I don’t have much time to write out these recipes for you today, what with planning for my occasional restaurant, Jack, taking up all of my non-lawyering time right now. We are busy making sure we have all the plates we need, picking up linens, and working out some menus for months down the line. […]

First things first. I would really appreciate it if you would go vote for me in Culinate’s Death By Chocolate contest. Also, I heard today is crepe day, so we made a Hungarian crepe cake! My grandmother says that she used to make this with a different filling in each layer – jam, ground walnuts, […]

My grandmother has congestive heart failure, which means that she is restricted to a low-salt diet. When she gets sick in the winter this goes straight out the window, because she tends to order in salty soup from the local take-out Chinese food place on the corner. I try to stave this off by delivering […]

When I think of cucumber salad, I think of all the love and sheer stubborn energy that only your grandmother can bring to the table. My grandmother, my Ima, makes very classic Hungarian cucumber salad, with vinegar and (again, you guessed it) paprika. Alanna of A Veggie Venture learned to make cucumber salad with sour […]

I hate shelling chestnuts. I always end up with sharp bits of shell poking the tender flesh beneath my fingernails until it hurts and bleeds. This is unappetizing, but true. I love eating chestnuts, though. I was raised on chestnut puree as a snack food of choice, after all. So when I came across this […]

Now that I have my new camera, I figure I should post older recipes that have been sitting in my drafts folder with photos taken with the old camera, just to get them out of the way. This is one of the first meals I made after returning from Hungary this past summer. Pancakes were […]

Ivonne from Cream Puffs in Venice and Orchidea from Viaggi & Sapori are hosting a one-time event called Dishes of Comfort. They ask us to write about something we consider comfort food, one of the special dishes that meant a lot to us when we were young. My grandmother has a fairly limited culinary repertoire. […]

These are the rest of my photos from Hungary. They were taken in Tarpa, the town where my grandmother grew up. Above is Josh Sucher, holding out some grapes for me to try. We were in the grapery at the top of the hill, as my grandmother called it, belonging to her friend Szaz Karcsa […]

While I am still on my Hungarian cooking kick, I offer you two desserts: one traditional, the other, not so much. This my entry for Sugar High Friday 23: Surprise Inside, which is run this month by Alanna of A Veggie Venture. Finding cabbage inside a dessert strudel is not surprising to Hungarians or their […]

I was so excited when I saw cabbage-stuffed peppers on a menu in Hungary. How wonderful, I thought. But when I ordered them, they turned out to be pickled. I’m sure that is delightful to some of you, but personally, I do not like pickled anything. (Oh, all right, Japanese pickled ginger. And mango slices […]

I flew into Budapest, then traveled with Dave to Pécs, Szeged, and Debrecen. In Debrecen, we met up with my grandmother and mother, who drove us up to the pair of small villages near the Ukrainian border where my grandmother grew up. She was born in Tarpa, and when she returned from Auschwitz and got […]

For The Spice is Right #2: Sweet or Savory?, we were supposed to choose a spice used primarily in sweet or in savory applications in our native culture, and then turn it around and use it in the other. My mother’s side of the family is Hungarian, and so my life has been saturated with […]