Six-hands Cheese Crescents

Two kids and me in the kitchen... The plan is to make something for breakfast, I hope it is going to be edible :)

What are the benefits of making food with kids? Flour everywhere over the kitchen, white faces and hands not visible under the dough, some undefined forms of dough spread all over the kitchen table... And it won't be over very fast, they enjoy the game :)

But this game can always be educational. You can turn it into math class, learn colors, fact about some groceries...

This was our game (children of 3 and 6):

- How many eggs do we have in the box?

- When we use 2 eggs, how many remain?

- Where does this milk come from?

- What animal gives us the milk?

- How do we get flour?

- Where does it come from?

- What is the egg consisted of?

- What color is which part of an egg?

- What shape is this?

- Can you make a triangle?

And so on, and so on... Depending on groceries you use to make what you intend to.

Today we made cheese crescents. Very quick and easy to make. Children can make them, too. They are so sweet with their little tools (stolen from play-dough) and enormously large aprons, that goes all to their toes. But it is useful, when you think of all the spilled flour...

That's what we needed for our crescents:

For dough:

- 2 cups of white flour

- 4 oz cottage cheese

- 1/4 cup milk

- 1/4 cup oil

- 1 egg white

- 3 tsp backing soda

- 1 Tsp salt

For spread:

- 1 egg yolk

- 1 Tsp milk

- sprinkle of salt

- sprinkle of pepper

I poured everything we needed into the cups, kids poured it into the bowl. Counting all the time. Then we mixed everything thoroughly - kids for the beginning, then I finished the dough. I divided it into three equal parts and spread two of them into the rounds. Then we used knives from play-dough to cut them into eights (elder child did it perfectly). I made the first crescent to show kids how to roll them, and with a little help they finished the rest of the rolls. The third part of the dough was left for freeform shaping. It came into some weird forms, pretended to be crescents... Small tiny crescents, more like fingers, but very cute. The prettiest, absolutely. Made by sweet little hands.

Final step was to coat them with spread and they were ready to get into oven, for about 30 minutes.

At last we could sit and wait for our breakfast. It was so yummy!

Made by pretty little hands. The best breakfast ever.

I send hundreds of kisses to my dear friend who gave me this recipe, it is really fantastic. We had a great time, and a great meal.

Mom's Recipe Collection

Smells from the mom's kitchen are something that all of us surely consider as the most precious memory to our childhood. No one ever knew to make such a delicates from nothing as mom did. There wasn't a moment or a day that there wasn't a delightful plate full of smelly sweet things placed on our kitchen table. Although, every Sunday a delightful smell of fresh rolls or some kind of pie discretely ran under the door of my room and sneaked into my bed. Who could resist it and don't get up immediately?

I am living far away from my birthplace for a while, but every time when I go to visit my parents' home, I have to dig into mom's recipes and make something from her collection. She isn't among us for several years, but every well known scent from the kitchen brings her back into the house. As smells spread around the house, I expect that every moment I am going to see the dearest face calling us to come to the table. Although the recipe I use is the same that she did use, it never tastes and smells the same. Only one person could make it that particular way. But I am never going to change some recipes and the way of making some food. This is one of the most precious things I inherited from her. And with every meal made from her collection, her spirit is there with me. My dearest company.

A few months ago I were in one of those visits to my hometown. When I opened the kitchen closet and digged through handwritten notebooks and a pile of papers with recipes, it came to my mind to gather all that in some electronic form. At first I meant to retype all of them into one file and keep it on some safe place, upload it to some internet storage place... But I wil loose one of the great memories, lines that are written with her own hand, stains that we made making that cake or pie and that bring all those memories back. Therefore, I decided to scan the whole collection and turn it into one PDF file. Memories to keep and to pass to new generations.

There is one more thing that I decided: at the same time, I am going to share those recipes here. From time to time, every single recipe I choose for that particular day. I want to share my memories with someone else and I hope that I will make pleasure to some other family for their family meal. 

Serbian National Cuisine

Serbian cuisine is the mix up of influences of many conquerors, but also has a great variety of characteristic food.

Preparing meals is a special ritual in Serbian home and that makes kitchen the central place in the house. There are three main meals for a day: breakfast, lunch and dinner. Lunch is the most plentiful and most important meal, so if it is possible the whole family is gathering around the table. Plenty of bread is must have for every meal, especially home made which is consumed with almost every kind of food.

Vegetable or meat soups and broths are always on the table so Serbian women usually make them once in the week in very large amounts, cook them for several hours and later add pasta or noodles to daily use and make the different meal every day. Main meal usually consists of some vegetables and meat mixed in famous mousaka, sarma or stuffed peppers. Something that makes Serbian cuisine famous abroad is rostilj, especially pljeskavica (grilled minced meat made like a beef steak), cevapi (small rolls of mixed minced meat) and Karadjordjeva snicla. To make material for rostilj, masters of that job mix several kinds of minced meat, add lot of spices including red pepper and garlic, but exact formula they use is secret and that makes Serbian rostilj unique.

Salads in Serbian cuisine are also made in specific way. One of them is tursija, pickled mixture of green and red peppers, green tomatoes, small cucumbers, cauliflower and carrots. Furthermore, there is pickled cabbage, that is unforgettable for all Serbs who leave their own country and make it wherever they live all around the world. Another salad special for Serbian cuisine is ajvar, known as the "Serbian vegetable caviar".

To make ajvar you have to roast red peppers and then leave them in closed dishes for some time to rest. Next you need to remove skin and seeds off the peppers and then ground them. At this point grounded peppers are then mixing with oil, salt and garlic and cooking for several hours to reduce water.

Finally, prepared ajvar is putting into glass jars and closing with a tight lid. Some other specialties that are always on the table when a large company is gathering are kajmak, kacamak and gibanica, a kind of pie.

Many meals known as Serbian national specialties are not even in the vocabulary of other nations, so their names are hard to translate. So if anyone wants to uncover the secrets of Serbian food, he should let the experienced chefs lead him through that fantastic journey.