povitica

Monday night a friend called me up. "have you finished dinner yet?" he asked.
"Just finished," I replied.
"Good. Then you come on over. We have povitica."
Then there was the clatter of a phone being dropped, a door slamming, and the rumble of an engine as a car pealed out of the parking lot. I don't have to be asked twice!

I know few people know of the wonders of povitica, but for some reason I still receive a shock when someone says, "povitica? What's that?" How could they not know the wonderfulness of povitica? Note: If you ever do eat povitica, it's wonderful if you spread a little butter over the top of you slice and pop it in the microwave for a few seconds. You won't be disappointed!

Oh, what is povitica? It's a Croatian sweet bread. It's kind of like a cinnamon roll, except replace the cinnamon with walnuts or cream cheese and make the bread dough really thin, so the swirls of bread and filling are hairline thin and keep winding round and round like the rings on tree stump. Only it tastes amazing.

My grandma learned to make povitica from her Croatian mother-in-law. And I grew up helping my grandma roll out the dough so that it stretched to cover the entire table. It was so thin you could see though it in some spots to the table underneath. Then we spread on the filling. I believe she altered the traditional walnut recipe and used pecans. This too, we spread super thin. And then we started at a wide end and rolled the dough and filling into a four-foot roll. My grandma then cut the roll in bread pan sized widths. As she placed the rolled dough into the bread pans, I took the two small bits left at either end and filled my own tiny little bread pans. Then we brushed on some sort of buttery glaze on the top.

Mmm...
I need to get that recipe.
but it takes so much work to make povitica. My grandma would only make it once or twice a year. They kept quite well in the deep freezer.

So, imagine my shock when I show up at my friends house for a slice of povitica and find his parents had bought me an entire loaf! It was poppy seed. Very good. But remember that part about it being time and labor intensive to make this bread? That means this stuff ain't cheap.
and they bought it for me because they remembered how much I loved povitica.
My heart.
They've been so good to me. They've welcomed me like family. How do you thank people for that? Maybe you can't.