I can be quite compulsive obsessive when it comes to cooking. This usually manifests itself through repeated (obsessive) preparation of a dish that I just “discovered”. When I was thirteen, I made crêpes every day for about a year and although I am nowhere near this bad these days, my husband could tell you some interesting stories… like about the time I discovered Jamie Oliver’s Piri Piri Chicken* and we had it every single night for a week and every single day the dish woud get spicier than the one I made the day before (*do buy this book
, by the way, it’s fantastic). Fortunately, the husband has a good sense of humor about it and upon entering the house and smelling the Piri Piri or whatever was the obsession du jour, he’d say something like “You know, I’ve been craving this whole day long, actually, on my ride home I was just thinking how wonderful it would be to have some Piri Piri”. So by the time I got obsessed with quiches of all sorts, he already had his routine down and just silently braced himself for another tasty yet monotonous week. And after a while, something strange yet sweet happened, the intensity of my quiche obsession subsided but the husband still helpfully suggests, at least once a week, that I should make some quiche for dinner. Yup, that’s how tasty it is.
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Question: How do you know that you’ve been neglecting your food blog? Answer: When the last post is about a duck, which not only was never your dinner, but rather a living animal who is nesting on your balcony and who just came back for another nesting season… meaning that a whole year has gone by since your last post and that this duck has had more in the oven than you have. Well, that last part may be a slight exaggeration, since in this past year, my oven got quite a bit of action… one could even say that it has gotten around, if you know what I mean… that slutty slutty oven… Ok, this is one of those unfortunate metaphors, which should definitely not be continued, because who knows where it might take me.* So anyway, recently, the oven has been my accomplice in the obsessive preparation of quiches of all sorts. Here’s a quick fact for you, I have always loved quiche but never made one till about a month ago. I guess it’s because quiche always seemed to register high on the PITA meter (for an explanation about PITA go here). And then one day, completely randomly, I decided to make Quiche Lorraine, which ended up turning into a quiche mania of sorts. Once I mastered Quiche Lorraine, I moved to Quiche Flamiche and then moved in the direction of savory tarts, like the Eggplant-Tomato tart. I am pretty sure that I will soon spill into sweet tarts. And speaking of tarts, did I mention that my oven was one?
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So the last time I posted something on this blog was back in May. I treated you to some story about how after a month of lazy bumming I will now post regularly. I obviously lied. To my defense, what has happened in the past months can only be characterized as me falling into a black hole. You know… time warp. It happens to all of us periodically. Some of us realize that they’ve been black-holed after five months and others realize this after fifty years. What happens then, you may ask. Well… Option 1: You crawl back into your black hole. Depression ensues, followed by amateur philosophizing about the nature of time and men… or Option 2: You decide to fight against the black hole. In the immortal words of Bridget Jones
, you choose vodka and Chaka Khan. Or in my case, you make French toast for breakfast. Delicious, fluffy, cinnamon-scented, black-hole-combating French Toast to be precise. The announcement that I will be making French Toast has been met with some resistance from the husband, who promptly announced that he hates French Toast and if I decide to make it after all, it should be without cinnamon because he hates cinnamon. This later got reduced to the demand of not putting cinnamon on his share (which is kind of perplexing, because after he announced that he hates French toast, I kind of assumed that he wouldn’t have any at all and the black-hole French toast will be mine and only mine). In any case, husband’s objections have been promptly ignored on both counts. I have been taught from experience that when he claims to hate innocent foods such as pancakes or lentils or French toast, it soon turns out that the opposite is the case… as evidenced by the mhmmm mhmmm sound he makes while eating. This time was no exception.
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One of the soups that I remember fondly from my childhood is the Sorrel Soup with a hard-boiled egg. Sorrel, also known as, Spinach Dock, is a leafy garden vegetable, cultivated across Eastern Europe and mostly used in soups and sauces. It resembles spinach but is much more acidic in taste. I have never seen sorrel in any of the stores in the West, but maybe only because I wasn’t paying attention. The other day, though, when I was leafing through an old issue of my German food porn, I saw the recipe and the accompanying luscious photo of the cream of spinach soup with a boiled egg. The yummy memories of sorrel soup came back to me in waves, and since I couldn’t find sorrel in the supermarket (I will now be on the lookout), I decided to make the spinach soup version. Although I am not a huge spinach fan (correction, I like it raw, but not cooked), it seemed like this soup had it drowning in white wine and cream anyway, and how could that ever be a bad thing? After I made the soup, it turned out that I was very right, wine and cream can do no wrong. This spinach soup must be one of the tastiest soups I ever made, it is very rich but at the same time, it is extremely satisfying. It sounds weird but when I eat this soup, I feel like it satiates some primal, deep-seated hunger in me.
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This chocolate cake is very special to me. Why is it so special, you may ask? Well, chiefly because this is the very first cake I ever made. And also because it’s the first recipe I ever tried from a food blog, which coincidentally happened to be the first food blog I ever visited, which, in turn, inspired me to start Kitchen Crush. And finally, because I strongly suspect that my husband married me in order to have constant access to this cake (since it’s so totally, unbelievingly delicious in its melt-in-your-mouth, chocolaty goodness). So, you see, if it wasn’t for this grand master of all chocolate cakes, I would be a blogless old maid, with a mustache and thirteen cats, and with no chocolate cake to make me feel better. It’s the truest of all truths, if you learn to make this cake, good things will happen to you.
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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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