Author Topic: Nostalgic food (Read 14547 times)

pgkevet · « **on:** November 27, 2019, 09:31:56 pm »

The forgotten green lentils
Simply done as boiled lentils and then my mum added some diced smoked bacon or salami or pork crackling bits with diced gherkin and onion. On days we had to watch the pennies.
Czech dumplings

Served with a lot of czech meals.. bread dumplings or with grated potato added to the dough as part of a main course instead of spuds. Very traditional and goes well with beef to soak up gravies or with duck or goose. The veg would often be czech style cabbage steamed and then finished off drained then basted with meat juices and added caraway seed. Ocassionally a little shredded apple added to sweeten it
Czech wafers.

This is a classic Kolonada brand hazlenut waers spread with chocalate/butter cream illing and stacked to make a cake finished off with a coating of chocolate. I must admit it;s one of my avourites although i cheat for simplicity and use Lidl's brand nutella as the spread and then coat with melted plain chocolate.
Fruit dumplings

Classically plums or apricot halves wrapped as dough balls and steamed the served with melted butter.
Buchti

These are a baked dough with centres of either poppy seed or damson cheese when mum made them . Done as a whole lot of individuals crammed inot one roasting tray for baking so then swell and stick to each other. Te same dough could be used for individual thinner cakes, lattened with the filling in a cavity on the surface.
Mum's potato soup

This was thick potato soup made with whatever extras were left over but always based on spuds and dried ceps and seasoning. Hearty and a meal in it's own right.
I'm not pushing this site from any personal benefit but you can get a lot of thse things mail-order fromhttps://www.halusky.co.uk/czech-slovak-foods/
Perhaps most useful they also have a heady variety of cookie cutters for the christmas biscuits

pgkevet · « **Reply #1 on:** December 03, 2019, 06:20:47 pm »

I've been playing with some of these recipes although I'm usually too lazy to do real cooking.
Burgers with Mushroom and pepper sauce served with Zeli and KnedlikZeli is the czech braised cabbage and Knedlik is the dumplings - we'll get to them in due course.
The burgers were simple - a diced onion and 3 finely chopped jalopenos and a little salt and two stock cubes mixed into a pound of mince and hand squeezed to flattened balls (I made 6) - seared each side in oil and then reduce the heat to fry them through. Once done use the juices and scrapings in the pan to add another diced onion and a whole punnet of sliced chestnut mushrooms and fry those right down to max shrinkage. Add a little salt and a lot (I mean a lot) of black pepper and get it all nicely stirred in before adding a pot of cream and reducing it down - lovely.

The bread dumplings do take time so you need to plan this meal out to get it all roughly together. Ideally the dough is made using half coarse flour. options include mixing plain flour with semolina or in my case neither was to hand so i used wholemeal bread flour (not as good).3 cups of flour, a little salt and a spoon of sugar and a cup of milk (you may need more flour or milk to get the consistency right) plus a packet of active yeast. Mix and kneed as for bread dough and put aside for a couple of hours to rise. Cut in half and form into two oblong bun shapes and drop into a large pan of boiling water. It'll take about 35 mins to cook through and may need turning over a couple of times 'cos it floats. Cut into 1cm slices. Some folk use dental floss to cut them but i managed with a sharp knife. They freeze fine and can be steamed for re-use. Excellent for soaking up sauces.
The braised cabbage is almost an art: half a diced onion and a rasher of diced fat bacon fried off in a very little oil (or use lard). Throw in 1/3 cabbage cut into fine strips and toss it through the oil before turning the heat down to very low and adding a small splash of white wine vinegar, a spash of water and a teaspoon of caraway seed. Keep it covered and ocassionally turn the cabbage. It takes longer than you think.. 45 mins or so to a consistent pale straw colour. You may have to add a little water but likely the moisture in the cabbage will do to keep things going> End taste is a mild sauerkraut.
I've just eaten too much and waiting for the over-full feeling to go...

pgkevet · « **Reply #2 on:** December 12, 2019, 12:52:42 pm »

Lentil recipe modifiedWhen itcomes to cooking nostalgic food it there;s a diference between what ya thinks Mum did and what you have to do...

Green lentils seem to come in different grades. V bought some from Sainsbury but the one's I bought from the czech on-line shop are definately bigger. Boiled in sl salty water you want them al dente rather than mushy. While simmering I diced up 2 gherkins and half an onion quite finely. This was for a single portion. The small side of salted and smoked streaky bacon was being used by cutting along the rind and taking out strips of rind free bacon for odd dishes. That meant that i could take two more bacon strips and cut the fatty skin off as a piece. In a frying pan with a little oil the diced bacon and whole piece of fatty skin were fried to a wonderful aroma of smokey, oily bacon-ness. Once the lentils were cooked and drained by sieve they got chucked into the frying pan with a satisfying steam-off drying them further and coating them in bacon fat/oily goodness. Mix in the raw onion/gherkin and serve. At the moment it's a weekly favourite - And Rebel got to chew away at the lump of rind once it had cooled.

naturelovingfarmer · « **Reply #3 on:** May 22, 2021, 10:47:42 pm »

For me, nostalgia comes in a few forms. I lived my childhood in 2 places, within 2 cultures. The whole way through we were quite poor. The first part I lived in Bakersfield California with my mom and grandma. We were average for Anglo-Americans in the region at the time (1989-1996) in terms of culture. Nostalgic foods from then are meatloaf, pickled olives, macaroni and cheese with hotdogs cut up in it, and beanie weanie soup (pork and bean soup with hotdogs in it). If you're noticing a trend, it's because hotdogs are cheap protein. I also regularly ate Cantonese food because my grandpa worked for the owner of the restaurant.

The second part I was in Canal Winchester Ohio from 1997-2007. All around me was different from what I had been accustomed to, and so was my home life. My mom married the son of Mexican immigrants and it was culture shock in the extreme. We actually got poorer during this time, and now I was eating practically no American food other than pizza on Saturdays. But, there was one thing I got a bit addicted to, and it was my stepdad's mom's tortillas. Now that she's not with us any more, I tend to tear up when I eat a fresh tortilla.

Unfortunately, my mom can't cook from scratch to save her soul. The one dish she can actually cook is BBQ Enchiladas, that's like regular chicken enchiladas, but instead of a chile based sauce, it's got a Kansas City style BBQ sauce.

arobwk · « **Reply #4 on:** May 23, 2021, 12:47:17 am »

Never have liked hot dogs me! - or meatloaf or macaroni cheese or (in later years) anything pickled. Also, any mention of BBQ sauce and I look for a plate of garlic bread & a bowl of salad and/or some sweet-corn cobs. Guess I, like naturelovingfarmer, will be avoiding most of her nostalgic food then !!