Everyone has seen the movie Ratatouille a few years back and applauded the gorgeous layered vegetable dish the little rodent protagonist concocted to sweep a picky food critic off his feet.  I am sure that some of you already know that the dish featured in the cute animated film was actually not a ratatouille, but […]

I am a bread snob. Why? Because I grew up in a country where you can survive on bread alone for months at a time, and not get sick of it.  Because our local bread store had freshly baked, still steamy and hot bread delivered twice a day.  Because our bread varieties were many, flavors […]

I remember in the hungry Perestroyka years, when general populace was going back to its hunting and gathering roots due to raging food shortages, one of our country’s beloved stand up comedians performed this monologue about the proverbial Iron Curtain.  The premise of it was that soviet people had experienced the pleasantries of the free […]

In my country this was a condiment.  There were two reasons for that — price and spiciness.  When shopping at a farmer’s market, I used to walk along the aisle of pickled vegetables, rows upon rows of pickled cabbage, marinated tomatoes, “soaked” apples,  stuffed eggplant… And at the end of that aisle, atop of the […]

There is really not much to it.  You take colorful bell peppers at the peak of their ripeness.  You line them up on a baking tray and broil them until blistered and lightly charred.  Then you let them cool.  The magic begins right after the peppers are cooled off.  The scorched skin readily peels right […]

Ever cooked scary food? I used to cook it all the time back home, but now I have to adjust my scary food cooking schedule for local availability and my American family taste.  What’s scary food? You know. I am talking liver, kidneys, brains, heart, feet, tongue, bone marrow, and other such things that typically […]

Had a nice trip down the memory lane today.  We picked up a nice size flounder at a farmer’s market.  Flounder has a special place in my gastronomically inclined heart, because I grew up eating it almost every other week.  Flounder came in two sizes and colors in my town — large black ones, the […]