Yiayia's Bread - As documented by Rae

Thankfully Rae had the idea to write down Yiayia's bread recipe. And while none of us will ever be able to recreate her bread without an outdoor wood-burning oven, it is still an amazingly delicious bread. Mom re-ran this recipe in the last newsletter and we decided to make it for Easter. Cathy even had a packet of yeast she'd purchased in Greece last year, so it was extra authentic! Soooooo good warm with butter.

Ingredients

• 1 quart milk
• Approx. 5-1/2 lbs flour
  
• 4 eggs - slightly beaten
• 5-6 heaping tablespoons sugar
• 2 cubes butter
• 2 pkgs dry yeast
• 1-1/2 teaspoons salt
• 1/4 cup warm water
• Flavorings: Whole corriander, anise & cumin seeds, "crushed" lightly to bring out the flavor
  

Directions
Heat the milk. Add butter and let melt.

Start yeast in the warm water with 1/2 teaspoon sugar. Set aside.

In a large bowl, mix milk, sugar, salt and flavorings. Add half the flour and work with your hads until partly mixed and then add the eggs. Continue to work a little more, then add the yeast mixture. Keep adding flour until the dough is smooth and easy to handle.

Rub olive oil over the top, and make the sign of the cross (a MUST!). Cover and let rise until double in size.

Preheat oven to 350-375 degrees.

Knead for 5 minutes or so. Set aside and prepare pans. Grease bottoms of the pans only.

Knead dough again and shape loaves to fill the pans about 1/3 full. Set aside until bread in pans doubles in size, or pans look full.

Brush with beaten egg. Bake at least 45 minutes.

Onion Skin Dyed Red Easter Eggs

Mom, Cathy, the kids and I tested the Nancy Gaifyllia's "recipe" for dying truly red Easter eggs using onion skins (you can link to her postings on About.com via the title above) and, amazingly, it works! The "dye" looks a little yellow-ish/orangey when but the eggs come out red with no chemicals. Very cool!

Here are some photos of the process, and one of Ruby who was the winner of the egg cracking contest with her winning egg. A year of good luck to her!

Glactobouriko

This is mom's recipe. It makes one very large pan, bigger than a 8x13.

1/2 gallon whole milk
2 C sugar
1/2 C cream of wheat
1/2 C cream of rice
6 eggs
1 T vanilla
1 pound filo, thawed and at room temperature (easier to handle)
1/2 pound butter melted (mom always used sweet butter on filo)
2 C water
1 C sugar
1 cinnamon stick

In a stock pot combine the milk and sugar and bring to scalding. Once milk has scalded stir the cream of rice and cream of wheat into the hot milk in a thin steady stream stirring the whole time. Once all the cereals have been added continue to cook untilt he milk comes to a boil. Remove from the heat. Whisk the eggs together in another bowl and temper the eggs with some of the hot milk mixture, then stirring all the while add the tempered eggs in a thin steady stream into the custard. Stir in the vanilla and set aside while you are lining the pan with filo.

Brush the pan with melted butter, lay a sheet of filo in the pan and brush it with butter, continue to layer the filo with butter until you have about 8-10 sheets of filo layered. Carefully pour the custard over the filo (make sure to leave some in the pot and on the spoon for snacking), top with a layer of filo and continue to butter and layer the filo until you've used up the whole pound. Make three verticle cuts in the galactobouriko, cutting down until you almost hit the filling. Be careful how you do this since it'll end up being how you cut the galactobouriko to serve it, if you want to serve smaller pieces of galactorbouriko you may want to score it in four places rather than three. The reason why you do this is so that the filo doesn't puff up and crack while baking, by scoring it you give the air a place to escape while baking. Bake in a preheated 375 oven for about 45 minutes. While the galactobouriko is baking prepare the soaking syrup.

In a medium saucepan combine the water, sugar, and cinnamon stick. Cook over high heat until the sugar melts, once the sugar has melted you can boil it without stirring for about 15 minutes or so (or as long as it takes you to clean up the kitchen!). Once the galalctobouriko is golden brown remove it from the oven and pour the hot syrup over the pastry (stand back a bit, the steam can come up to your face). Allow to cool to room temperature before you put it in the fridge. It's best to eat it the day after you've made it, but eat it within a couple of days because it's flavors are so delicate that they fade quickly.

It really depends on how you cut it, but I got around 30 pieces out of this recipe. Mom always cut on the diagonal. She'd trim all the edges ("because who wants a mouth full of filo!"), and then she'd cut down her score lines until she cut all the way to the bottom of the filo and then she'd cut on a diagonal so they were kind of diamond shaped. This gives you lots of ends and the non diamond shaped end pieces which fortunately were Dad's favorite thing to snack on.