When the spring knocks at my door I give up on fancy cooked food and I go more for salads. This is what happened last week when I made eggplant salad, roe carp salad and so on. But all these salads fit well on a slice of bread and the bread goes away almost instantly. For me and my family, a bread of 1.7-2kg per week is more than enough. But last week I realized on Tuesday that the bread done during the weekend had been almost gone. I had then, to quickly search for a recipe and make a bread during the week. And I have chosen a recipe with only yeast. Yes, you have heard well, no sourdough in this bread at all! I wanted to try a pure yeast bread and to compare back the taste.
Even if the bread raised so nice, even if the bread contain kamut flour that has a very good taste, there was something missing... a flavor, a country aroma, a bit of sourness taste. What a disappointment for my expectations... I can now confirm the saying that, once you go sourdough, you never come back.
Even if it will not be probably my last pure yeast bread, I vote for sourdough breads.

This bread gains its name from the shape. Known more as "La tabatière du Jura" it looks like an old box of cigarettes. Before the final shape, a part of the bread is flattened with a rolling pin and packed back over the bread. I have seen other shapes as well but I prefer the one the author proposed for this bread. It is like a half circle and the model of the scoring suites perfectly the bread shape. As for the recipe, there is not a special one, I think is working well with any type of bread.

Again my pot with sourdough to throw away was full! And as always, I hate wasting flour. What best recipe for this purpose than pancakes? And not ordinary pancakes, but cocoa pancakes. Enjoy ...

The eggplant salad has a recipe that I know since childhood. I was enjoying it then as I do now. It is simple to make but its taste may be different depending how you cook the eggplants and their initial quality. The best way to achieve an amazing taste is to cook them is on a metal sheet / grill put on top over the gas stove. The eggplants are put on the metal sheet until the skin becomes burned. They should be turned from one side to another so you get almost all the eggplant skin burned. This gives a smokey flavor to the salad later. Alternatively, they can be cooked on a plancha on the grill.
When I moved to my house I realized that I have no gas stove but an electric one. Cooking eggplants on an electric stove can be done in a pan but it is slowly and takes ages. Another option is to put them on a tray and cook them in the oven for 1-2 hours after they have been pricked with a fork. These 2 last options reduce a lot from the flavor of the eggplants and there is no smokey taste in them.
What I usually do is to make a big set of eggplants on the grill and a part of them I freeze for a future use.

For the Easter Sunday I was having some guests planned and as I was not in the mood to do the traditional Easter cake (cozonac) I looked for a simple recipe. I have found a cheese cake with chocolate recipe and decided to give it a try.
Finally, my guests had an urgency and couldn't arrive to taste it. Do they know what they have missed? I do not think so.
The cake is a very reach one, so if you on a diet forget about it. To me it was a kind of "mousse au chocolat". The texture was incredible and my husband and my daughter loved it very much. For my taste was a bit too rich because I prefer cakes that are more light and I was able to eat only small slices. Nevertheless, I appreciated the taste.

A friend of mine started recently a new adventure, to bake bread. While giving her some hints, I remembered of my first bread book love of Hamelman. I have then searched for a sourdough recipe that I didn't do and I have found this one.
The bread itself was a challenge for me as I almost forgot how sticky the rye dough is and in addition, with a wet dough. However this is a pure sourdough bread with no extra yeast.
Let's see the recipe ...

During my Easter trip to Romania, I stopped to visit one of my best friends. Near a chat, a laugh, and a great pleasure to see each other again, she put on the table a salad and some bread. While my attention was more on our conversation I was not quite realizing that I grabbed a spoon and put some salad on a slice of bread and taste it. Suddenly, my full attention switched to the green salad I was eating. "What is this?" was my next question. A soft creamy texture, a sour taste and a combination of flavors. She explained me that the amazing salad I was tasting was nothing else than guacamole. Huh? I knew about it, I've seen it before but never occurred to me to try it. So, I returned home with a recipe in mind that I put on my priority list to cook. Here it is ...

These were my Easter painted eggs. I know, it is a week since the orthodox Easter has gone but with all the things I had to do lately, I had no time to publish them.
We (in Romania) do painted eggs every Easter. Years ago we were painted eggs only in red to symbolize the blood of Christ but as this holiday is not just a religious one but also a commercial one, it became very popular to paint eggs in all colors.
Here in Belgium, to paint eggs is an activity for kids. Back in Romania is a serious business as everybody does it. Of course kids loves this tradition the most but we also do very artistic patterns on the eggs and I could even find them in the airport as souvenir for tourists.
When I was a kid, I tried also different techniques like putting the egg in an old fine stockings with a parsley leaf inside before submerging the egg in the paint. Other times I tried to paint them with wax. Back then, it was just a play and I was enjoying very much being creative with painted eggs.