eggs', beef tartar, butter, thin rings of various hams and sausages, cheeses, various dippings and tiraminu and sour cherries and whipped cream cake for desert.

To give our poor tummies a break, I made tortillas and yesterday we had soup and pancakes. I am taming the new frying pans and have gotten it down almost to perfection, although of course they can never be as good as gran's ancient pan of twisted black iron. Point is, you have to make them flat and large and thin for the soup, as they then have to be cut into noodles, but for desert I mix them further to make the raw dough foamy and I fry them thick and puffy. Trick is to make them just right - soft and juicy inside, crusty outside and just well enough done, otherwise some people who cannot stop until they've eaten 4o (I make them pizza-sized, approx. 2 -3 mm thin) could get tummy aches.

Today Mags was making his Ribbe again - for the entire family. Even those who are not really into meat, came. This is the problem with Mag's Ribbe, his roast pork ribs with the crunchy yet delicious upper crust chess-board.. You cannot not eat them. And once you start, you cannot get enough. We licked the plates afterwards. There wasn't even leftover left for the dogs or the cats. They are seriously so good that once you've had the, when you're in your dying bed and you look back on your life, you can safely say that when times were different, when you were young and wild, you've had Maggie's Ribbe. And die a prosperous man.