Here is the promised third Czech Christmas Cookie. You can find a similar recipe in the December issue of Sauveur magazine, although they call it an Austrian cookie, which raised my blood pressure. Luckily there are bloggers out there who will correct these mistakes.

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There are a few differences between the Christmas season in Central Europe and how most families celebrate in the USA. The major one would be that the presents are brought by the baby Jesus, and not by Santa.  During the dark Orwellian times, the fashion from the Soviet Union was to bring in “Ded Maroz” (Father Frost), which was the comrades’ version of Santa. It did not work for many reasons, one being that December 6 in Central Europe is Saint Nicholas day, when kids eat themselves sick on candies brought by Saint Nick. For kids it was very hard to understand why would a man in red suit and beard coma back at Christmas and bring toys. Why he wouldn’t he drop off the candies and toys all at once? We needed another character.  So the concept of baby Jesus survived.

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Emperor’s Crumbs or császármorzsa or smarni or Kaiserschmarrn was our first recipe on this blog. I felt like revisiting it for three reasons: first, it is our name and signature recipe, so we should try it with American ingredients. Second, we are delighted to mention that we’re featured on The Hungarian Girl’s website and I don’t want to risk any mistakes! Most importantly, my mother-in-law had a birthday recently, and a decadent breakfast reminiscent of fancy Austro-Hungarian weekends was a perfect way to celebrate it. So I remade the recipe to serve 5-6 instead of the original 2. I also made it more “California compliant” and used less eggs and almost no fat, while keeping its outstanding flavor. It still tastes rich and delicious. If you want to know the background of emperor’s crumbs then check back to our first post and the old recipe.

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This soup started out as gazpacho, at some point in our cooking past. Maybe it could still be called gazpacho, I haven’t consulted with the Wordwide Soup Taxonomical Organization (if such a thing exists). It’s the ideal tonic at the end of a hot day, with its deep red color and a sweet/sour snap. True, you do have to generate a little heat roasting the veggies, but it’s well worth it, I’m telling you. (I can tell you because even though this is Valerian’s recipe, I’m writing it up today).

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I feel like this article has to be written. I am very disappointed when a magazine like Cook’s Illustrated makes a goulash recipe and it turns out to be something else. I love Cook’s Illustrated and I forgive them. But let’s put things straight in the case of Hungarian gulyás. The biggest mistake people make is mixing up other Hungarian foods and calling them “goulash”. So what is gulyás, really?

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