The Exchange

My landlord's wife is constantly bringing me goodies. On Sunday she dropped off some cooked kofte patties (hamburger mixed with onion and spices and fried to make little burger-shaped bites) and some buttered white rice. Later in the afternoon she brought by two generous slices of apple cake. Yesterday, Monday, she came with some kind of savory biscuit-type thing her daughter had made. There is never a shortage of food coming my way.

On Sunday I had made a batch of banana bread (to which I added diced, dried figs...a highly recommended addition). After it cooled, I cut off a few nice slices and took it over to her. When she came back later in the afternoon with the apple cake she kept saying, "Oh, Kirsten, cake, delicious. Recipe? Recipe?" and she made writing motions with her hand.

Now, I'm always willing to share recipes, but this particular exchange brings up a bit of a conundrum: two of the ingredients, wheat bran and apple sauce, are not available in Kosovo. The apple sauce can be made; that's not such an issue. The wheat bran, however...I can always bring a bag of it back from Skopje the next time I go, but I hate the thought of giving her a recipe with ingredients that she can't get. If the bran weren't such a central part of the recipe, I'd omit it. But what's a bran-based bread without the bran?

Last night I also made brownies for the first time since my arrival. I did them right after the power had come back on (rationalizing that if the power had just come back on, it was unlikely to go back off right away). She want the recipe for those, too, which brings up the whole issue of cocoa. I use nothing but Ghirardelli, which, of course, is not available here. I don't even know if one can buy sweetened cocoa...hmmm....I see cocoa investigation in my future.

In a bit of a cooking mood last night, I also made a pumpkin sauce for pasta that turned out fantastic. Last week I baked a huge pumpkin and I've been throwing it in random food concoctions all week (one of my favorite things to do with baked pumpkin is to mash it a bit and add it to oatmeal with nutmeg, cinnamon, and yogurt). Last night I put two hand-sized chunks of baked and peeled pumpkin in a pot, mashed it with enough milk to give it a thick sauce-like consistency, added a generious pinch of rubbed sage, and heated it through. Then I simply poured it over some whole wheat pasta. The sage totally makes the sauce. If you wanted to add more chunks and some fat, you could always dice and sautee an onion in olive oil and then add the pumpkin. I even considered, briefly, trying to make some kind of an alfredo sauce with it (butter, onion, nutmeg, milk, do a roux, then some how combine it with the pumpkin). I was quite happy with what I ended up with, though.

Mmmm-mmm.....comfort food.