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?
Read the full article »
Thinking of things to cook and to feature on this blog is a lot of fun. It makes me think about food and about the role food plays in my life. It makes me think about what I do and do not like. Sometimes when I cannot remember why I do not like a particular food, it makes me want to try it again, in order to define the why. After all, as we say in Poland, taste changes every seven years, so I may actually end up liking something I thought I didn’t. But my favorite part about thinking about food is trying to remember the first time I had it and trying to recall what impression it made on me. With some foods this is quite difficult but then there are others, which bring back very vivid memories of the exact place, year and the company I was with. Hummus is one such food and black olive tapenade is another. In fact, when I was writing the black olive tapenade post, I wrote about how my friend Tom made beautiful little tapenade and goat cheese sandwiches. And of course, the mere fact of remembering and writing about them, made me lust after them, a feeling which hasn’t left till they were recreated and eaten. So here they are, the very delicious Black Olive and Goat Cheese Crostini.
Read the full article »
I have a huge weakness for visually stunning foods. I have a huge weakness for visually stunning anything. This, of course, is a snotty way of saying: I like pretty things. That’s right; I and some 99% of the world’s population suffer from this affliction. I don’t know about those 99% but I often (too often) base my purchases on the pretty factor. I bought my laptop because I thought it was pretty and I was convinced that its prettiness will encourage me to work on it often. If I had a car, I’d most likely go for pretty and I would ignore all other specs (is that what you call them? specs?). I am a master at finding and purchasing pretty and sometimes very impractical items (which is a big no-no in Germany, where to be practical is the highest of virtues). There is only one exception to my pretty rule: husbands… Those I like to be handsome, not pretty. But when it comes to cooking, I go back to pretty. Choosing what to cook next, involves leafing through my cookbooks and staring at luscious photographs, then looking at the recipe and evaluating the “will it be a pain in the ass to make” factor (henceforth referred to as the PITA factor). So, when I saw these zucchini rolls, I immediately thought they looked gorgeous and were composed of all the things I liked. The only problem was that, like many pretty things, they were very impractical to make. Let me rephrase, on a 1-10 PITA scale, they were a solid 7.5. But they looked so good and I’m just so unabashedly impractical.
Read the full article »
