This is the kind of thing you throw together when your fruit trees are producing more than you can manage, or if you’ve gone a little crazy at the farmers’ market. [Read more →]

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 →]

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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My mum used to make these amazing Slovak potato pancakes. She would come home during her lunch break and make lunch for us, so it would be waiting for us when we came home from school. She made sure there was some soup and a main course. By the time we would get home, Mum was back at work, but she always left a note about what she cooked and how much we can have — with three hungry boys she left nothing to chance. I still remember that we could have 5 pancakes each. [Read more →]