Warming up your soul on rainy days: diós guba

It is raining, it is cold and windy which gives me the sense that I cannot dress myself warm enough. Streets are empty, once in a while someones passes by in hurry while trying to fight with the umbrella and puddles. Although these are not the days when it is easy to find something that brights up my day, but still it can happen that small miracles come surprisingly.
For example when I discover, that Virág is not only a wonderful yoga teacher with whom we have weekly yoga sessions in our village, but also an amazing goat cheese-maker, who knows her goats by name. Tasting her goat milk I discover that it can be delicious without any strong, not appealing flavor- the secret lies within the way animals will be treated. We are standing in the cold wind on her little farm and talking about how significant is that goats can run around freely, eating for whatever they have appetite ranging from nettles to elderberries and other healing plants.
When I arrive home, carrying three different kind of cheese in my bag, I find a bowl of grapes next to our front door, without any message. I will need to find out who was that kind neighbor who surprised us in such a lovely way. In the house our tile stove, which was rebuilt after 40 years this summer is slowly warming up, and it is beautiful to see the flames through the new glass door. Sometimes it stops raining so I can go out and collect walnuts, that started to fall from the tree.

After all,when I find some day-old kifli in our breadbox, I know that this rainy day will end up really being heart-warming and sunny. This is a Hungarian dish, which has many recipes- this is one of them, the way my grandmother prepares it. It is quick, easy and delicious, it is like a bread pudding, but you don’t need to put it into the oven. If you don’t have kifli, you can use brioche as well. In Hungary we often sprinkle it with poppy-seed but I prefer walnuts, especially because I can use ours from our orchard. It is warming up my soul maybe because it remind me my grandmother, whose kitchen was filled up by the scent of vanilla when she was preparing it. We sit down at our dining table next to the tile stove and we agree that life – with rain, coldness, wind but with diós guba is simply beautiful.

Diós guba/ kind of Hungarian brioche pudding

Ingredients for 4 people
160 g day-old brioche or Hungarian kifli
600 ml milk
2 package of vanilla sugar (or 2 tsp of sugar and a piece of vanilla bean)
40 g butter
80 g walnut
confectionar’s sugar

Cut the brioche or kifli into small pieces, heat up the milk and dissolve vanilla sugar. Put the brioche pieces into a bowl, pour over the milk and let it rest until the brioche soaks up liquid. Crush walnuts in a mortar and mix with some sugar according to your taste. Melt butter in the pan and add brioche, fry each sides until golden brown. Serve it hot, topped with the walnut mixture.