My Weekend

It has been really nice spending time with my Mum over the weekend. We did all of the usual things we do like chatting, shopping, having lunch and dinner and just taking life at a much easier pace then I do when I am in Sydney. Mum also updated me on all of the local happenings and although I haven't lived there for over half my life now(!), I still like to hear what is going on and how well everyone is doing. I got to catch-up with some of my favourite relatives like Auntie Stef and Uncle Henry who made a delicious dinner for Mum and I on Saturday night and whom we met for dinner each night I was there. For other relatives, like my wonderful grandparents, all I could do was take some flowers to the cemetery. Last April, we lost my beloved Grandma after a long illness. Being from the Ukraine, we called her Baba, which means Grandma in Ukrainian. We all miss her every day and for me, I still find it hard to believe that she isn't around anymore and find myself close to tears whenever I think about her. I guess the only consolation is that she is reunited with her husband, my Dido, who passed away 15 years ago. But I really do miss being able to visit them both and be plied with Ukrainian food of all descriptions. From the time I was little, I was always on the skinny side and Baba took this with great offence and did everything she possibly could to fatten me up. She would exclaim every time I saw her, in an accented English/Ukrainian hybrid language she developed over the years "Ah, my Cole-y, you so skinny, you like a skinny rabbit". I used to think that being compared to a rabbit was quite nice, rabbits are pretty cute after all. What I didn't realise until recently was that she was actually comparing me to a skinned rabbit not a cute and cuddly, fluffy rabbit. Bless, Baba sure knew how to tell it like it is.

Even though I have tried to make Baba's recipes, they just don't taste as good. Luckily we got to visit Baba and Dido's best friends, Mr and Mrs P, over the weekend. I have known them all my life and Baba and Dido knew them for most of theirs - they first met in a war camp in Germany back in the 1940s before meeting up again in Australia. Mrs P had done some baking in the day and I got to try it in vast quantities - sauerkraut and bacon filled pierogi. These are best described as being similiar to dim sum only made from pasta and filled with assorted stuffings like cabbage, potatoes and usually some sort of fatty, delicious meat. OMG, amazing! I told her how much I missed Baba's food and that I was so happy to be eating authentic Ukrainian food again. Mrs. P gave us lots of peierogi to take home and Mum was so concerned that I was going to wolf them all down as soon as we got back to her house that she had to remind me to "Leave some for me!". Ooops, my reputation for eating is well known in Mum's house....