Even though the way we celebrate Easter and the dishes we serve for our Easter brunch vary a bit from year to year, there are two food related Easter traditions we always keep. On Saturday we will decorate eggs (with…
Easter Lamb Cake
Categorie: Czech
Buchty, sweet Czech buns
15 years and 10 days ago, my beautiful star-eyed daughter Esther was born. At that time I was already practically living with my husband in the Netherlands but getting a residence permit turned out to be a very lengthy and…
Czech fruit filled dumplings
A couple of weeks ago Sebastiaan started high school. New school, new teachers, new kids, new rules and about ten times as much homework. A big change for him (though he does not seem to worry about anything – not…
Real jam doughnuts
I am a doughnut snob and that is a good thing. I do not settle for less than perfection, which means that if I want doughnuts, I have to make them myself, and that means I only have doughnuts about…
Christmas 2013
For the fifth year in a row, we celebrated Christmas at my sister’s in a tiny village in Western Bohemia. The village has about 30 inhabitants, a tiny church and a giant pear tree in the middle and no shop…
Blueberry kuchen with streusel topping
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…
Cherry `bubble` cake
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…
Mazanec, sweet Czech Easter bread
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,…
Open face sandwiches with home made potato salad
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…
Potato salad with peas, carrots and celeriac
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…
Vanocka, the sweet Czech Christmas bread
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…
Plum kuchen with streusel topping
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…