After I had dinner at Kanzlei Restaurant last month, I vowed to recreate some of its food at home. It’s a fun thing to do, trying to make something you’ve seen elsewhere and adding your own little twist to it. This is something I do quite often, and not only as it relates to cooking. When I see something I like in somebody’s approach to life or in their house décor or in their kitchen, I adapt it myself. Is it idea theft? Sure. But that’s my way of learning and evolving. I learn by observing and emulating others, just like a one year old would. Speaking of babies, one of my friends who is a new mother, had just created a Gmail account for her newborn son with his firstname.lastname as the username. I thought this was brilliant and hilarious at the same time. Totally theft-worthy. And since I do not have any children of my own, I have briefly considered ‘reserving’ some potential baby name plus our last name combinations. Which is a bit insane, I admit. My small-time idea stealing or should I say inspiration drawing from German restaurants pales in comparison. Anyway, one could hardly call cheese wrapped in bacon a unique or proprietary idea. Everyone knows that wrapping anything in bacon makes it taste better, right?
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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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