'Nduja!

From streets to stars

Last year some friends and I went to Calabria to visit a class mate of us. It was his birthday.
While we were at his birthday party, one of our friend was hungry and on the table there were a lot of typical dishes. He took a plate on the table, he thought that it was a big piece of cake, but he didn’t know how wrong he was! After the first piece of that "strange cake", he changed color and he began to sweat. At first we laughed about that joke, but then we started worrying because we knew that it wasn't a cake at all but a very very spicy sausage. He asked for help and we passed him a glass of milk because it is one of the most effective methods against spicy. Water or other similar drink do not help much against the spicy. Since that day every time our friend eats spicy he holds a glass of milk in his hand.. just in case!

The name of the food our friend confused with a cake is 'nduja or simply duja. The name originates from the Latin word "inducere" that means to introduce. 'nduja consists of meat and spices. The anduja is typically associated  to the entire Calabria: it is usually made of fatty pork meat with the addition of Calabrian hot pepper, stuffed into the blind gut and  finally smoked. The 'nduja is consumed on a slice of toasted bread or it can taste even better if used fried to cook a sauce.

Glossary

Nduja: meat, and extra spicy spreadable Calabrian.
Spicy: having an agreeably pungent taste
Spreadable: it’s like a cream that you can spread, for example, on a piece of bread
Classmate: when someone is with you in your school classroom
Sweat: when you feel hot water evaporates off the surface of your skin
Laugh: when someone find something funny he laughs
Joke: it’s like a prank, a little game with friends
Sausage: highly seasoned minced meat stuffed in casings
Spices: any of a variety of pungent aromatic vegetable substances used for flavoring food
Fatty: containing or composed of fat
Blind gut: initial part of the intestine
Slice: a thin flat piece cut off of some foods
Sauce: flavorful relish served as an accompaniment to food

Colored eggs

Burdock Bonny Lashes

When I was a baby, I used to see my great-grandmother painting eggs and once I asked her what she was doing. She explained that it was an old Romanian tradition linked to Easter. I was very curious and I started painting getting everything dirty around me... but at the same time I was happy.

Now my great-grandmother has gone but this event always reminds me about her and the time spent together.

The custom of painting eggs is not a Christian tradition; it roots two thousand years ago in China and in Persia: painting eggs was a symbol of balance, fertility, life and rebirth of nature.
In Romania at Easter it is used to paint eggs in red and black to remember the suffering of Jesus Christ on the cross, but there are also yellow, green and blue eggs to be in harmony with spring. When you break the eggs you usually have to say: “Jesus risen and really risen”.

 

Recipe

Eggs must be removed from the refrigerator half an hour before, rinsed, degreased and boiled for 5 minutes. In the meanwhile try to get colors ready, peel some onions because you will get your eggs painted in onion peels!
The egg shells should be covered with onion peels to get a good taste. Then take a nylon stocking and put the egg inside the stocking: you will proceed with each egg separately that way.
When the paint is ready, put the eggs in the paint and leave them there for 5 minutes. Put some eggs in red paint, some in green paint: you will get many different eggs and the final result will be much better.
Remove the eggs and pack them in paper towels for 5 minutes. Cut with a scissors the socks and get the eggs out of the onion peels. Put them on a platter and anoint them with a little oil. The eggs will get shining.

In the Romanian tradition eggs are decorated with various designs, sometimes it can take more than a day to do the. If you want to save time you can color them uniformly, but it will be less nice... of course! ;)

The meaning of the drawings that you can find on each egg has different stories, for example a vertical straight line symbolizes the life, the horizontal straight line stands for the death, the double straight line for the eternity, the spiral for the time and, finally, the double spiral represents the link with people that are around us.

GLOSSARY
Fertility: it is the ability to have babies or to reproduce
In the meanwhile: during the intervening time
Stocking: the activity of supplying a stock of something
Suffer: you’re not happy, in fact you’re quite miserable.
Anoint: to put oil on something or someone; often in a religious ceremony of blessing
Sining: the visual property of something that shines with reflected light
Save time: use a faster method that lasts less
Scissors: a tool ou use to cut things
Degrease: to remove grease or oil from the eggs