15 Sep An old Polish cookie recipe and feeling human

“Alberty” cookies from Kuchnia Polska

I must admit I’d never heard of “Alberty” cookies prior to finding them in a 60s version of Kuchnia Polska this summer. However, I know that they have been around for a long time. A Polish recipe I saw online had taken them from a. 1948 version of the same book (it’s the classic book all our mothers and grandmothers had). They used to be quite popular it seems. One of my favourite things is to rework old recipes and make them more appealing for now. With these cookies, I used half wholewheat, half plain flour (as well as the potato flour) and substituted refined sugar for coconut sugar. I also added some poppyseeds/sesame seeds on top. The girls loved them, so we will be making wholewheat Alberty again. I am sharing the modified recipe below, this is the original.

Feeling human

What’s the point of having a blog if you don’t share something of yourself? Recipes are very nice, but when I read someone’s work I want to feel our shared humanity. At the weekend, I was doing to clearing of old stuff at my parents’ house. I opened an old diary from 10 years ago. I was starting the relationship with my current partner, preparing for motherhood and becoming a mother whilst writing my first cookbook. Looking back, it was one of the turning points of my life, and while some part of the old me sensed that, except I didn’t have as much faith then. I was emotionally flailing about a lot. I saw the old me so clearly in those pages. Where before I might have felt frustration, now, I felt a lot of compassion for the 30-something year old me. I couldn’t help being a bit unstable, it just wasn’t within my reach in those days. The changes that have taken place inside of me in the last 10 years have been profound. I have somehow become more a grounded, strong version of myself, while at the same time accepting that I have ADD. The changes happened through therapy (with a really good therapist), by taking more responsibility of my outcomes, through learning to be of service to others and not thinking about myself the whole time, and through having a daily spiritual practise, including lots of yoga and meditation. And here I am. Just being human and accepting it. It’s been a long journey though, and sometimes it’s good to remember that.

Letters

On the same day, I also accidentally read a letter my mum had written to me in an old notebook, which I imagine she was not planning on my seeing. I picked the notebook up as it used to be my daughter’s, now lying on my mum’s bedside table. As I read it, I felt the love that I don’t often feel from my mum and was incredibly touched by it. I felt a huge amount of compassion for her as a human being too, which is something that’s not always easy to feel for one’s mum. The third thing that touched my heart are the writings of a doctor is Gaza. As we witness the most terrible things on a daily basis, reading this from Dr. Ezzideen Shehab unmasked for me the depth of human experience. The beauty of the human soul during the most heartbreaking of times. Ezzideen bears witness to what is happening around him and writes in a way that makes you see, that makes the distance between us much smaller. You can support his future book here.

An old Polish cookie recipe, reworked