..And so it begins....

Pita

Welcome to Mama Anna's School of (somewhat) fine Balkan cooking.

Take a seat and be quiet please.

Yes, that means you - up the back in the corner...

the one that always orders steak, three veg and a VB can from the Chinese restaurant down the road....

pay attention please...

Thank you.

Pita has it's origins from Bosnia. 

Traditionally a Turkish dish, now everyone makes it.

Serbian, Muslim and Croatian.

At each others throats sometimes, all are one in the kitchen.

Now that I pestered my brother-in-law's wife to teach me last Christmas how to make it (and she showed me) I too, have joined the ranks.

Yes.

Now that I have (somewhat) mastered the delicacy I may now be married off to a Bosnian at the age of 17...

You will need:

Fine flour

Pork Mince (roughly 300g)

An onion

Two medium potatoes

Lots of patience (you will need about ten go's at it to get it right).

A not-clean floor (inevitably foodstuff will find it's way to the tiles/carpet/floorboards).

After sifting four cups of really fine flour, adding a pinch of salt and a cup and half of warm water then kneading it well, you  should have something like this:

This is left to rest a while (and rightly so - it's hard work being prodded and poked like that I must say).

Whilst that is left to have a nap (in a warm place) the ingredients are prepared.

The onion and potatoes are finely diced and placed with the pork mince in a bowl with plenty of salt.

Variations without meat include egg, sour cream and thickened cream, egg and spinach, cabbage or plain potato.

These are usually made on a Friday or simply when meat is in scant supply.

The well-rested and now rejuvenated dough is now ready to be cut into four pieces and rolled into balls.

These are then rolled out and drops of oil applied to soften the dough for stretching.

Folded over, they will now be ready to be hand-stretched.

(The bloody tricky part).

Sorry I couldn't show it being hand-stretched but...

My hands were rather full.

This is the end product (though please don't look at the holes - I did say I had somewhat mastered it and when it's eventually rolled up it [thankfully] makes no difference).

The filling is now ready to be applied.

Once the mince, onion and potato is evenly spread out, the tablecloth is used to "roll" the dough and filling.

Like so:

Rolled halfway, it's then cut and ready to be rolled again..

Once it's browned nicely, boiling water (with some salt) is added to it.  Returned to the oven once more for a few minutes or until the water has pretty much disapeared is the final step.

Dobar tek....

Is War. Is not good.

The most inventive cussing I ever heard was whilst I was sitting outside on a stifling summer day. 

We were smoking cigarettes with my cousin's wife on the front porch watching people on the street and life go by in a tiny village in Croatia's heartland called Vrbanja.

Raucous protestations from a very drunken man defending himself from the strident accusations of his wife that he'd been at one of the two local pubs and spent all their green stuff.

"Odi u tri picke materine" was her retort.

My mouth curled into an embarassed smile.

Go to not one, but three of your mother's pussies.

She had raised blasphemy to an art form I hadn't yet seen. 

Perhaps she had good reason. 

My cousin told me they were forbidden to go to the forest and sell the wood as they had done in previous years. 

Work was scarce. 

Money was tight.   

Still, the ever present alcohol always flowed.

As I noted whilst sitting with my cousins and one of their friends whose perpetual gaze in my direction had me looking up at the ceiling, whistling and twiddling my thumbs, completely oblivious to my uber-discomfort at his ogling.

My shaven legs were the target.

The complete opposite of the prevalent custom of uncontrolled body hair among both sexes. 

He then proceeded to lift up his top whilst peering over his drink at me like some sort of bizarre and unexpected mating ritual.

Suffice to say that this particular form of non-verbal communication was not reciprocated....

.................................................................................................

I cranked up the volume in our rented car with Zagreb number plates.  The kids nodded their heads in time to "Get me off" by Basement Jaxx, a CD I paid a hefty ransom for in a Zagreb music store, as we wound our way on the road to Bosnia.

As we crossed the border, women and children appeared with berries in jars for sale alongside the road.  My husband slowed for two young boys.  With eyes widening in enormous surprise, their eager fingers almost tore the large note from his hands.

As we drove up the cramped, narrow road that resembled little more than a goat track in the village he hadn't seen for 17 years I wondered what we would find.

It had always been the piece of the puzzle that had eluded me for the longest time.

 That of the life he had before he met me where Serbians, Muslims and Croatians trained together in the compulsory fifteen months of military service....

and that of the previous lives of his brothers and their families who had lived with us for a time when they came out to Australia as refugees and whom I treat now as my own family and not only his... 

I wanted to see the houses they fled from carrying nothing but the clothes on their backs.

I sought to meet the people who had returned, to truly put a name and face to the old photographs stuck in albums often dragged out and examined.

Needed to hear the stories of family, some who had been living in a motel room you couldn't swing a cat in for almost ten years after being ethnically cleansed and still living with the mental scars of torture during imprisonment.

**Kad smo dosli kod njegove staru kucu, komcinica izasla iz kuce.  Jedna starija zena, oko sestdeset godine.

Ko si ti? ona njega pitala.

Nije ga mogla poznat.

On se okrenijo.

"Vidis ona kuca"?

"Ja sam jednom tu zivijo".

Pocela zena plakat....***

The time we spent in Croatia and Bosnia enthralled, amazed, amused, bemused and saddened me, sometimes all at once.  The thoughts of people who had died from the war, some family, other's family members of friends and all those who were personally affected by ethnic cleansing have stayed with me and always will.

It's a part of my life that is a box of personal treasure - opened very occasionally and looked at with sadness but also love....

**When we came to his old house the next door neighbour came out from her house.  An older woman, about sixty.

"Who the fuck are you?" she asked.  She couldn't recognise him.

He turned around.

"See that house over there?"

"I once lived in that house".

The woman started crying**

................................................................................................................................................

***The above is the correct translation from Croatian to English. 

***Except for the word fuck.

***I just like that word.

I have an aversion...

to filling out forms.

An affliction so deep-rooted, withering and darkly potent in it's force that only many long hours spent with my hot and sweaty back pressed against the cold, uncaring leather of a psychiatrist's couch with a tear-streaked face and a very shiny, very red nose will alleviate the  condition.

Please.

Take my hand.

Step with me this way.

Let me take you back to where it all began...

A portion of blame may be attributed to my father and his lack of English speaking/writing skills.  Long days and nights spent on the tobacco fields trying to eke out a living for us all meant he was unable to learn much of the Aussie language except for the word "bloody" and a few other choice Italian swear words. 

Friends popping in to visit me who had the front door opened by my father had his cringe-inducing shout of  "Anica, WHERE YOU ARE?????" in their earholes.

Forms from his work were all handballed to the child who in reality had knowledge only slightly more than her parents in what she was reading and able to write.

My mother, who was unable to write in English but able to read my private diary detailing the joy of marijuana use, also enlisted me to write notes such as  "I was sick and unable to work" to her employer and fill out any boring paperwork.

As I moved out of home I thought my phobia could be laid to rest.

But no.

My husbands brother and his family upon arriving in Australia from Bosnia some years ago now had form after form after (you guessed it), form to fill out. 

The paper used was enough to strip an entire timber plantation.

Several times over.

Does Bosnia have less red tape and paperwork than Australia?

If so I'm moving there.

So you see I just can't escape my loathing, even in everyday life.

Want a red-hot, super urgent, mustbefilledoutyesterday credit application? 

Sure, I'll put it in my manila folder.  The one which is opened occasionally to peek at in disgust then put away to the furtherest corner of my desk.  I usually get to those tasks anywhere from now until twelve months later.

Is that alright with you?

Cooooooool..

Wanna give me a form which must be filled out, like,  immediately, otherwise it will cost me money? 

Great, I'll hand you the money right now.  Cash ok?

And did you want to kill my libido? 

Fine.  Just present me with a form which must be filled out in block letters and a black pen. 

Not even a handful of little blue pills will save that one.

So last night, having a quiet ciggie outside on the back verandah, unable to sleep I began to think about a form I had yet to fill out for my mother-in-law.

And farted.

Very loudly.

Yup.

I really don't like forms....

Meso...

Seven empty wine bottles and three empty beer ones in the yellow recycling bin later the recipe was complete.

Other vital ingredients which, when omitted, will create an inferior product include laughter, whooping and the very loud, extremely Bosnian music with the thumping Turkish rythymns producing vivid images of long, dark haired Balkan women with lithe hips swaying, eyes staring, dark, fixated on you....

and was the most likely cause for the incessant barking of the neighbour's dog..

I had made "pita" (a Bosnian dish with Turkish origins - dough stretched paper thin by hand with pork mince, onion and potato) and my brother in law's wife had made "pogaca" (a special type of bread).

We were set.

The four of us - my husband and I along with his brother and his wife - had begun our annual pilgrimage to our holy shed (a long way away) in our backyard to make our holy food.

"Meso" or meat in Croatian.

Sausages. 

Minced by hand.  Made by hand.  Intestine pulled over a plastic, approximately 6 inch apparatus in a very familiar fashion (men may identify with this) through which the mince is pushed through. 

Never knew making sausages could be so sexy.

Bacon. 

Cut with perilously sharpened knives, so edgy that if I was Angelina Jolie I could have filled many, many vials of blood if I had so chosen. 

Bacon lovingly rubbed with sometimes overly generous amounts of paprika, salt and garlic.

Hung up to be smoked the next day.

Pieces of bite sized fat with very little meat simmering in it's own fat.  The voice telling you that the ridiculously high fat content of these, well,  pieces of fat really, has sent the measurement for "will this make my bum big" completely off the richter scale silenced by the pairing of these divine morsels with pogaca.

Eat your fucking heart out Posh...

Letting the kids go completely feral until they collapse into their sweet smelling beds.  Mark was no doubt delirious no-one was there to tell him off for watching a particularly saucy part of a French film someone had taped on the top box, which he played over and over again.

I think he quite enjoys the bit where the French whore struts her stuff on stage.

And why wouldn't he?  She has very nice breasts...

It was a late and extremely cold night when the last of the sausages had been hung and we patted our full and bulging bellies.

A bone tiring, enormously long day yet somehow supremely satisfying.

The meso had been done.

The annual pilgrimage was complete.

Constipated farts that have (finally) run their true course...

It had been going on for days now.

She pressed her hard, pissed off nose into the screens of my windows. 

Searching for windows ajar and finding them. 

Her furious mouth spewing enormous amounts of dust and whatever else she had been able to gather through the tiny openings in the mesh.

Last night she clouded over the heavens so darkly not a star could be seen.

Nor the moon.

Nothing.

Small, baby offerings in the form of inconsequential drops of rain which dried up almost before they had even hit the parched and depleted earth.

We had pumped her full of toxins you see. 

Blocked her. 

Through our own selfishness and desire to consume at all costs. 

We had constipated her.

Yet even as I sat outside last night in the dusty chair and watched the spider in the corner with it's enormous legs curled up underneath it, crouching below it's adhesive like web I knew she would fight back.

I looked skywards at her and willed her.

Stop your farting and rain I told her.

I willed her to rain.

And so she did, magnificently so, for the first time in many months.

She listened to me.

This time.

Hanging onto the frickin' wagon for dear life

A sharp snip along the dotted line of the small square piece with my pink plastic scissors and it begins.

The application of the round silver patch onto a spare scrap of flesh on either upper arm along with a quick rub and I'm almost there.

Two hours later when the permeation into my blood stream has reached it's peak and the arm with the patch experiencing pain akin to childbirth I'm there.

Yeah baby.

I'm so there.

Still, confusion reigned at lunchtime.

Normally I would quietly slip outside through the back door of work to the side street where I'd light up (I've made it a rule to never smoke at work - a work function being the exception when I've been coaxed into submission with a bombardment of margarita's).

So I ignored the profound daze I found myself in as I walked through the front door and paid no heed to the brief, desperate moments of wanting to punch out the girl walking in front of me, prise the cigarette from her nictoine stained fingers and run as fast as my black high-heeled shoes with the pretty bow would let me...

Until I got home.

When I spotted the half stubbed out, six-puffs-left cigarette patiently and quietly waiting for me in the rockery like a secret lover.

I absolutely love you I told it as I lit up.

I fucking hate you I reminded it when I stubbed it out.

The eight rocky road biscuits on special at Safeway that I demolished in ten minutes completely and utterly negated the wholesome benefits of my half hour walk at lunchtime.

However.

Today is another day.

The pantry cupboard is Mother Hubbard bare of chocolate biscuits with a fat laden content high enough to feed Nicole Ritchie for a few months.

My supply of discarded, three quarter smoked fags waiting for me with lusty, open arms has dried up.

I'm still hanging onto that wagon by my fingernails, short and nervously bitten down as they are.

But only just...