FloorCookies

One of the most versatile pastries, that always gives you good results, is the famous linzer.  You make the dough, you cut out different shapes from it, and then decorate them reflecting the occasion.  It can be a circle, a square with flouted edges, a heart, a star, a tree, or your favorite animal if you happen to have a cutter in its shape – anything you like, really.

While looking through The Whole Foods Market Cookbook, I came across an interesting recipe for turkey meatballs.  These meatballs are very different from those I grew up with.

Thanksgiving, this special American national holiday, is always the fourth Thursday of November.  Family members (and often friends) get together over a big feast of turkey (even though in these days turkey meat is not necessarily served) and give thanks for the blessings of the year.

Inspired by my hamburger bun baking, I wanted more, this time a different type of bread.  Maybe a bit bigger than buns.  I went back to the Making Fresh Bread cookbook, and there it was: the good looking sounding simple enough recipe for a flatbread.

A few years ago on a flight to Europe while reading a magazine – no memory what kind – I discovered a few recipes from the Australian cook Donna Hay.  I am not a magazine fan at all, but upon my return to the USA I went on a quest to find her cooking magazine.  Until a year ago, I diligently bought the issues always one-two months behind the current ones, and sometimes I couldn’t even find them in the various bookstores or magazine stands in Seattle.

One day, when I was in seventh grade, probably on a Saturday or during the summer, my parents and my sister went to work in our vineyards.  I stayed at home alone.  By the time they came home I had made crêpes.  Never before and not for a long time after did I make anything by myself in the kitchen.  Both my sister and I occasionally helped, but the kitchen was my mother’s territory.  On that day when they came home, my mother looked at me and said “You will be fine”, meaning I will be all right in the […]

I’ve been baking a lot in my life, even with yeast, but savory breads and their like were not very often a part of my repertoire.  In my quest to replace the commercial, store bought, you can squeeze it into a flat paper-like substance by the time you are done with eating your burger type of bun, I searched and found a doable recipe for homemade hamburger buns.  I adapted the recipe from Making Fresh Bread, a cookbook of the brand “Love Food” of the British publisher Parragon which promises to “create bread in your home with perfect results”.

In many countries throughout the world, November 1st is observed as All Saint’s Day.  I grew up with this tradition in what was then Czechoslovakia.  After I moved to America, I learned that here and in some other parts of the world, it is October 31st, Halloween that is celebrated with its interesting activities like kids trick-or-treating or adults attending costume parties.  And there is pumpkin carving, and contests in pumpkin carving, and decorating with pumpkins around houses.

How often it happens that you want to do something and it gets delayed and delayed?  No, it’s not procrastination, it just happens.  Like my exploration of the many different varieties of whole grains.  The other day this trend finally got broken.

After a long absence from my blog, I hope my presence will become more regular after I settle into the routine of the new school year.  Developing the routine is taking a little bit longer than usual – more about this in a future post.  Today I present this easy and wonderful way of preparing apples under a crispy sweet crust of rolled oats.  I adapted the recipe from The Whole Foods Market Cookbook.  You can use almost any type of fruit, or you can mix different fruits together.

Just before we went on our winter break last year, I received a nicely wrapped box from one of my senior Advanced Placement Calculus students.  When I opened it at home on Christmas Eve (yes, we Europeans don’t open presents in the morning), to my big surprise I found a spring form cake pan in the box together with spatulas and her family’s recipe for a tart!