There are some nights when you just want something quiet and homey for dinner. Nothing fancy or particularly elaborate, and nothing that requires your constant presence in the kitchen.  Tonight is the night.  Easy does it, and turns out easy it perfectly acceptable on a Friday night after a busy week. This dinner makes me […]

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 […]

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 […]

Growing up, among my favorite books one could find a collection of poetry for children by Polish authors.  It was wonderfully translated into Russian by various talented Russian writers.  I loved many of the poems and you could hear me reciting some of them quite frequently.

This recipe was shared by my friend Tatiana, who now lives in Greece.  She swore it was a Greek recipe, but I didn’t believe her for one second.  It seems profoundly French to me in every respect — from vast quantity of onions used, to butter, to cream, to cooking in wine method, to extracting […]

It seems these days that I am always late.  We aren’t talking appointments and school drop offs…  We are talking, weeks, even months at a time. I signed my kid up for Jewish library distribution a while back.  They send her an age appropriate book each month.  The books are supposed to showcase essentials of […]

This dish is a marvel of home cuisine.  It’s good in any weather, easy as can be, and with mere five to six ingredients readily available it will never send you grocery shopping in order to make it.  Yes, you heard me, just five or six,  and can be even four if you choose not […]