Obscure Journey

Cat-shaped "minciunele"

Publié le 20 Juin 2021 par Charly C.

Catégories : #Cooking, #dessert, #food, #recipe, #short story, #sweets, #tips, #donuts, #doughnuts

Hello, world!

Today I'll share with you my results trying to make a common Romanian dessert, called "minciunele." This word means little lies and they're a type of donuts.

As you can see from the pictures, this recipe was supposed to appear quite some time ago. In fact, i had already posted this recipe on my first blog, before i rebranded for the first time.

When I first started blogging, I thought i'd have a cooking blog and another blog for other stuff. As we all know, things changed, and now i have this "general" blog and my site/blog dedicated to reviews, called Being Obscure, hosted by WordPress.

The recipe goes something like this, and you can see the original recipe and results here. This is the blog dedicated to recipes for Romanian foods. The post shows you how these are supposed to look like, and you can clearly see my cats don't look as nice as the original.

If you want to know why i chose to shape my donuts as cats, I'll add the story AFTER the recipe. I recently realized people don't appreciate too much talking BEFORE the recipe. So, without further ado, here we go!

Ingredients:

500 g flour (1lb?)
2 eggs
2 yolks
2 tablespoons of sour cream
1 teaspoon of baking powder

Additional ingredients:

some powdered sugar for coating
some sunflower oil for frying; whatever other type of oil you use for frying food should also work.

Method:

Beat the egg whites until they're fluffy.
Mix the egg yolks with the sour cream and gently fold this mix into the egg whites.
Sieve the flour and the baking powder on top of the mix.
Gently fold these also into the mixture above, until you have a smooth dough.

The original recipe doesn't say to let the dough rest and raise a bit, so I didn't do that. However, I think it should be done, and i think it should be at least 30 minutes.

Roll the dough onto a sheet on the work table (about 5 mm or 2/8in thick) and cut your shapes. Of course, you can cut whatever shapes you want - i also did that.

To cut shapes you can use cookie cutters, a glass, or directly a knife. The difference is that with the knife things will be easier and much faster, while with the cookie cutters/glass you'll need to reroll the dough. You don't want to waste all that yumminess. ;)

Fry your shapes in hot oil, over medium heat, and on both sides. If you have too many donuts and you run low on oil, add some more oil, and make sure it gets hot before you fry more donuts.

When they're brown on both sides, remove them and place them on a plate or a bowl covered with some paper towel or (unscented, dry) paper handkerhiefs. The paper will absorb the excess oil.

In the picture above, you can see I'm frying donuts in other shapes than cats.

Once you're done frying all the dough, sprinkle some confectioner's sugar on top. These are always better with some of that on top.

I never tried, but these could also be good with some chocolate or cream on top.

Bon Appétit! Enjoy!

Why cat-shaped?

I believe that at some point in 2017, the butter we usually buy came with a little cutter. There were 3 shapes: cat, car, and i forgot what else. They were meant to help mothers make cute sandwiches for their kids, to entice them to eat and enjoy the food more.

I got the butter that had the cat-shaped cutter. I never really used it since, but one day, when i made these donuts, Anna jokingly challenged me to make them look like cats, thinking it would be impossible for me to do so.

The expression on her face when i pulled out the cat-shaped cookie cutter? PRICELESS!

So, this is how you make another type of easy doughnuts. i hope you liked the story about the cookie-cutter shaped like a cat as well.

As a reference, i have 2 more cutters for cookies: one shaped like spectacles and another shaped like lips. These are from H&M Home. I got them on sale, i think right before the SHTF last year.

The yellow disk is a cookie or cake decorator i found in the lid of a jar of Nutella. I forgot the year. maybe 2019.

See you next time!

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Many people struggle - part 2

Publié le 1 Juin 2021 par Charly C.

Hello.

This is a continuation of this post here. I didn't want that entry to be too long, so here we are.

I also wanted to talk about this relative of Anna's. She was the cousin of Anna's mother, on her mother's side.

This poor woman is no longer with us. She died at the end of 2020 from some heart-related issue, in a mental hospital. She was diagnosed with schizophrenia years before. Her mother had also died earlier in 2020, in the same mental hospital.

The mother was 91 years old or something, and the daughter 60-something. The daughter was so out of touch with reality, she had no idea where she was or why. :( Of course, she also had no idea her mother was no more either.

This is the daughter with her adoptive father, sometime in the 1980s maybe, by the style of the photo.

What is left of these 2 women is literally not much. There's an apartment and a studio that will be sold by the family at some point.

There are little to no other valuables they left behind. From the mother, there are the Chinaware i talked about in this post and a few pots i took from their apartment. There was a family photo album as well, that we gave to Anna's mom, since it belonged to her relatives.

We also managed to salvage these 2 coffee table books:

The book on New York sells for around $2.5 on local sites, as it's by a Romanian author. The text is both in Romanian and English. The art book on Chinese prints is written by a Russian woman, and I saw it selling for various prices, starting at some $26 and up to $126.

We like both the Big Apple and Chinese culture/art/history/traditional clothing. It goes without saying, these books will stay with us. We wouldn't have bought them if we saw them in a store, to be honest. But like this, for free, why not?

Everything else had to be discarded because they lived with bugs literally crawling everywhere, in an unbearable smell of feces, bug spray, dust, and only the Lord knows what else.

Of the daughter, Anna kept these 3 notebooks. She wrote many notebooks. The ones we found/kept are dated 2013-2014.

These notebooks have been used as planners, a diary, and somewhere to write her wishes, hopes, and random thoughts, basically.

These are a few pages taken from 2 of the notebooks. The diary's name is "Anca".

I like her handwriting. It shows her pain and hopes at the same time. I think she got bored or tired fast. Most likely, suffering from schizophrenia, this is normal.

I myself try to write neatly when I put my hopes up for a change. It's like a prayer. Also, a meditation at the same time - writing neatly requires more effort and concentration.

On some of the pages, The aunt was writing "we will get married." I believe that was more like a manifestation, her greatest wish. I think she also wished for her mother to live as long as possible. And, well, she did.

In one of the notebooks, Anna read how the aunt was asking for some treatment that she never received. But she wanted it. She was asking for some sort of help that nobody gave her.

Their apartment is on the 4th floor. All the windows had bars on them to prevent the aunt from jumping out the window. She must have felt even more like a prisoner, not only in her body/mind without proper medication, but also in her house, though it was for her own safety.

That poor woman (her mother) lived for so long because she probably felt that nobody else could take care of her daughter. And she was most likely right. Though she was also in no condition to do so either. Not anymore. She lasted in the mental hospital for like half a year. I think she either realized she no longer has to worry about her daughter, or she finally gave up. It's hard to tell.

If you read thus far and you see someone struggling, try to help them. Remember that not everyone shows their pain the same way.

Until next time, stay safe!

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