food commune

December 23rd

Pula

Ljubljana

merry marxmas from pula, croatia! yes we have been wearing these hats in public throughout our entire trip.

here is some fish sara consumed in ljubljana.

and here imogen is eating a burek at the ljubljana xmas market.

this was also at the xmas market - we ended up wandering around here a whole bunch, mainly to indulge in the various mulled wine selections...

buckets and buckets of this shit everywhere

 "it's not christmas without nutmeg!" - sara. pictured here is the large pail of homemade egg nog we made on xmas morning, spiced with an inappropriate level of rum.

homemade eggnog is best consumed in a picturesque ferrero roche and knitting adorned environment...

... or in imess-style plastic bottles while climbing around castles in the middle of pula.

wishing you all the best during this festive season, your comrades,

comrades! just a small post to mark my excitement about my imminent travels. in a few hours i will be meeting comrades laurynas and adrien in london fucking england, at which time we will immediately proceed to the brick lane beigel bake to indulge in my favourite london cuisine. in honour of this reunion, please enjoy this yiddish song about bagels.

Yiddish lyrics

Shalom,

I am preparing for Shabbat and thought it be appropriate to write something for the blog, even more so after Sara commented on my lack of engagement in this enterprise of ours. 

So, this morning I went to the fish market and bought eight oysters and two crabs.  On the way back I had a beef bagel just as I was to commend myself for being a good Christian and abstaining from meat on Friday. I also got a challah. But it is not braided!

Otherwise, London is dull and grim.  Were it not for the “insanely” (to quote the Survivalist) delicious oysters, it would be even worse.  I need to go to the sauna lest I get depressed.

sziasztok a bajtársaim!

some of you may remember that i recently had to undergo a terrifying, life-threatening, dental operation. here is some brief and select documentation of that process and its aftermath.

the last photographic evidence of my front teeth in their pure and authentic form, as i head out to face my dental doom. viszontlátásra, fogam!

life is so hard, my comrades. yet some things are surprisingly less hard than you imagine they will be. these things may include recovery from deadly tooth operations. last week i almost died when i had an appointment with a hungarian dental surgeon who fortuitously turned out not to be a creepy psycho killer of the human centipede persuasion. but, yes comrades, i triumphantly survived the near fatal surgery to eat the following delicious things. 

home-made potato soup / burgonyaleves

my new friend in budapest, louisa, came over the day after my operation to make me potato soup and keep me company during my time of suffering. but in fact i was in much better shape than any of us had anticipated, and have been recovering relatively smoothly (touch balls).

we topped the burgonyaleves with sajt és petrezselyem

all post tooth-surgery periods demand blended beverages. consequently, another new comrade of mine, cecile, graciously lent me her blender for the occasion, and i have been breaking many food commune rules (implemented single-handedly by our pickiest comrade, mind you) to invent innovative tasty smoothies.

this one probably came about through all manners of unlikely combinations... maybe bananas? spinach? carrot? apple juice? yoghurt? cocoa? blueberries? mint? it was damn delicious though. ignore the evil cat on the cocoa box in the background. 

in the days that followed my operation, i read a lot, and watched the wire, imported from prága via imogen, but was fine to leave the house and make merry in almost no time. and indeed it has been a good week for merriment. on monday, i discovered a balkan music night that takes place at a pub down the road from where i live, where a bulgarian woman teaches everyone southeast european folk dances while an all-female band plays a mix of serbian, croatian, and macedonian traditional music.

yesterday the same pub hosted its weekly hungarian folk music night, at which i met a hungarian man who tried to pick me up with the following line: "you know, the best way to learn hungarian is in bed" (it did not work). after i told him what my dissertation is about, he ranted for a long time about "the fucking gyppos" and responded to everything i said with "oh stop it with your jewish propaganda!" it was nemzetti ünnep (national holiday in hungary commemorating the 1956 revolution), and we had just come from seeing the Viktator Himself give a speech outside the hungarian parliament, via running into a super creepy late-night jobbik rally with people brandishing lit torches and fascistic-styled banners, so i was all maxed-out on my tolerance for hungarian rightwing bullshit, and quickly got away from the man before i could pull a comrade imogen and punch him in the face.

post-operation studying at massolit bookstore, my second home in budapest (thanks to comrade roman introducing me to it in the summertime). you can't tell but something in this photo is TOTALLY FAKE.

all in all, life is hard, my dearest friends, but also mostly okay and entertaining. i hope all the comrades are enjoying it these days, whether in prága, london vagy moszkva.

the first signs of my indoor herb garden, here in budapest. i noticed this progress yesterday morning and it made me very happy. i planted a shit ton of seeds right when i moved into my flat here and now am just waiting for the day when i will be able to use fresh herbs in my cooking.

After wallowing for several weeks in the comuter-less abyss I now have access to my very own (OK mine and my roommates') internet whenever I want, which can only mean one thing: bordering-on-irrelevant pictures from mid-August!

Above is the spread from one of our extravagant intern rooftop lunch pot-lucks, including various pasta and couscous salads, eggplant parmesan, kofola chicken wings, meat pie, cookies, and fried banana donutty things (sorry Adrien, I'll try not to be so obscene next time).

And here is the pavlova I made for my going-away potluck:

I have decided to combat my many inhibitions and feature on this digital piece of paper. This is only because I just once again want to sing praises to my village and all its gastronomic pleasures.

To begin with, my house in Vilnius caught fire in early August and I had no reason to go back home ever since. It is not that I have spent much time in the capital this summer anyway.

So, the day after the fire I caught a two-kilogramme pike and decided to make gefilte fish out of it. This wonderfully coincided with my name day, which is merrily celebrated every year by my peasants and I. It is a tradition to have a roasted cockerel that is slaughtered especially for the occasion.

I was so excited by the gefilte fish that even my sister was allowed to mock my momentary zeal for photography. In the background you can also note a little piece of white cloth that I use to make quark and cheese. It is not my underwear. 

Last week I found an eel in my fish trap. It was the first eel anyone caught in my village for quite a while. And what a beast it was! It weighed 1.7 kilogrammes and measured almost a metre. Local connoisseurs said it was unusually short for its weight. My mother commented that it is just like me – short and chubby. The eel now cosily awaits to be cured with smoke. 

Adrien wrote about ceps in June and I shall write about them now. Their season is just beginning in Lithuania and I went on my first specialised hunt last Sunday. For most of the summer the chanterelles blighted my baskets, but now I can confidently stride past them in search of something much more noble. One marked difference from Massif Central is that in Southern Lithuania no one appreciates large mushrooms and they all end up on grills drying. Even on my way to work yesterday I found two ceps that my landlady is now drying.

Moreover, the official cranberry season begins on the first of September. I already picked my first handfuls, because I just simply could not resist their charm.

To touch one's own balls, by designer Antonio Bertossi