An International Cuisine Dinner

As we were recommended to make our experience for the food blog as fun as possible, we decided to do this work as a group of four and have an international cuisine dinner. Each course we had came from another country which turned out to be an interesting idea. Why is there so much garlic in the Greek Tzatziki? Who would ever make handmade puff pastry except for Alma’s mum? All in all, we sure had a lot of fun and full bellies afterwards.

Starter: Tzatziki (Marlene)

Tzatziki is fairly easy to make. All you need is (no, not love…) yoghurt, cucumber, garlic, lemon, salt and pepper. You can add a dash of olive oil or some herbs like chives or dill for extra flavour, if you like, but those are the most important ingredients. How much of each ingredient you need depends on your personal taste and on how much Tzatziki you want to make. For mine I used…

• 1 cup (500 g) of plain yoghurt
• half a cucumber
• 2 cloves of garlic
• roughly 1 teaspoon of fresh lemon juice

...and then I seasoned it with salt and pepper until I deemed it tasty enough.

First, I poured the yoghurt into a bowl. I then added salt, pepper, and a splash of lemon juice to refine its taste.

My next step was to add the garlic to the mixture. I recommend you use a garlic crusher for that, but since I don't have one, I just used a knife to cut two cloves of garlic into tiny little pieces. I tried to make them as fine as possible, so there wouldn't be any garlic chunks. The thing with garlic is that the intensity of its taste can vary a lot. I was originally told to add 5 cloves to the Tzatziki by a reliable source (aka my mum). I added two and it was already verging on too much. So I suggest you just taste the yoghurt-mixture after every clove you add to make sure you don't end up having made Tzatziki that's either tasteless or far too garlic-y.

After I'd added the garlic, I chopped half a cucumber up into small squares, whisked them together with the rest, and just like that my Tzatziki was finished. Took me a grand total of about 15 minutes max. So if you ever need a quick and simple side dish or starter, Tzatziki is the way to go! Just... Be careful with the garlic... Less really is more sometimes, I learned that the hard way...

Main Course: Cheese Pita (Alma)

Pita is a traditional Bosnian dish, best served fresh from the oven. Pita is light, healthy and easy to make. Depending on what type of pita you prefer, it can be a gateway drug to moreish and healthy eating. If you don’t insist on making the pastry yourself, it can be referred to fast food as well.

What you need:

• flaky/puff pastry
• natural yoghurt
• eggs, yolk
• salt
• pepper
• feta cheese

Mostly, there are no measurements needed when cooking this, because it is a rather long lasting dish and therefore you can make as much as you want to.

At first you have to take the yoghurt, eggs, yolk, spices and the crumbled feta and mix everything together until you have a thick mixture. After that you roll the flaky pastry into a long and thin dough. Then you place the mixture alongside two opposing edges of the pastry. When this is done, you have to roll it over so the filling is fully surrounded by the pastry. Then you have to grease the baking plate and put the pita in the oven for about 45 minutes at 200°C. The last step before taking it out of the oven is to pour melted butter over it to intensify its taste. This amazingly tasty dish is best served with yoghurt and tomato salad. While eating with cutlery is considered as boring, Bosnians declare it as finger food. You may or may not wash your hands afterwards.

Pita can also contain other fillings such as: potatoes, zucchini, spinach and meat.

I would, of course, add the original names of them, but they are unspeakable for those who don’t speak any of the slavic languages.

Dessert No. 1: Mousse au  chocolat (Ines)

There is no dessert more typically French than mousse au chocolat: It’s a bit too much of everything and still manages to stay classy. Every look at it seems to gain you a tiny piece of fat on your hips while every spoon of it makes you crave for more. That’s probably the kind of food they invented the adjective ‘moreish’ for.

Many people do not seem to realise how fast you can make such a mouth-watering dessert. Of course I’m not French, but I tried my best to create the impression that I know how mousse au chocolat is supposed to taste.  All you need is three eggs, about 250 grams of cream, 200 grams of chocolate and some sugar. I usually add between 20 and 40 grams. Depending on your personal preferences, you can either use milk chocolate, which makes the mousse more sweet and tender, or dark chocolate to make it taste more interesting. For at least half of the chocolate mass, I would just use plain chocolate as it’s much cheaper and tastes superb as well.

Basically you just have to whisk the egg whites until it becomes a solid but fluffy white mass. Whisk the egg yolks with the sugar. Do the same with the cream while you heat the chocolate. If you do it in the microwave make sure you don’t burn the chocolate. That has happened to me so many times before. Now slowly and carefully mix the liquid chocolate with the egg yolks. Then let the whipped cream and the egg-yolk-chocolate-mixture unite. As a very last step gently fold in the whisked egg whites. Then put the whole thing into the fridge for at least three hours. If you want it to look really nice when you serve it, I’d recommend at least five hours. Well, I didn’t have that time, so this is why it was still a bit too creamy when we ate it. We enjoyed our mousse with a strawberry on top so that we could convince ourselves that there were vitamins in the dessert.

Dessert No. 2: Mor Monsen’s Kaker (Norwegian) = Mother Monsen’s Cake  (Tabitha)

I decided on baking something for our dinner, because my cooking skills are very poor and I am better at baking cakes and cookies than cooking. My baking skills are not that good either, though, so I had to not only look  for a cake from a foreign country, but also a cake that wouldn’t be too hard to bake.
After some research in my mother’s cookbooks, I finally stumbled across a Norwegian cake, which is typically made there during Christmas time. The Mother Monsen’s Cake. In Norwegian: Mor Monsen’s Kaker.

As the instructions did not seem to be very hard to follow, I decided to take up the challenge and just give it a try. No risk, no fun.

So, I got together all the ingredients:

• 400 grams of butter (O.O seriously? Yep, I double checked it)
• 200 grams of sugar (This cake is a real calorie bomb)
• 1 package of vanilla sugar
• 4 eggs
• 250 grams of flour
• 1 teaspoon of baking powder
• 100 grams of almond flakes
• 100 grams of raisins
  

The first step is to stir the butter till creamy. This took a little while and my fingers got pretty greasy, while struggling with the blender. (I really am a beginner ;))

Then, with the butter being nice and creamy, slowly add the sugar, vanilla sugar and the eggs and blend everything together.

After, more or less, successfully doing that, stir in the baking powder and the flour.
And that’s the whole batter. Pretty easy, right?

The only thing left to do now is to spread the dough evenly on the baking tray and sprinkle it with the almond flakes and raisins.

Now a piece of advice: There are people who don’t like raisins, so it might be a good idea to leave a part without raisins. I did not do it and regretted that later.

Then bake it in the oven at about 150 – 170 degrees for 35- 40 minutes until it has a golden yellow color. Aaaaaaand done!

As I had never baked this cake before, I was really curious about how it would taste. It felt like a little experiment when I took my first bite, but luckily it tasted really good. Well, it has to. There are 400 grams of butter in there!!!!

So, if you ever need or want to bake an easy cake and brag about it, that is the right cake. But beware… it surely is a calorie bomb!

OUR RESUMÉ

After we'd eaten all that the general consensus was to never move again. Ever. All four of us had our stomachs filled to the brim. Turns out four courses are a lot of food... Still, we had a good time preparing and eating said four courses, and agreed that we’d really like to stuff ourselves with randomly chosen and haphazardly made international dishes again sometime soon!

Who am I?

“A good painting to me has always been a friend. It keeps me company, comforts and inspires.”

I had a tough time making or even thinking of trying to make a blog post so that you guys could kind of get the picture of who I am.  There are over 7 billion people on the lovely planet called Earth, which means there are over 7 billion unique stories to tell. But today is my turn and I´ll try and do my best.

Stuttgart, Germany, July 24^th 1994, “Marien Hospital”. A girl named Adna Kurtagić was born. I know I know, Adna isn´t really a German name. Both of my parents are from Bosnia, but during the war they escaped to Stuttgart, and there I was. At the age of four we moved back to Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Primary school was just around the corner. I started school in Sarajevo and finished it there, but in the meantime I moved a lot. Being able to spend time in the beautiful and sunny California (San Diego and Irvine) and not that sunny but still beautiful Malaysia (Kuala Lumpur) made me much stronger as a person and more independent. But times were not always that easy and fun. Do you know that feeling when you finally meet good friends, you get along with everyone, you are doing well at school and then all of a sudden it all comes to an end? The next second you find yourself on another continent, don´t know anyone and you just feel lost. Yup. Been there done that. Days over there, especially Malaysia, were not easy. Peer pressure, bullies and all kinds of things that you as a teenager do not want to experience, came up to me. It felt like someone threw a bunch of things in my face and I was trying to find my way back out. But, as they say, there is always light at the end of the tunnel.

Music, art, dance, singing, playing the guitar and ukulele.. It was all about finding that one spot where the world stops and your imagination starts. All of a sudden you feel like you are your own superhero, actor of your own movie called “Life”, trying to make it to the top and reach the stars… Ok, maybe I overdid it but seriously, have you ever felt that one spark in you trying to get out of you so you could really show the world how much you mean and who you really are? 

Those are and always will be Adna´s five minutes of fame. Everyone who knows me, knows that I do not really talk about me and my way of making music. On the other hand they know how much I love talking about music in general and trust me you never want to get in an argument with me about it or dare me to play the ‘Who-knows-every-song-in the world-challenge’, because you know I´ll win (not even kidding, but yes, I just did make up a new challenge :D ). Anyway, I will hate myself because of saying this but it is true: “I couldn´t imagine my life without music”. Drawing, fashion, makeup and all the other similar things related to arts are what I am really passionate about and what define me as a person.

That is also when we come to the question what am I doing in Graz?

After the period when I got back from Cali and Malaysia I finished my primary school in Sarajevo and started with high school. I went to a bilingual high school which followed the national curriculum and the International Cambridge Curriculum. But shortly after that, I moved to Zagreb, Croatia, again where I finally got my high school diploma and got my IGCSE´s, As and A levels done. YAY! But then the questions came: what do you want to study, where do you want to go and what do you want to do? The first thing that popped up my mind was: Languages! I love meeting new people, new cultures, traveling and hearing new stories. So, I figured out I want to go again somewhere abroad and just enjoy both the student life and the city and people where I end up living. After being accepted to Dundee University in Scotland and getting a full scholarship at the University of Istanbul, I decided I do not want to spend my bachelor years somewhere far away from family and friends.. Not again. At that point of my life I wasn´t feeling ready for it.

So here I am now, close to everything I need in my life but still far enough to have my own space and life. And yes, all of you who may be reading my blog, my life may seem to be quite intense and kind of moving from one place to another, but trust me it isn’t.  As a person I could not be any simpler than I already am. If you would ask me what my next stop in life is I could not give you an answer. I will just let things go with the flow and see where I end up living and what I end up doing...

Btw, in case you are bored and don´t know what to do or listen to, check out my Sound Cloud profile, feel free to both comment and share it and let me know what you think of it  : https://soundcloud.com/adna-kurtagic  :))

Who am I?

Who am I?

Who am I? I guess this is one of the hardest questions you could ask yourself. Of course I could tell you that I am obsessed with fashion and make-up and that my hobbies are reading, baking and spending some time outdoors with my loved ones, but instead I am going to tell you a story my grandfather told me a couple of years ago when he was still alive. To understand the whole story, I have to tell you a little bit about my origins. I am Croatian, who originally comes from Bosnia (obviously the Croatian part of Bosnia) and was born in Austria. My parents were not refugees as you may think because of the Yugoslavian war from 1991 until 1995. Actually they came prior to the war because my dad was offered a job and that's how they started a new life here in Austria.

“Odžak“ is the name of the city I originally come from. It's located in northeast Bosnia, ten kilometers from the border with Croatia. It was first mentioned in 1593 during which time there was a huge fortress. Until the end of 1900 Odžak was part of the Ottoman Empire. After 1908 the city started developing as being part of the House of Hapsburg. Recovering from the First and the Second World War required a lot of time and energy, but the damages of the Yugoslavian war, often described as Europe's deadliest conflict since World War II, can still be seen in many parts of the municipality. But back to the actual story I'd like to tell you.

I remember playing in the yard on a hot summers day when my grandfather pulled out a sheet of paper and told me to have a look at it. While growing up, my grandfather was always keen about telling us stories related to historical events or to our origins and family. The headline of one special article instantly cached my eye. „Berlin pao, Odžak nije“, meaning that Berlin had capitulated and Hitler had already pulled the trigger, while Odžak was still fighting. The article was about the Second World War especially in connection to not only my home town but also my home village. When I saw my surname in a collocation (Nuića Bášča) mentioned in the article I absolutely had to read it.

While Berlin had already capitulated, the combatants “Yugoslav Partisans” were planning on invading Odžak. After fighting several days against “Croatian Armed F

orces” they managed to occupy it. Their goal was the occupation of all municipalities around Odžak, including “Posavska Mahala” (also known as “Vlaška Mala”), the village I come from. The ”Croatian Armed Forces” were trying their hardest to defend their territory, but after numerous battles and thousands of lost lives, they had to capitulate.

We have a huge plot of land in Bosnia, which is common down there, as agriculture has always been and still is the main occupation. Let me now explain why my surname was mentioned – Behind our stall there is a small cemetery located (Nuića Bášča), which cannot be seen when standing in front of our house. This cemetery has not always been there, but was more or less created during the Second World War. It is said that this last battle, which led to the final end of the Second World War, ended right at our property. All the dead bodies were at first just thrown at one side of where they were battling and should have later on been brought to the local cemetery. But the number of corpses was increasing each minute, so they decided to bury them right at our plot of land. The cemetery officially includes just about 30 tombs, but the number of people buried there is countless. I researched the internet and found out that the cemetery is nowadays a symbol for the arrival of the enemies, the “Yugoslavian Partisans.”

My father once planned to engrave the names on a huge marble slab of all those who fought and lost this last battle but were not buried properly. But as my grandfather and probably all older people who could have helped him with the names, have already died, he never got the chance to do so.

While searching for some appropriate pictures of my hometown, I came across a picture of my grandfather with a link to a YouTube video. He passed away in 2008, so seeing and hearing him speaking after such a long time brought tears to my eyes.