A few days ago I decided to dive head first into a thirty-salads-in-thirty-days-adventure.  I find that my salad repertoire, however tasty, is always rotating around same basic things, so current challenge, in part, is an exercise in beefing up my salad portfolio.  Vegetables are at their peak right now, so what can be better than […]

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 […]

I like omelettes. Plain ones, vegetable ones, Greek ones, ham ones, cheese ones, mushroom ones…  I like them mostly when they are prepared for me, not by me.  But there are exceptions.  For example, this morning.  I slept plenty of hours, there was no place I had to be by 8 a.m, no rush to […]

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.

If I had to name one dish that immediately recalls childhood for me, it would be this one.  Stuffed cabbage rolls called Holubtzi in Russian, Ukrainian, Polish, and possibly other Slavic languages, invariably bring back memories of my Kindergarten.  You see, in our Kindergarten they fed us breakfast, lunch, snack and dinner, all cooked on […]

I have only one question for you people.  How did it happen that I still don’t own a tagine?  I mean, I pretty much own everything else, but not that quirky looking clay crock.  Why, would you ask, does one need to own a tagine?  And I will tell you: I tried something new yesterday, […]