Archive For The “Czech” Category
I love foraging. It runs in the family. My 15 months old niece is an incredibly picky eater. She doesn’t eat vegetables or rice or yoghurt. She will also not touch a banana or a store-bought apple. But anything she can pick herself or see being picked is another story. Many times a day she [...]
When I get a chance to eat as many cherries as I want, I’ll eat kilos of them. I don’t often get a chance. Last time was when I was sixteen and spent the first week of my summer vacation working in a cherry orchard, picking cherries from huge standard cherry trees, balancing on a [...]
The way Easter is traditionally celebrated in the Czech Republic frequently shocks feminists from foreign countries. This is how it goes: guys go out and cut young, soft branches from willow trees and braid them into a kind of whip, decorating the top with colorful ribbons. Then they take a basket and go around the [...]
So, we made the potato salad to eat on Christmas Eve and then we made another batch to make open face sandwiches for New Year’s Eve. As we do every year. And the sandwiches that are not eaten on New Year’s Eve, we pack in a box and take on our traditional family walk on [...]
Because a marriage is not only a union of two individuals but also two different culinary traditions, it is during the high holidays, when “laws” and “in-laws” meet around one table, that culinary conflicts are likely to escalate. The traditional Czech Christmas dinner is carp with potato salad, but few agree on how the potato [...]
Czech Christmas would be no Christmas without Christmas cookies. And “vanocka”. Vanocka is a sweet bread studded with raisins and traditionally made for Christmas. The taste is not much different from other braided sweet breads such as challah, but it is a lot showier, because it is not just one braid, not two, but THREE [...]
Because I come from the Czech Republic and my whole family lives there, this is where we go every summer. We usually pick lots of mushrooms and blueberries, but the wild growing damsons sadly only start ripening towards the end of our vacation. And the reason I am on a lookout for damsons is this [...]
