Auld Lang Syne

Should old acquaintance be forgot,
and never brought to mind ?

Apparently, it should.

Happy New Year!

From Madrid

As a matter of fact, everything in Madrid is bigger and much more crowded than in Ávila, even Christmas decoration. One can get tired of long waiting moments. But it is also exciting. You can feel the people around. It is like a people river. A living mosaic, so many nationalites, so many languages, so many different faces make you believe in diversity.
Some big cities get this honour of sheltering the flowing waters of humankind. Madrid is one of them.

White and blue

I had never seen this colour composiiton in Ávila. It's cold but it's good. I find it more peaceful than the green and red typical Christmas decoration.

Mountain Call

I found this and thought it might be a good Christmas gift for the blog. It's Maria Tanase's voice.

Cozonac

Not that it matters anymore, this is a recipe we usually prepare for Christmas and Easter, very similar to the Italian Panetone. The fillings can be diverse: chocolate, cream, Turkish delight, but walnut is my favorite. I never make it.

Dough: 2 lbs/1 kg flour, 10 oz/300 g sugar, 1 1/2 cups milk, 6 eggs, 2 oz/50 g yeast, 7 oz/200 g butter, 2 tablespoons of oil, vanilla stick, salt, egg for smearing the dough, grease for the pans.

Make a starter from yeast and a teaspoon of sugar. Mix until it has the consistency of sour cream, add 2-3 tablespoons of tepid milk, a little flour and mix well; sprinkle some flour on top, cover and let sit in a warm place to rise. Boil the milk with the vanilla stick (cut in very small pieces) and leave it on the side of the oven, covered, to keep warm.

Mix the yolks with the sugar and salt, then slowly pour the tepid milk, stirring continuously. Place the risen starter in a large bowl and pour, stirring continuously, the yolk-milk mixture and some flour, a little at a time. Then add 3 whipped egg whites. When you finish this step, start kneading. Knead, adding melted butter combined with oil, a little at a time, until the dough starts to easily come off your palms. Cover with a cloth and then something thicker ( a blanket, for example).
Leave in a warm place to triple in volume. If during kneading the dough seems too hard, you may add a little bit of milk. If, on the contrary, the dough seems too soft, you may add a little flour.

Filling: 10 oz/300 g ground walnuts, 1 cup milk, 3/4 cup of sugar, 1/4 cup of rum, vanilla

Melt the sugar in the warm milk with vanilla in a pot on the range. When the sugar is melted, add the walnuts and keep stirring. After a few minutes of boiling, and after the filling has thickened, remove from heat and add rum. When the filling is cold, roll a sheet of dough about one finger thick, uniformly spread the walnut filling on top and roll like a jelly roll.
Grease a bread pan, place the roll inside, let rise for a while. Smeare with egg and bake at medium heat. Take out of the pan as soon as it is done, place on a cloth and let cool.

Enjoy it!

End of the day

Another kind of winter-gray

We were used to cold, snowy winters, with frosty and often sunny days (we call it "soare cu dinti"- sun that has teeth, biting), sparkling snow, icicles, icy roads, sharp wind-sometimes. The public transportation often got slow and if the snow was higher than half a meter or so, schools would close. Then, kids would stay outside all day playing in the snow, there was no flu danger and it was heaven for them.
I hate cold, but incredibly I regret those winters. Now, all we have is gray. It's wet and rather warm: 7 to 10, foggy and dull. We keep the lights on all day long, so the hours have almost no meaning. At 4pm it's already night. Kids are almost all sneezing and coughing, many have the flu, so no outdoors playing. An early vacation starts next week, I hope they will be able to enjoy it. We will only to some extent, because it will cost us. And then, we'll have to redo classes on our spare time.
I'm dreading the New Year- the worst moment in the year for me,when we are supposed to celebrate that we're only ephemeral. But, until then, let's cross the fingers for a snowy Christmas.

Industrial Dawn

Lonely dawn moments in the cold morning of a big town. There are people there, everywhere, but they are so far apart, each one deep in his/her work, hurry, travel, thoughts. Even the sunlight is cold. It brings feverish activity, but not as much hope as it would bring in a quieter, wilder place, over a forest, over the sea...
See the House of People in the background, beyond the twin furnaces?