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 […]

Initially, I was just going to repost an older recipe, along with a nostalgic essay I did on stuffed peppers called Pepperfest.  When I checked the aforementioned post, I realized that the recipe has changed considerably and it might be worth sharing separately.  Not to mention, the pictures turned out quite alright.

Don’t you just love it when certain things come together in time and space to make your life easier?  Better yet, don’t you just love it when certain seemingly negative things coincide in time and space, and when combined yield a resolutely positive outcome? Well I do, indeed.  And here is why. Enter the seemingly […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]