If you’re not a Buddhist — and specifically not from the Tibetan tradition — you probably don’t know this, but Fat Thursday (the Polish pre-Lenten feast day of indulgent sweets and fried pastries) always falls about a week before the Tibetan New Year, Losar, which this year lands on February 18. We’re already slowly getting … Read more
It’s amazing how context changes everything. Take, for example, the phrase: “I got a mushroom from a friend.” Sounds very different coming from a chef than from someone into swingers parties, doesn’t it? In my case, the “friend” was my Translator Friend (from my work), and the “mushroom” was a kombucha SCOBY (not Candida). Since … Read more
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 … Read more
This soup has a bit of an Advent feel — it’s something quick, made with what’s on hand and what you know you won’t use otherwise. For example, I didn’t end up using the sweet potato for a salad. I originally bought it with soup in mind, but I also had leftover kaffir lime leaves and yuba. … Read more
Gryfny Shalad for Advent. That’s about the extent of my Silesian, which is barely better than my German. These languages are very much relevant here because *Hekele* is a Silesian Advent salad, sometimes also served on Christmas Eve. And Silesia is one of the most fascinating corners of Europe. Situated between Poland, the Czech Republic, … Read more
TVP: texture vegetable protein. Until recently, only TSP, or “textured soy protein,” was available on the market. These are all those products like dry soy cutlets (affectionately called “sawdust cutlets”), pieces, granules, steaks — large, rectangular cutlets with a fibrous texture. TSP products had their time, at least in Poland, in the 1990s, when they were pretty … Read more
Stuffed vegetables are my comfort food and a traditional folk Polish dish.Poland and Germany are countries with allotment gardens. Small plots of land, originally on the outskirts of cities and usually belonging to working-class families, were an important supplement to the diets of many households in Poland until the 1990s. INGREDIENTS:– 500 g cooked white … Read more
No, Not Sweet Nuts are somewhat underrated in our daily diet. In plant-based cooking, cashews or other seeds are often used as substitutes for yellow or white cheese. But apart from such niche recipes and desserts or cakes, nuts, or other seeds, are rarely seen on our tables. In traditional cuisine (not folk, more like … Read more
Ice cream is chilled fat with sugar and protein. If you want to make good plant-based ice cream, remember these three components. The first records of chilled, icy desserts date back 2,500 years to Persia, where they prepared desserts resembling today’s sorbets. Icy desserts appear in a Roman cookbook from the 1st century and in … Read more
Some lottery bonus of fate is that I’ve never been a fan of either sweetened carbonated drinks or those awful sweet Mars bars, Twixes, Pigs, or whatever those brown things with corn syrup and additives are called.Similarly, fast food. All those pizzas, hot dogs, burgers. Not even pizza. And I never really understood those fans, … Read more
