Instagram

Thursday 13 March 2014

Rediscovering burekas. Nostalgia in a pastry puff.

 Burekas.
The ultimate in fast food.
With my son temporarily home from uni, breakfast can no longer be a haphazard mix of nothing, chocolate or a large coffee. 
I lost my cooking mojo when Josh swapped rural Wales for Cheltenham three years ago, so when he comes back it's a great excuse to take baking to extremes.
And today is the long forgotten bureka.
Nostalgia in a pastry puff, bringing with it memories from Jerusalem in the fabulous 80s.

As a teenager in Jerusalem the bureka was the answer to everything.
Hungry?  Grab a bureka.
Midnight munchies?  A bureka.
Meeting friends?  A bureka and coffee in the sun.

I had a good teacher for bureka making.
She was a very strict, very talented matriarch on Kibbutz Maabarot, called Naomi.
And she ruled the kitchen with a rod of iron.
Being four foot nothing she would only work with tall girls, so being 5ft 8'' I was recruited very quickly during the summer of '88. 


Naomi, Queen of Burekas.

Her grasp of english was on a par with my hebrew.
If I did well,she smiled and kissed me.
If I did wrong, she would slap my arm.

I loved Naomi.
And the volunteers liked me working with Naomi too, as she would send me back to Boat People Straab with boxes of broken meringues!












No comments:

Post a Comment