Category — Side dishes

If you’re looking for a soft, yummy, eggy bread recipe, this is the one. I have to admit failure here, though: I just can’t seem to get the stacked braids to stay upright when I cook them. I finally resorted to my old standby six-strand braid, and the results are much more attractive. [Read more →]

Körözött is a Hungarian classic and every household makes it differently. It is kept in the fridge for moments when you do not have the mood to make lunch or dinner, or when your offspring is going to school and you just barely tumbled out of bed. You reach for a slice of bread and körözött. Eat it with good tomatoes and Hungarian wax peppers and you are instantly transported to the Hungarian countryside – close your eyes and you will find yourself on the beach of lake Balaton while staring at the sunset and soaking your feet in the lake’s warm water. And if by any chance you will hear your washing machine going trrrrrr, you and your bread with körözött might take you on a friendly Hungarian train ride, where snacks appear on the table as soon as the conductor blows the whistle. [Read more →]

One of the first questions I get when I introduce my wife is “Where did you two meet?”. I don’t know why, is an American-Slovak-Hungarian combo that weird? So make it even more weird — I say “in Kosovo”.  That always takes the conversation away from us and transforms it to a discussion about Kosovo. Yes it is true, we met in the Balkans and we worked together and we fell in love with each other, then got married, had kids and started this blog.  Maybe when someone asks me how I met my wife, I should say “while we were eating Shopska salad”. Is this true? Most likely yes, because being in the Balkans was all about eating a lot of Shopska salad.

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Many of our recipes end with the sentence: “Enjoy with a good rustic bread”. Bread is the staple food of Central Europe. We eat bread with everything. One of the challenges of moving was to find an everyday bread -  frankly, supermarket “sandwich” bread here is pretty bad. Sorry my friends, it is the truth. It is full of preservatives, different crazy sounding items and of course, sugar (that is true about everything. Everything tastes sweet here. It is like non-stop candy time). On other hand there are artisan breads. Well, those are amazing! The only problem is they are not priced for everyday eating. A good bread, which our family polishes off in 30 seconds, is $4. If you eat it once in a while, yes, it is the right price for something “special/artisan”. But if you eat it as Europeans do, yikes!
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I had a great day in Sonoma tasting some wine. I specifically went to try out the Cline cellars, since I was very excited about trying their wine; I had it for the first time on the way to California on the BA flight. I love the idea of grapes grown on 100 year-old vines. The yield is low but very mature and sophisticated. I am a big fan of Cline and their Ancient Wines line. With a little luck you can get these wines from under $10, which is my comfortable price limit for a bottle of wine. After the tasting at their cellars, I could not come home empty handed, and I decided to share this gem with my family. Since good wine must be accompanied by good food, I decided to make a Czech classic: roasted duck with red cabbage and Czech dumplings.

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