It's hard to get into the Christmas spirit in heat and humidity, but my family has succeeded in convincing me to have a Vrenikje making day before Christmas.
This has become a family tradition in our house and even in Bolivia, everyone hopes for Vrenikje for Christmas dinner.
The ingredients for vrenikje are dry curd cottage cheese, flour, eggs and cream. All the ingredients except for the dry-curd cottage cheese are easily found here. In order to acquire the filling, I went down to the Mennonite Market (which is just a street close to Los Posos market here in Santa Cruz) to see if I could find a place that sold it. I had no luck. I went up the street asking different Mennonites if they knew about "GLUMS" (the name in Low-German) or where I could find it. All the people I asked didn't know or they wouldn't even talk to me. It was rather discouraging! I found out later that many of the Mennonites don't even speak Spanish, so even though I was trying to speak my best in Spanish, it probably sounded like Blah Blah Blah Glums Blah Blah to them. I finally asked a clump of ladies who also spoke English and one of them offered to make me some and meet me at the market a few days later! So, yesterday I went and picked up a big 5lb. bag of the stuff and was able to have our vrenikje making party! In this pic are my kids, Eva Cool and her daughter Alayna. Eva is a good Mennonite girl from Alberta and knows Low-German. She's pretty awesome! We had a fun afternoon and we are all very excited to eat all the vrenikje we made!
This has become a family tradition in our house and even in Bolivia, everyone hopes for Vrenikje for Christmas dinner.
The ingredients for vrenikje are dry curd cottage cheese, flour, eggs and cream. All the ingredients except for the dry-curd cottage cheese are easily found here. In order to acquire the filling, I went down to the Mennonite Market (which is just a street close to Los Posos market here in Santa Cruz) to see if I could find a place that sold it. I had no luck. I went up the street asking different Mennonites if they knew about "GLUMS" (the name in Low-German) or where I could find it. All the people I asked didn't know or they wouldn't even talk to me. It was rather discouraging! I found out later that many of the Mennonites don't even speak Spanish, so even though I was trying to speak my best in Spanish, it probably sounded like Blah Blah Blah Glums Blah Blah to them. I finally asked a clump of ladies who also spoke English and one of them offered to make me some and meet me at the market a few days later! So, yesterday I went and picked up a big 5lb. bag of the stuff and was able to have our vrenikje making party! In this pic are my kids, Eva Cool and her daughter Alayna. Eva is a good Mennonite girl from Alberta and knows Low-German. She's pretty awesome! We had a fun afternoon and we are all very excited to eat all the vrenikje we made!