Recipe of the Week
or Maybe I should have gotten a job in a bakery
Disclaimer: The contents of this website are mine personally and do not reflect any position of the U.S. government or the Peace Corps.

I'm crabby because I drank the decaf chai tea this morning. I have to ration my Good Tea from the U.S. (there is no chai spice tea in Romania) versus my Really Good Tea from the U.S. and this morning I judged Monday to be a sufficent enough occassion to warrant a bag of Stash brand Chai Tea (the best) but for some reason I went with the decaf which obviously should have saved for a last cuppa tea before bedtime kind of night.

Now having misused a valuable teabag put me in kind of a mood, but the mood was made worse by the fact that I have a grocery bag of apples that my gazda generously gave me from the apple trees at her country house. She also gave me a gallon of grapes that looked and tasted exactly like the grapes that used to grow in my babysitter's back yard. The ones the adults would say "don't eat those grapes - they're not good" meaning they're perfectly good they just have seeds in them and a soft mushy part in the middle and they're not like the South American grapes we buy in the grocery store.

But I digress. Matching the grapes that grew in my babysitter's backard to apples also strikingly similar to the same backyard apples we weren't supposed to eat. So I didn't know what to do with them except let them sit in a bag attracting fruitflies for a week and then on Sunday I decided with the help of a visiting friend to peel and core all of them and make apple bread.

Last night I decided two loaves of apple bread should be made immediately and I would make another loaf (or two) every day this week. And I have enough apples for it. I chopped enough apples last night while watching a movie to make 2 loaves today and I still have more apples to chop. Note: I would be chopping apples if I were making apple bread at home too because I've never had a CuisineArt but it's the first thing on the registry if I ever get married. Maybe I'll ask for two and then if one is dirty, I won't have to wash it, I can just use the other one...

It takes two cups of finely chopped apples to make a loaf of apple bread. This is doubling the recipe because Romanians don't have sweet breads and so they don't have bread pans. My bread pan is the size of your average Mack Truck and is really for a fat loaf of something called cozonac - the closest thing Romanians have to sweet bread. So 2 loaves of U.S. Apple bread = 1 loaf of apple bread in Romania. About the size of your average cement block.

I was hoping to freeze a bunch of loaves and eat apple bread for breakfast all winter until I run out and move on to something else for breakfast. But wouldn't that be awesome to never have to think What should I have for breakfast? No. Breakfast = done. Then I started thinking about all the wonderful things I could buy with apple bread currency. I should definately, of course, give a loaf to my gazda who was generous to give me her apples, and perhaps I could buy some homemade apple butter and two American* pumpkins from other volunteers. One pumpkin for a pie, the other for a stew grown from American pumpkin seeds by a volunteer ingenous enough to bring pumkin seeds to Romania without even knowing that the kind of pumpkins that grow here aren't sweet enough to be eaten by people.

The point I'm trying to make is that I have a lot of apple bread to make. I bought a kilo of flour and a kilo of sugar yesterday and another kilo each today, and if I stick to the two loaves a day plan, probabaly another kilo each tomorrow.

My oven - the one that needs a chair propped up in front of it to keep it closed and has two cracks in the glass door into which I've stuffed rags which are rapidly becoming a nice toasty brown color -varies so much in temperature it can take one loaf of bread between 50 and and hour and 20 minutes to bake.

And the size of my loaf pan (Mack Truck sized) versus the size of my oven (not garage size) means the bread inevitably comes out burnt on the bottom. This is OK if it comes out of the loaf pan nicely and I can just cut the burned part off, but the loaf I made last night decided to come out of the pan in the form of pure anarchy resulting in a blizzard of crumbs and resembling nothing that can be wrapped in aluminum foil, frozen or given away.
Sigh.

*I use the word "American" here to denote a pumpkin of North American origin because I realize that America is not one continent but two - and on one of those continents are quality pumpkins you can eat. The other one, I'm not sure about.

So one loaf is in the oven now, and I just swept the floor with the kitten fighting the broom every step of the way. But in non-food related news (I'm sorry I write so much about food. I promise my next blog entry will have something to do with the projects I'm actually working on over here.) Here are some mind teasers:

Do you think Joss Whedon knows his first name means "Down" in Romanian?

Did Andy from Toy Story grow up to be Andrew Beckett who dies of AIDS in Philadelphia? that would be ironic wouldn't it - considering Tom Hanks...?

I'm pretty sure the hat given to the kid in Transamerica is Jack from Brokeback Mountain's hat. (weren't paying that close attention were you?)

and for the Harry potter fans: If Harry's name is Harry James Potter, what do you think his son's middle name would be? James Harry? James Sirius? James Remus? What about James Dobby?