I first encountered black olive tapenade some ten years ago when I studied in Paris. My friend Gośka and I used to frequent this insane Australian bar in Châtelet called Café Oz. It was known for hunky bartenders with cute Australian accents and… well, that was actually all it was known for. This is where we met and befriended Tom who went down in history as the first guy to ever cook for me (well, actually, he cooked for us, which would indicate that he was possibly trying to woo one of us, only I don’t know which one). In any case, it’s been a decade since that dinner and I don’t remember anything of what he made except for those darling little appetizer sandwiches with black olive tapenade and goat cheese. They were seriously good and seriously memorable since they looked and tasted unlike anything I’ve ever eaten up to that point. Black olive tapenade is one of those foods that look completely unappealing (think mud or worse) but taste very satisfying and almost sensual with its richness and saltiness.
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I am going to make a bold statement: Cod is my most favorite fish in the whole world. Halibut is a close second, followed by albacore tuna (but only sashimi style) and salmon (but only sashimi style or smoked, and if smoked, then only in a particular way, from one particular place in Poland)… and on a related topic: I hate herring, always have and probably always will. All this to say, that for the moment being, you will not see any herring recipes on this blog but you will see plenty of cool fish, like cod, tuna and salmon. Also, I do realize that I’m weird and I will make a serious attempt at branching out fishwise or, at the very least, I will provide you with as many delicious and varied cod/halibut/tuna/salmon recipes as humanly possible. Although after eating this particular roasted cod with tomatoes, onions, red peppers and orange zest, I must say that my branching out incentives are pretty slim.
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The first sentence of Chuck Klosterman’s great novel Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs reads: No woman will ever satisfy me. That pretty much sums up my feelings toward salads. You see, I do not come from a salad-eating culture… we, Poles, have always been the potato, vodka and kielbasa people, not green salad people. And although I’ve lived in America for a while, where salads are considered meals in themselves, eating a salad has always felt weird to me. It’s not only that it made me feel like I’m a cow, chewing on a handful of grass, with pieces invariably sticking in all possible directions, refusing to fit in my mouth all at once, falling down and sprinkling me with dressing… no, that’s not the only thing. What made me most uncomfortable about eating salads is that I always felt like a fraud. I would order a salad because I’d be in a healthy mood but what I secretly wanted to eat was bacon. Halfway through my salad, I didn’t feel like finishing it or being healthy anymore, I only felt like stabbing myself in the eye. I finally came to peace with salad eating when I discovered that I do like salads when they incorporate some of my favorite foods and if they have a tasty dressing. The below is a very simple salad which fulfills these criteria beautifully, plus… it contains bacon.
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February 25, 2010 in
soups
I come from a country where beetroot soup is sacred. We call it “barszcz” but the name has been internationally butchered and bastardized and you may know it as “borscht”. We usually eat it for Christmas with little mushroom-filled dumplings, which we call “uszka” (meaning “little ears”). Barszcz is probably my favorite childhood soup and, understandably, messing around with other beet soup recipes feels like a sacrilege or a betrayal of sorts, not to mention, it could get you disowned by your grandma… but when I saw this recipe in yet another cookbook gifted to me by my awesome parents-in-law, I knew I had to try it, if only because there is almost a whole year till next Christmas.
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Sometime last winter, our friend Axel came over for an evening of dinner and cards. After we ate, cleaned up and got the cards ready, we all felt a hankering for dessert. This is where Axel, quite unexpectedly, volunteered to make Tiramisu. At first, I was quite skeptical. I pictured a long and complicated cooking process, resulting in a horrible mess and a questionable culinary outcome, but Axel assured me that this was his quick and foolproof recipe for impressing girls. Within 20 minutes he made an absolutely delicious dessert and then he proceeded to kick our butts in cards. This was clearly his night and this girl and her totally non-girly husband were very impressed. I promptly appropriated the recipe and started using it to impress girls and boys alike. I like to serve this Faux* Tiramisu in cute little jars (an idea I shamelessly stole from an awesome brunch place in Essen, where we once, completely randomly, ended up having a two-hour lunch with Otto Rehhagel).
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The first time I encountered hummus, I was eighteen years old and had no clue what it was. I knew it had to be something special, because my ex-boyfriend threw himself at it with a savage scream and, frankly, with more excitement and enthusiasm than when throwing himself at me. I could now grace you with a monologue on the superiority of my attributes over those of pulped chickpeas but there is no need to digress. You see, hummus really is special, it’s tasty and healthy and quite addictive, once you get a taste for it. So, all I would like to say to the ex-boyfriend is: I understand… and after a brief consideration, I forgive… however, after some more consideration, I will not forget.
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I vividly remember my first attempt at roasting a chicken. I was thirteen and my mom left me with detailed chicken operating instructions. I followed them to the best of my capacity, which was scarce, since back then I didn’t know anything about anything (something which, sadly, continued well into my twenties). Anyway, it seemed to me that the chicken was sticking out of the roasting form unnecessarily much… so I took care of it. The look my mother gave me, when she saw the final product of my culinary zeal – the product being a chicken splashed out like a frog in water after I gave it my best push to make sure it would be nice and flat – the look she gave me, indicated that she firmly believed, at that moment, that I was nineteen shades of crazy and counting. It took me about fifteen years before I attempted to roast a chicken again, but this time with dramatically different results… The below recipe is possibly the juiciest, tastiest, most mouth-watering and world changing roasted chicken recipe in existance. It is, in fact, the über-chicken…
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