Zeljanica Recipe

Disclaimer: Some of this is a little bit hard to explain, but I’ll do my best.  If you google “zeljanica” you might find a couple more recipes and/or videos to clarify how it’s supposed to look.

Making pita takes a good bit of time, so if you want to try it yourself, leave the whole afternoon free so you don’t have to rush. 

Also, all of the measurements are guesses.  We just approximated things.  You don’t have to be perfectly precise.

First, clean a large, flat surface.  A lot of Bosnians have pita-making boards, but a dining room table will do just fine, as long as it is clean and smooth.  Also, find and clean a long thin dowel for rolling dough.  A traditional rolling pin is too short.  Finally, prepare a large, deep baking dish (the sides were maybe 4 inches tall) either by lining with baking paper or by oiling it well.

Then, make the “Jufke” (dough):

Mix about 2 cups flour with about 1 tablespoon of salt.  Add 2 tablespoons of sour cream and just a splash of water.  Mix until it starts to come to together, and add another splash or two of water if needed.

Knead well.  Kneading makes the dough elastic enough to stretch thinly, so knead for at least a few minutes.

Let dough rest at least 30 minutes after kneading

While the dough rests, make the filling

Filling (again, I am making approximations)

Combine:

3 eggs, beaten

½ cup sour cream

½ cup “fresh cheese” (There really is not an American equivalent.  The closest thing I can think of is a mix of cream cheese and ricotta.)

1 tablespoon salt (Or to taste.  It will taste more “authentic” if it is really salty, haha.)

1 small package of frozen spinach (Defrost and drain for best results), or blanch 1 bag fresh spinach.

½ cup shredded smoked cheese (this is unconventional, but tastes really really good!)

Milk as needed (the mixture should be thin enough that it spreads easily)

After dough is rested, divide into three evenly sized balls.

Sprinkle flour on the table, on a long dowel, and on the outside of one of the balls.

Begin rolling dough with dowel.  Roll into a flat circle.  Continue rolling the dough as thin a possible.  You can also try slowly stretching the dough out by hand.  Whatever works for getting a large circle of super thin dough.  Use a lot of flour so it doesn’t stick to the table or the dowel.

Cut the circle in two.

Spoon the spinach mixture to make a thick line that traces the rounded outer edge of the half-circle.  Put a little more towards the middle and a little less on the ends or it will ooze out.  Then gently roll up the dough starting from opposite the flat side of the half circle.  Roll it up all the way to the flat side.  Take the roll and place it in a baking dish.  If it is longer than the length of the dish, just bend it around to start another row. 

Continue the above step until the baking dish is full.

Spread a thin layer of oil on top of the pita. (We forgot this step and without the oil, the pita will be very dry and crunchy.)

Bake at a medium temperature (350 F to 180 C) on a middle rack for about 30 minutes.  Then, check on the pita regularly until it turns golden brown.

Remove the dish from the over and allow the pita to cool very briefly.  Cut into pieces and serve.  It is excellent with a glass of liquid yogurt, or with the yogurt poured on top of the pita.

Zeljanica going into the oven

Bascarsija Night

After being back in the US for nearly two weeks, I’m finally getting around to writing about my final few days in Sarajevo.  The Bosnian lifestyle has rubbed off on me, and after a few hours of errands, chores, or practicing, I feel the need for “pausa”.  So it’s taking a little bit longer than I expected to get reorganized, haha.

The day after returning from Sibenik, I had a relatively successful lesson in pita-making from my friend Adi.  By pita, I mean the multi-layered Bosnian pastry stuffed with cheese, meat, spinach, or potato, not the pocketed flatbread that we call pita in the US.  I really like zeljanica, the kind stuffed with spinach and chesse, so that’s what we made.  The hardest part was getting the dough well-worked so that it can be stretched super thin.  We didn’t quite get the dough as thin as it should be, so the outer layer of the pita was a bit thick.  Also, we didn’t know to brush oil on top of the pastry at the end, so it was drier and cruncher than expected, but it still tasted really good.  I’ll include our recipe on this blog. 

On Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, I spent most of my time in the city center, since we were so busy preparing for our concert on Sunday night.  Every year, spanning the entire month of July, Sarajevo hosts a large outdoor arts festival called “Bascarsijske Noci” (“Bascarsija Nights”).  The Sarajevo Philharmonic traditionally plays a concert to celebrate the opening night, on July 1^st.  We played a collection of short pieces, and accompanied a few soloists from our orchestra and from Serbia.  We played on an outdoor stage, right across from the National Library.  The library is an important landmark that was shelled during the war and is now being rebuilt, so I felt honored to be facing it while playing my last concert in Sarajevo.  The only problem with the location was that it was extremely hot, and we had to rehearse in the blinding sunlight.  At least I looked awesome playing my oboe with sunglasses on.

Rehearsal for Bascarsija Nights Opening Concert

View of the National Library from my seat in the orchestra

Between our rehearsals, I tried to spend as much time as possible with all of my friends.  I also taught a final lesson to my student, ate one last sandwich at Metropolis, my favorite restaurant, drank a few coffees, and made a last lap around the old town.  I went home only at night, and didn’t get much sleep because I had to pack and clean up the apartment.  At first, I felt like I had all the time in the world to wrap up my life in Sarajevo.  Then, a couple days before I left, panic set in, because every time I checked something off of my list, I thought of five more things to do.  But, by Sunday evening, I was all packed, the apartment was cleaned, and I could enjoy myself until it was time to go.

Unfortunately, this year, July 1^st fell on a Sunday, and our concert conflicted precisely (almost to the minute) with the Eurocup finals.  I was worried that we wouldn’t have much turnout, but we still managed to fill the seats.  My Albanian friends were very excited because the Albanian Radio Television Orchestra was in town, and a lot of their friends and former colleagues came to see us.  Our concert ended with Elgar's Pomp and Circumstance, a piece that is traditionally played at graduation ceremonies on the US.  I found it a bit funny, because the music made me feel like I was graduating from the Sarajevo Philharmonic, which I was in a way.

After the concert, Matt and I (the only two Americans who stayed all the way until the end of our season!) invited all of our friends to join us at the pivnica (the brewery).  It was an ideal spot because it was just up the hill from our concert, and has enough space to accommodate a very large group.  By the time we got to the pivnica, it was already close to midnight, since our concert was two-hours long and didn’t start until 9pm.  So we only had a short time to have a beer and say our goodbyes before the pivnica closed.  It was so sad to say goodbye, but of course I was glad to have one last evening with all of my friends.  I didn’t feel like going back to the empty apartment right afterward, so I went with just a few friends to find another place to hang out.  Since it was Sunday night, we were worried everything would be closed, but Sarajevo always has something to do at night, and we found Cheers to be open.

Saying goodbye in the Pivnica

One last drink with "The Otes Family"

My flight left at 6am on Monday, so it worked out that by the time I got home on Sunday night, I had just enough time to shower, pack a few last items, and call a cab to the airport.  Whew!  On the plus side, I didn’t have too much time to feel overly nostalgic about leaving.  And I screwed up my sleeping schedule so much I didn’t even have jet lag when I got home. J

Comedy of Errors/It's a Long Story

            On June 26^th and 27^th, the Sarajevo Philharmonic traveled to Sibenik, a small city on the Croatian coast, to perform the children’s opera “Jezeva Kuca” (“Hedgehog House”) as part of a festival there.  The Adriatic coastline in Croatia is one of the most beautiful places I have ever been. I had a great time at the beach and walking around the old part of the city before our concert.  So, fortunately, it was worth the extremely unpleasant and tiring hours of travel it took to get from, and back to, Sarajevo.

            We traveled by buses that were chartered from the biggest regional bus company, Centrotrans.  There was one double-decker bus for the opera company and one “normal” bus for the orchestra.  I think that everything that could possibly go wrong on a bus trip went wrong!  I have not had very good experiences with Centrotrans buses (lots of delays, broken buses, disgruntled drivers, etc), but this was by far the worst experience.  At least everyone and their instruments made it there and back in one piece, I guess…

            The trip started quite well.  The orchestra met in the city center at 7am and boarded the bus.  There was plenty of room for everyone, and I got my own row to spread out.  I took a Dramamine, knowing that we had a windy trip ahead of us, and also plenty of time to sleep.  We started off by making really good time, and went all the way to the border in only a couple of hours, with a brief break in Jablanica.  I was conked out the whole time too, so it went extra fast.

            The problems began when we got to the Bosnian/Croatian border.  We stopped for about 20 minutes, and then pulled a 180, passing a sign that said “Welcome to Bosnia and Hezegovina”.  I was very sleepy, but alert enough to be alarmed.  I asked my colleague behind me what was happening, and he simply replied, “We are going back”.  I was extremely disappointed and worried that we had to go all the way back to Sarajevo.  Later, I found out that we couldn’t get through the border because the paperwork for taking our instruments across needed to be processed by a computer system, which was down.  So we were driving to a different border to try there.  We had the same problem at the second border, but at least it only took 5 minutes to realize that we couldn’t get through.

            After weaving around some back roads, we finally tried a third border crossing. (On the plus side, I got the grand tour of almost all of Herzegovina.)  Finally, the border patrol let us through!  But not without another holdup and nearly an hour’s delay.  Because of all of the problems crossing the border, we arrived in Sibenik nearly four hours behind schedule.  I was so happy when we finally pulled up near the harbor.  But, the trip still wasn’t over!  The bus driver didn’t know where he was going, and it took even more time to find our hotel.  So we didn’t walk into the lobby until nearly 5pm.  So much for our scheduled noon-2pm lunch. 

As we waited for our room keys, I felt so dizzy.  Because of all the chaos, I hadn’t had anything to drink all day, and I was so dehydrated.  There was some debate about trading rooms, and who would stay with whom, and I readily agreed to any arrangement, as long as I could put my stuff down and have some water.  When I finally got into my room, I think I chugged about six glasses of water, and instantly felt better.  Fortunately, the hotel also saved a little bit of the lunch for us, and we had about an hour to eat and walk around before getting back onto the bus to go to rehearsal.  After having some bread, cheese and fruit, I wandered down to the beach.  Five of my friends had traveled by car and had arrived much earlier that day.  They were all in their swim trunks and bikinis, having a great time, and greeted me enthusiastically.  I couldn’t help but feel a little cranky and jealous that they were swimming in the Adriatic and lounging by the pool while I was stuck on a bus all day.  But as soon as I waded into the warm seawater, I couldn’t help but relax and cheer up.

That evening, we took the bus back into the central part of Sibenik for a dress rehearsal and concert. The city is built on a hill that rises almost directly from the shore.  It is rather small, very old, and naturally quite charming.  I learned that Sibenik has a unique history because it was founded by Croats, unlike other cities on the Adriatic coast that were originally Roman, Illyrian, or Greek.  The bus dropped us off at a station near the harbor, which gave us a chance to stroll down a lovely promenade on the way to our venue.  We performed outside, in a square located right beside the church of St. James, which is Sibenik’s most famous landmark.  It was difficult to hear each other, and keep our music from blowing away in the wind, but I liked having the chance to perform at such an interesting location.

Church of St. James

Performing Jezeva Kuca

Looking up from the harbor at Sibenik's city center

We didn’t get back from the show until quite late, as the performance didn’t even start until 9pm.  Nonetheless, we only had one day in Croatia, and on top of that it was Matt’s birthday, so I was determined to celebrate.  Almost everyone in the orchestra headed down to the beach for a late night swim.  I didn’t swim because it was so dark and rocky, but I relaxed on a lounge chair and chatted with Matt and Ivana.  Later, I wandered down to a bar with Mattia to check out the resort’s nightlife.  It was pretty dead, but on the plus side the servers were drunk and didn’t charge us very much, hehe.

Even though we had a late night, I found myself waking up quite early the next day.  I think I was too excited about the prospect of my morning at the beach.  To start, I wandered down to breakfast and met up with most of my friends there.  The hotel’s breakfast was delicious; they even had pura (polenta) and palacinke (crepes), two of my favorite Bosnian (or in this case Croatian I guess) dishes.  I’m glad I took advantage of it, because it was the one good meal I had the entire trip.  After a leisurely breakfast and coffee, I walked down to the beach, and was immediately dragged into the sea by my friend Arvida.  The water is so calm and so warm…it would be easy to swim all day!  Unfortunately, we had to leave the hotel at 1pm, so we just had half of a day.  But we made the most of it: swimming in the sea, relaxing under umbrellas, walking around the resort, and last but not least having a drink in the pool bar.  That’s right, there was a bar in the swimming pool. J I had a Corona and pretended I was in Mexico!

Hotel Beach

Before driving back to Sarajevo, the orchestra went back to the old city to have lunch at a restaurant (not vegetarian—boo).  At this point, the comedy of errors resumed…  When we walked back to the bus station, the buses were not there.  I guess there was a miscommunication about where we would be picked up.  So we spent some time dashing back and forth through traffic, trying to find the correct meeting point.  When we finally boarded our bus, it was extremely hot.  The temperature outside was probably about 30 C/85 F, but inside it was more like 35/95, and even hotter near the back of the bus.  When my colleagues started complaining, we found out some very bad news…the air-conditioning had broken!  Ugh.  I joked that we should just go back to the beach all afternoon, wait for the company to send a new bus, and then return overnight.  It was joke at the time, but now I really think we should have done that.

We started the trip back to Sarajevo by just sticking it out, and suffering through the heat.  Luckily, heat doesn’t bother me that much, and I didn’t find it to be so bad.  However, some of my colleagues were completely miserable, and we were worried about our instruments.  A lot of the guys in the back stripped down to their underwear, while most of the women seemed to conveniently have fans (the non-electric kind) tucked into their purses.  The driver opened the back door as we drove to get some air flowing and people took turns standing by the door (hold on!) and getting fanned off by colleagues.  I couldn’t resist the pun, and joked that I had never seem a literal “fan club” before…

After a short drive, we got the other bus, the double-decker one with the singers, to pull over next to us.  There was some room on their bus, so most people moved.  There was some confusion about whether we could also move our instruments, and I ended up moving back and forth between buses a couple of times.  Finally, it was decided that we could ride on the singers’ bus, but we would stop at the border and move back onto the other bus with our instruments so that there wasn’t any problem with the paperwork.  We were allowed to keep our instruments with us, as long as they stayed on our laps.  So, I squeezed onto the top level of the double-decker with my big oboe/English horn case and we set off.  Unfortunately, the air-conditioning on the double-decker bus didn’t work very well on the upper level, so I was just as hot as before.  And much more squished.

Although I think we only drove for an hour or two, it felt like forever.  When we pulled over, I though it was because we had neared the border, and eagerly got off to switch buses.  I planed to just stay on the original bus, because even though it was hot, there was a lot more room to spread out.  Meanwhile, I was unaware that we were not yet close to the border, and that we had pulled over because the original bus was having even more problems.  The entire electrical system went down.  A bus mechanic took a look, and it turned out that a piece of the engine was missing!  Oh, Centrotrans…

So, after a noisy deliberation, it was decided that we could just abandon the broken bus, and everyone would squeeze onto the double-decker.  There weren’t quite enough seats, but we made it work by having a few people sit on the stairs and taking long breaks to stretch our legs.  I moved to the back of the bus, which was even hotter, but quieter and roomier.  I even found a corner for my oboe so I didn’t have to hold it the whole ride.

          Fortunately, the final stretch of the trip was pretty non-eventful, excepting some heated debate amongst the opera company about whether the bus could stop in Ilidza before arriving in city center (it was impossible, because there was too much luggage to sort through).  We held our breath at the border crossing and, miraculously, the police let us through without coming on board to check out the bus. (If they had, I think we could have been seriously held up, because there were more people than seats.)  After dinner in at Zdrava Voda, a well-known restaurant Jablanica, the bus drove directly to the theater.  By the time I caught a cab back to Otes with Matt and Ivana, it was midnight.  All in all, I spent 20 hours traveling to play a 45-minute 

Waking Up

I woke up this morning, my first morning back in Evanston, and it felt like the last ten months were one very long dream.  I’ve never gone away for so long and then come back to the exact place I left, and it’s a little bit disorienting.  I have all of these things that I completely forgot about: that are familiar but unexpected. It’s kind of exciting, like getting a bunch of presents, to find all of my clothes, books, music, etc that I left behind.  I forgot how big everything is in the US, how much we have, how clean and organized.  Ross and I went to the grocery store today, and I felt like I had shrunk!  Now I remember why I used to buy two tomatoes instead of four, one lemon instead of three: they are literally twice the size.

It’s funny how we form small habits, and it’s hard to change them.  This morning, I automatically reached to the left for my contact solution even though here I keep it to the right.  When I sat down to breakfast, I had a hard landing because I expected the level of the chair to be a little lower.  When I grabbed my purse, I felt around, concerned that I was missing my coin purse with the tram pass before remembering that I don’t need it here.  And when I went to pay at the grocery store, I had “dobar dan” and “hvala” at the tip of my tongue before stopping myself to say “hello” and “thank you”.

Maybe I also feel disoriented because my sleeping habits have been so disturbed.  I went 48 hours without falling asleep for more than a couple of minutes…a record for me, I think.  I can’t really sleep when traveling, and could barely sleep all of last week, since I was filled with nervousness about leaving.  I had so much that I wanted to do.  Then a friend pointed out that if I don’t cross everything off of my bucket list, I will be more motivated to come back and visit.  So I intentionally left a few things to do in Sarajevo and am hoping I can go back for a visit within the next year or so.

When I agreed to move to Sarajevo for 10 months and play with the orchestra, I expected that it would be hard to leave Ross and be in an unfamiliar place.  I was right: it was hard.  But I didn’t expect how hard it would be at the end, to go home again.  I knew that I would probably make some friends, and would be sorry to say goodbye.  But I didn’t know that I would form such strong bonds in such a short time, that I would be able to feel like a part of a family in only a few short months. Leaving my friends was very sad.  I felt silly about how much I cried.  I hope that I will stay close to them, even from such a great distance, even if it can’t be quite the same as being just upstairs/down the street/across town.

There are a lot of problems in Sarajevo: political stalemate, corruption, animosity between ethnic groups, poverty, lack of public services, litter, stray animals, unreliable public transportation, pollution…  There are a lot of people who could easily find a way to leave the city, and go somewhere cleaner, healthier, and safer.  But now I think I understand why so many Sarajevans stay in their city and maybe even why they stuck it out during and directly after the war.  It is their home, and is completely unique and very beautiful.  The people are unbelievably friendly, and extremely laid back.  It’s impossible to be unhappy around others who are so relaxed and so welcoming.  I miss it already.