Have you already accepted into your heart our Lord and Savior, the Easter Bunny?**  
Well, I had to. Even though I know not everyone shares my religious sense of humor.

But the Easter Bunny is not so far removed from the Sacrifice of Christ—and that doesn't diminish Christ; quite the opposite. But more on that later, because there are truly important matters at hand. Namely: eggs.  
Smoked, plant-based eggs.

The Easter Menu is part of my project “The Ritual Year,” dedicated to food and culinary customs connected to the traditional ceremonial yearly cycle.

Designing a Christmas Eve menu has been great fun for me for years. Christmas Eve is a fasting meal, and a properly strict one, at least in the most orthodox version—meaning not only without meat and sausages but also without eggs, butter, or cream.  
Yes, my dears. If someone adds egg-based mayo to a Christmas Eve salad, it’s a sin!

Who’s tempted?

What would you say to a delicacy like this? An exclusive, high-quality, and very expensive chocolate. With a distinct moldy note. And no, it’s not about some new product using camembert mold in chocolate. It’s about the latest hype in the food world — Dubai chocolate, which, in practice, turns out to be more moldy than pistachio.

For six years, I have been living in a "monastery." Before that, I had many adventures in life, including romantic ones. And not that I'm an expert—my specialty was toxic relationships and emotions—but there’s one piece of advice I can give you, gentlemen:

Cooking and serving a good dinner for a woman is very sexy.

I know this because it's the only reason my last fiancée was with me. Which was quite exhausting after coming home from 12 hours of cooking.

From my best Valentine’s menu:

One of the most important Christmas Eve dishes of my childhood, a dish never made at any other time, was “kutia”. For some, it’s noodles with poppy seeds. In Silesia, there’s moczka, there’s siemieniotka. A sweet dish with nuts, raisins, honey, and sometimes alcohol (a good kutia needs a touch of brandy) is a legacy of pre-Christian rituals.

Kemm’s Kuchen, also known as Hamburg gingerbread, is a traditional Christmas cookie from the heart of Hamburg. Its history dates back nearly 250 years. In 1782, master baker Johann Georg Kemm baked his first brown Christmas cookies on Lange Reihe in St. George, in central Hamburg.

For the past few weeks, when the guests leave and I finish a thorough cleaning — together with, or rather first of all washing the extractor hood, something no one likes to do — I’ve been working on a collection of recipes, my interpretation of Christmas Eve cuisine, mainly Polish.