It’s a busy week. Mum and Dad have been helping me organise our Croatian food stall at the school’s Summer Fair. We’re going to be selling cevapi rolls and oblatne, a Croatian wafer cake. I’ve had a devil of a time trying to find cevapi in the UK. Cevapi are small sausage like snacks, made of beef and pork mince and blended expertly with loads of garlic. There is a small ‘Balkan’ contingency here, but not huge and certainly not exclusively Croatian, rather a mixture of ex-Yugoslav food products and specialties. They all seem to be in the Ealing/Acton area, and it looks like we’ve found a winner. Mum and Dad spent last week cooking up and eating three kinds of cevapi available from a store I found that specialise in Balkan foods.
They’re called Magaza, and they sell all the favourite brands including Podravka, Gavrilovic, Kras and Minas along with a good range of cured and frozen meat products. They even sell the special bread rolls that the cevapi are served with, in places like Zagreb, so we’ll be getting some of those too. We’ll serve our rolls with ajvar (a red pepper dip) and diced raw onions. I think we’re going to bring the house down with our stall – I don’t think the kind folk of Maidenhead will have ever tried anything like this before. Dad managed to get some little trinkets and decorations from the Croatian Embassy and he’s going to bring his flag. Me, Mum and VC are going to be wearing our Croatian aprons and generally being awesome. Mum is going to make oblatne, a dangerously addictive wafer slice, which is simply layers of wafer and a chocolate cream which is then sliced into diamond shapes. My auntie makes the best kind and she has been kind enough to share her recipe with us (I might ask her permission to put on the blog).
Image courtesy of Stef (click here for her recipe)
I’ll take some snaps and fill you in next week. Wish me luck!