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?

Hey Guys :)

Being born and raised in the beautiful South of Styria, and possessing an Austrian passport technically means that I am Austrian. Nevertheless, I never called myself Austrian. My parents were refugees of the Bosnian War when they came to Austria in 1992. That means that I am Bosnian, but somehow, I do not consider myself an fully Bosnian as well. So, who am I? A question, I often asked myself and others my entire life. The answers to my question did not simplify anything, on the contrary, they even increased my confusion:

Austrians used to call me names such as Jugo or Kanake, which are used to insult people of former Yugoslavian origin. Actually, many people do not know that Jugo is rather a common expression, than a swear word in those Southern countries. Jug means South in Bosnian, Croatian or Serbian. Therefore means Jugo: The man of the South. Whatever.

Opinions of  Bosnians, even of some of my family members, did not make it easier for me to understand who I really am. They used to call me Švabo because they have always considered me an Austrian, rather than a Bosnian. Švabo means Schwabe in German and Swabian in English. Swabian is a historical and political expression for people from a certain geographical part of Germany. People from former Yugoslavia erroneously use this word for both, Austrians and German people, and, apparently, for me!

But that is still not all: For reasons of history and religion, Serbs, for instance, call me Balija. This term used to describe descendants of Turks of the Ottoman Empire in the Balkans. In most cases, this word is used in a derogatory way.

Turks in turn, at least a number of them, do not consider Bosnians one of them. Perhaps this is because of the language. Although Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian contain a huge number of Turkish elements in their languages, they are still Slavic. That means, that Bosnians who never learned Turkish only understand a few words. Additionally, just like many Arabic people, some Turkish people do not regard Bosnians as being real Muslims, because they do not seem as strict as Turkish people do. - Believe me, they are! At least some of them. I think that every country has its firm believers, regardless of what religion!  

Finally, after a long time of asking who I really am and getting these answers, I decided to consider myself all of that what people called me. I am a Jugo, a Švabo, a Balija and even more! I am an open-minded girl who does not judge anyone because of his belief or nationality. I love travelling. I have been to Asia, Africa, North America and many countries in Europe before. I loved it everywhere and I want to explore even more!

In conclusion, who cares where you are from? It is about who you are. And Guess what! Now I know who I am! ;)

Hmmm… quite kitschy ending, isn’t it? whatever :D

Good Bye

Who am I?

Hello there! For those who don’t know me .. My name is Alma. I am 21 years old and came to Graz to study. I am originally from Carinthia, beautiful little area in the south of Austria.

Where do I begin? Firstly, family is one of the most important things in my life. I can’t go a day without calling my mum or my brothers. Some people say, I look exactly like my mum when she was younger, but actually I don’t see any resemblence ;-).

But one thing for sure is that I inherited most of my characteristic features from my mother. Some are good and some are bad. For example I am a bad liar. I cannot lie and wouldn’t even want to. (Probably a good feature?) And something not so advantageous about me is, that I am lazy as hell (I bet Frank already noticed). I try really hard to get rid of this bad habit, but sometimes eating candy and watching movies seems a lot more interesting to me…(Definitely inherited from my dad.)

Second place is for my friends. These are two of my best friends. I have known them since kindergarden and we are still really close. They practically know EVERYTHING about me. And they know me better than I do. This is actually frightening, but hey, it’s a two-way situation so I got that going for me ;-)

the early teens

I love going to concerts and festivals! I have seen so many artists and bands, that I lost count. However, I still think, I haven’t seen enough, so whenever I have the opportunity to got to a concert nothing else matters to me.

What else? Right .. I love to read, mostly thrillers or crime novels. I try to stay fit as good as I can, but there is just too much food ready to be eaten and one has to make sacrifices.

People say I am crazy and I totally agree with that! I am shy at first, but after some time I get comfortable and start opening up. I can be annoying sometimes, especially when I am hungry or exhausted. What I really dislike is smalltalk. I don't why, but I find smalltalk rather boring and pointless. That is probably one of the reasons, why hardly meet new people.

I have nothing left to say, so I'll end my post with a song. Enjoy!

WHO AM I?

I´m Hannah. My middle name is Barendina – quite unusual name for an Austrian person? Well, I´m named after my grandmother, who is Dutch. All my relatives from the mother´s side are from the Netherlands, and some of them (including my mother) now live in Austria. Unfortunately I wasn´t brought up bilingually since my parents only spoke German with me.

 

Every summer my family and I go to the Netherlands. There we spend the days on the sea. The beaches are extremely broad and full of beautiful seashells. When I was a child I looked for the most extraordinary ones to take them with me.

 

We used to go there in summer since I was very little, and maybe that´s the reason why I love the sea! I love sunbathing and taking a dip in the cool water. While strolling along the beach and feeling the fresh sea breeze I easily can get away from it all. I can relax and forget everything for a moment which is absolutely necessary for me. Otherwise life would get far too stressful…

I have two sisters and they mean everything to me! They are like my best friends. I can count on them because they never let me down. It´s important to me to stay in touch with all those who mean a lot to me. People are the ones that make my world, not things. I´m not a materialist. Material things come and go, but family and good relationships last forever.