Food Storage Saturday Show offs: Bosnian Wheat Dessert

I got this recipe from Stasha and was amazed at it’s simplicity AND her story. Do me a favor, and make sure you read all of her story (below the recipe) to hear from a real survivor and what life was like in a war torn Bosnia.

This recipe is very simple, traditionally made in Bosnia for celebrations, it is served on a tray as people come to our house, everyone takes a scoop of wheat (with different spoon and no double dipping 🙂 you only need wheat, walnuts and sugar the ratio is 1 to 1 to 1 by weight… so for example 1 lb wheat…1 lb walnuts….1 lb sugar
cook the wheat according to your recipe..so presoak and boil until cracked, drain wheat but only the water that it was cooking in don’t let it drain any longer transfer into a food processor immediately, some liquid is OK, puls few times this is really up to you how far you want to go, and do you want to leave some bits, use cheese grinder and grind up the walnuts, I use hand held, I tried it in different kinds of food processors and it didn’t work it only turns into greasy blob, when you use cheese grinder it comes out fluffy, add sugar and walnuts to the wheat and stir….of course you can adjust the amount of sugar or slowly add it to the wheat and walnut mixture.
This dessert is eaten chilled and just like that with a spoon, kind of like a pudding, some people like to add whip cream I prefer not to, hope you try it!

STASHA’S STORY

I’m 37 years old, wife and stay-at-home mom of three 8 year old girl, and two boys 22 months and 4 months, I home school and can’t imagine now not having the food storage. I come from a war torn country and food storage should been my way of life, I experienced hunger and life without electricity, gas and running water, but it wasn’t until few months ago when my sister in law started her own food storage and memories of the war came back. She sent me links to Crystal’s blog and youtube channel. Crystal inspired me and made it approachable. If I can do it anybody can, life is very busy around here, I have limited space and very limited budget, but we make it work.
I should probably tell you a little about myself before the war. Here’s the link to wikipedia about the town where I grew up, Banovici
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banovi%C4%87i
The 29 000 population includes surrounding villages, the town itself had less people. If you compare your family and mine side by side I’m pretty sure the only major difference would be the language we spoke. I had ordinary uneventful childhood, music and dancing was something I loved (Madonna, U2, Michael Jackson, Simple minds…I even secretly liked Wham, hey I was young :D) art and books, going out with my friends, watching movies (can I just say Top Gun 🙂 and any girl that says she didn’t like the movie I don’t believe her lol) My parents worked and my two brothers and I went to school always counting down to the next vacation. It is important to mention this so you know I didn’t go from bad to worse. Life was good, really good, and then one day somebody pulled the plug on all good things and if as that wasn’t enough they pulled the rug underneath me too. How did this happen over night? Well, it did and it didn’t, the stores were emptied over night and money lost all value but there were signs we ignored, prices going up, lack of certain items at the stores, riots here and there, news from other parts of the country….Why we ignored it? Because we were “special”, those things didn’t happen to us, this happens in other countries, it happens to those people, my family is different, my town is different….that will never happen to us. Human beings are amazing in convincing ourselves that bad things happen to other people. We actually think that if we stand on a railroad and see a train approaching fast, we can just close our eyes and think happy thoughts and the train will go around us.
So the war was the fast approaching train and all we did is close our eyes and counted to 10. My worst nightmare became reality, the war started in May of 1992 on the last day of my high school. We became CNN and BBC sensation. Now my family became “those people”.

During the war we had no electricity, gas or running water…..I don’t mean to go down “the war path” I can go on forever but I wanted to share at least few things with you which you probably already know 🙂
-The first thing that lost value OVERNIGHT was money, stores have been emptied overnight too, all the owners and managers refused to sell food and kept it for themselves.
-We were able to buy some food from other people for gold, I remember my mom exchanging her rings and other jewelry for sacks of potatoes, flour and rice but that didn’t last for a long, people got scared and the only way we were able to get food was through exchange for other food items.
-things that gained in value other than food itself, tools, any and all tools, if you didn’t have a shovel good luck planting, also seeds, if you had storage of seeds you can get “big items” for your seeds like oil, yes oil or any kind of fat was priceless
-we were lucky to live in a small town so we had natural water spring walking distance from our house but line was long and sometimes took hours of waiting in line to get water, which brings me to the third item of great value, water jug, or any container that you can carry water in and if grenades started falling on the way home you better have a container that you can close so you don’t spill water running.
-when it comes to medicine only three things were in demand, pain killers, fever reducers, and antibiotics

(We’ll go into her story later on in more depth of all the things she learned first hand!)