30.11.2004., utorak
If you have a weak stomack, go away
My dear, dear people, I got a cold.
I feel miserable and I'm sneezing and coughing, and then sneezing some more! I've spent a ton of tissues and have eaten pounds and pounds of honey mixture, and have even drunk home-make bay leaf syrup, and I still feel like shit. I guess I have to wait it out.
Honeybunny has gone to Sarajevo. He’ll be gone for the whole week.
I miss you honeybunney!
As you know, this weekend I was going to kolinje.
Well, I went, had a great time, and brought you some pictures.
The first day of kolinje was the killing and sorting day. The family all got up early in the morning, around seven, drank coffee and waited for the rest to arrive. Soon, the rest of the family and friends who came to help arrived. All in all, there were about fifteen of us all together, the cat and two dogs not included (we brought Leelo along for the ride).
The men went outside to deal with the pigs. There was a professional butcher among them, so they killed the pigs quiet quickly.
 (hears and lungs... just hangin')
I really didn’t want to watch how the pigs got killed and cleaned. I was scared not that I would puke or anything, but that I wouldn’t mind the killing.
I’ve never seen anything or anybody killed except on TV. And on TV, you don’t mind. Human or animal, one death or ten thousand, it’s all the same on TV. But what if you see a death in real life, and you still don’t mind? What will you think of yourself then?
So I didn’t want to see the death of a pig not because of the pig, but because I would have to face myself in that moment, and god knows who I would be. I certainly don’t want to know.
 (cutting up meat to make a pršut)
 (future pršuts getting the liquid squeezed out of them)
So, for the whole fist day I help with the cooking while the boys outside cleaned the pig, gutted it, separated different peaces of meat and modeled them to the yummy foods they will later become – bacons, ribs, prsut, etc…
The essential part of kolinje is drinking and eating. The boys were drinking slowly while working, then stopped for a hearty breakfast, and continued working and drinking until dinner. It’s a time for hard work and party.
We cooked. We made loads of stuff for breakfast – fried eggs with mushrooms, ham and cheese, chicken, French salad, regular salad, sliced salamis, and so on.
After breakfast honeybunney’s sister and I went to visit the veterinarian to see if the pigs were free of parasites. There is a parasite that embeds itself in the meat and is very dangerous to humans, so before eating pork you have to make sure it’s parasite free.
 (fat inna bucket)
After the meat was cleared, we started preparing dinner with some of the fresh pork. And dinner was as hearty as the breakfast – cabbage with pork, pork chops, chicken (again), potato dumplings in meat sauce, salads, and later on caked and cookies. Yum, yum, yum.
That was more or less the end of day one.
On the second day came my favorite part – making sausages! This is where I joined in. I was making sausages with my grandmother since I was little, and it’s such fun.
First, you have to mince the meat, and then season it.
 (mincing the meat)
In Slavonija, the part of Croatia where my grandmother lived, they season it with salt, pepper and chilly peppers, so the sausages turn out very hot and spicy, but in Istria they make them with garlic, which was very unusual for me. After seasoning, you mix them good, so that every part is equally seasoned. Sausages are made with a machine that has a tube on one end, to which intestines are attached, and then slowly filled with the spiced meat. When all the meat’s been used up, you hang it in a smoking room and smoke it.
So we made sausages, honeybunny, his mom, aunt and me.
 (smoking sausages :) )
Ah, how horrible this must sound, intestines, entrails, gutting, killing, but when you think of it, all of us eat meat, but most of us never wonder how it got to our plates.
When we eat steaks and sausages, we never think how someone had to kill that cow for us and do all the things I’ve shown here before it arrived to our plate and our mouth. We don’t think of it as a part of some animal, but just as - meat.
I hope my pictures haven’t grossed you out.
Until tomorrow, love to ya all from Tiamat.
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- 14:34 -
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