And.... did I mention coffe?

Mum opens a bag of coffee sent from Tirana. The strong earthy smell reminds me of repeated patterns of life in a country where life is rich in bars, restaurants and cafes.
Before the working day starts, beautiful cafes and (coffee-serving) bars are filled with customers and with the same teasing smell that fills my kitchen now.Coffee is the breakfast of every Albanian as far as I know.
A good cup of what we call Turkish coffee warms up slowly, smells good, tastes good and spares no one.
I don’t think there could be anything more traditional and irreplaceable than Albanian early mornings starting with a cup of coffee. It makes the coffee maker and the drinker become one to reach the perfect taste. It makes a neighbor ring your doorbell, It makes colleagues argue over who is paying today in the café, it makes men have a rest and smoke a cigarette or two, it makes young boys find an easy and cheap way to invite girls on dates and ladies have a chit chat on how useless their husbands are while complimenting the coffee maker…
Everyone has a different reason to have that morning deliciousness, and every single cup has it’s own unique taste.
It is so interesting to me that I think I could keep going on for hours on this theme, until I’m alone and boring myself to death. Then I could stop and go make myself a cup of coffee to feel better. Only slightly foamy on the top and a warm dark brown colour, mixing dry sugar and coffee first and letting it roast, until the smell has become strong enough. Small like an espresso shot, yet I'll have at least two sugars. I like it sweet.

Writing Identity: What I find delightful!

Delight is love… Not the romantic, fairy-tale one but the warm and cuddly kind of love. The love you feel when you’re sitting on the sofa reading out soap-opera subtitles to your great aunt and in the kitchen the water is boiling for you. Wild roses, those dark red little bulbs, are slowly softening and wrinkling up inside the coppery pot, colouring the water red, like love, like blood. It smells sour, like lemonade, and sweet like Turkish delight… and maybe a little bit like the rum you managed to sneak in it. Life feels like a warm, drunken dream when you smell the little red fog that teases your stomach… and your heart. You take long, throat-filling sips of the warm tea that fills your cup over and over again, and it is as if something better, bigger, warmer, shields you from within and winter can do you no harm. 
Delight is love… like the love of the robust women working in farms where your grandfather lived once. Like their love for the corn they grow in the fields and the grapes they press to make delightful wine, and the cows, and the bees, and the warm milk and the honey. The sweet pine honey and fresh butter… nothing better could ever be spread on a slice of warm bread. Even more delightful is the olive oil, so dark green you can smell the darkness and freshness of the sharp, bitter olives that made it, poured on a fat plate of mashed potatoes and crumbled feta cheese. The dish the village women lovingly devour after their hard work, the same dish that warms you up together with the red fluffy blanket as you watch the soap opera with auntie. 
Delight is love… Love of the kind you feel when you come back from school and throw your bag into the corridor and run behind it from miles away, like a puppy. Because from miles away you have smelled the tomatoes and the onions and the lamb and whatever hunger inducing delight expects you after school. 
Delight is when you lovingly run towards this beautiful angel with big brown eyes, that you call ‘grandma’ and say: 
“I’m so hungry!”
Delight is food.

The art of making pies...

Albanian pies are made of crisp, thin layers of pastry and fillings of all sorts…Onion and tomato, spinach, chicken, yogurt… Pumpkin (yack) …
It takes time, effort and space to make one. Especially when you have a big family and grandma likes to make her own pastry. And she makes enough pie to feed the neighbourhood…
Today I get to help, together with granddad, mum and Annie. They don’t seem as excited as me. I love it when grandma makes pies, especially when she makes the pastry. All the furniture on the first floor gets all wrapped in cellophane and then with some white thin sheets over which Annie pours flour until it looks like it’s snowed inside. A little winter wonderland…
Once grandma has made enough pastry dough, and my obsessive compulsive granddad is reassured that we have washed our hands over and over again the right way, with that skin-peeling, white, brick-like Duru soap; we all take bits of the sticky, soft dough and roll it into our hands until it becomes a bun, the size and shape of a tennis ball. We make lots of them. Thousands even. Then grandma shows me how to open the buns into big, round, thin pastry sheets. I try, but while I’m making my first attempt my mother has finished opening her third. 
Annie laughs. Meanwhile, grandma spreads all these perfect pastry sheets all over the furniture so they can dry. At this point no one else is allowed to touch them. They’re so thin, they can break. 
I manage to touch one a little bit. It’s soft, and smooth, and pretty. 

Forbiden ginger!

I love ginger biscuits.
I love anything with ginger in it. I think, right after cinnamon it's the best spice ever. I use ginger in almost every sauce I make. Definitely in every cup of tea or hot chocolate and in many desserts.
Ginger gives food this light taste that makes you want to eat more. It's never heavy or stomach-upsetting. It goes with pretty much everything.
Ginger is the chameleon of foods.
I like it so much, that every night, before I go to bed I have a cup of ginger and lemon tea. It's hot and spicy and light and it makes your chest feel nice and warm inside. You don't even need to put sugar in cause it tastes fine just like that (which is brilliant if your sugar high is too high).
My mother thinks I should be a bit more careful, since I am a little bit allergic to ginger. Especially ginger biscuits for some reason, so I can't have those.
But, I never listen to reason and I am not one to care about my face looking like it's been stung by a thousand bees when it comes to food I like.
So, today, I had ginger biscuits. As expected it didn't go very well. So I made myself a cup of ginger tea to cheer me up.
Like I said, I won't let anything (unless it's really serious, I'm not crazy... not that much) get in between me and my favourite foods. A simple allergy is nothing. I can put up with that. But a live without the pleasure of good food, is a nothing I can never put up with.

Not pretty. Not very yummy either.

It's been a few months that I keep getting every cold or flu any of the people around me have. This and the constant fatigue made me remember the time when I had iron deficiency anaemia. I took a blood test and I'm pretty sure I have it again...
My family must not know.
You see, when you suffer from silly things such as anaemia, you get to have crazy diets. And they get to have a go at you if you think you 'don't wanna' and stomp your feet.
Don't laugh. Have you ever had to eat almost raw spleen?
It's like latex filled with blood. You try to chew on it and pull on it like a dog and the blood fills your mouth and you feel pretty disgusting overall.
When it's only a little bit cooked it becomes a bit creamy, but you can still taste the blood, you can taste it even more than you can when it's actually raw (don't ask) and once you chew on it - surprise -the liquid inside comes out to make you think of what being a vampire must feel like. 
I also had to eat tons of beans and I was never a fan.  Beans, the way they cook them in Albania get a very creepy texture like ... I'm not saying it cause it will make you sick.
I must say, I did not enjoy parts of my diet very much. I would have rather gone on looking sick and tired for a longer time.

A long-distance cakeship!

It's my grandmother's birthday and I have to go through the sweet torture of a Skype conference call with a very large and loud family in Albania and Italy.
Whilst I love them all, I do not love my cousin showing me this big slice of my favourite cake which I cannot have in England.
I feel like a lost puppy looking for it's cake (this puppy loves cake).
Even with the blurred image on Skype my mind clearly sees a thin layer of cake soaked in cherry liqueur, a very thick layer of sticky chocolate cream, two layers of crispy pastry and another thick layer of sweet and sticky walnut cream sprinkled with grinded walnuts and covered with cherries soaked in sorbet.
It's sweeter than sugar.
I miss my family and all, but there's nothing I miss more than pastry cake.
Nothing, as a child, could make my heart race like the anticipation of the weekend when I had gathered enough money to buy a cake that served four (well it only served me really).
Nothing raised my low blood pressure like the insane amount of sugar in that sticky cream that not anyone could handle (see, I thought about my health as well).
So yeah, I long for this amazing cake I cannot have.
I sometimes stay awake at night and cry because of so much longing. I have had to eat many other cakes to fill up even a little bit of the emptiness that pastry cake has left in me. But no other cake is as sweet.  
It's killing me. This distance between us is truly horrible and unfair.
But my long-distance love will survive this hardship, and I will have my cake again when I go back for the summer.