Cooking starts long before you chop the vegetables.It’s worth making that process easier, optimizing it — to make your life and cooking simpler.Simpler, not more complicated, so if any step feels unnecessary to you, just skip it. This is just a framework to help you out. 1. Start with the menuFor Easter cooking — or … Read more
Once very popular in traditional folk cooking, today these ingredients are truly underappreciated and underused. Various grains, seeds, and nuts — from sunflower seeds to hemp (with their phenomenal protein content), pumpkin seeds, and walnuts. On the one hand, they no longer play the role they once did, when even a hundred years ago, nuts and seeds … Read more
The vegetable most closely associated today with the celebration of Dziady, Samhain, Halloween — call it what you will — is the pumpkin. INGREDIENTS Filling: 300 g pumpkin purée 100 g sunflower seeds 1 tsp smoked paprika ½ tsp cumin ½ tsp ground coriander seeds 3 tbsp nutritional yeast 1 clove garlic salt Dough: … 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
Easter breakfast — or Easter in general — in Polish tradition is a grand, fatty feast that clogs the arteries and makes the liver weep. This is somewhat understandable and rooted in historical context. Easter comes after Lent, winter, and the early spring hunger gap, when, even just a hundred years ago, there wasn’t much food to eat. Today, we no … 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
Have you ever cooked a classic dish you had no idea how it was supposed to taste? Recently, I was tasked with exactly that. We were expecting a visit, postponed since the pandemic, from a high-ranking teacher. You’re not required to know what kind of teacher, so let me explain. I cook at a Tibetan … Read more
I reached for one of the cookbooks on my shelf, looking for inspiration, and after a few minutes, I stumbled upon an onion soup recipe. This reminded me of the first soup I ever made as a teenager — onion soup with chunks of bread and grated cheese. Onion soup is a typical “poor man’s” … Read more
Continuing the kitchen inventory series: Lentils, sunflower seeds, and tomatoes. Still no onions, but when you live in the forest, going to the store is a whole expedition. INGREDIENTS:– 2 bell peppers of different colors (about 150–200 g)– 100 g sunflower seeds– 50 g red lentils– 30 g olive oil (3 tablespoons)– 30 g hoisin … 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
