Slovenian Recipes

Lately I've been craving Paris. The symptoms are the usual: I miss walking the Seine and Boulevard Saint Michel , entering the bookshops and buying cookbooks eventually. I badly miss my favourite bistrots and the street vendors. I even miss the parisians! I daydream of crispy croissants , pain au raisins et café au lait , hot chocolate and... macarons . The perfect way to get me to Paris without leaving home is to bring Paris to me, all packed and arranged in a colourful and full flavoured macaron! Macarons were on my list for quite a while. For some reason, I felt a bit scared every time I'd come across Helen's recipes - bookmarked since always from Tartelette - so I never got to try them. The 2009 October Daring Bakers’ challenge was brought to us by Ami S . She chose macarons from Claudia Fleming’s The Last Course: The Desserts of Gramercy Tavern as the challenge recipe. What a wonderful choice! Because I feared disaster (and after reading other fellow Daring Bakers ex...

When all else fails, I cook. Some people go out after a god-awful day and slam a tennis ball around or jog their joints to pieces on a fitness course. I had a friend in Coral Gables who would escape to the beach with her folding chair and burn off her stress with sun and a slightly pornographic romance she wouldn't have been caught dead reading in her professional world—she was a district court judge. Many of the cops I know wash away their miseries with beer at the FOP lounge. I've never been particularly athletic, and there wasn't a decent beach within reasonable driving distance. Getting drunk never solved anything. Cooking was an indulgence I didn't have time for most days, and though Italian cuisine isn't my only love, it has always been what I do best. Even if I identify completely with the idea, these aren't my words. In fact they belong to a literature character, not a real person - although I suspect Patricia Cornwell lends a bit of her soul when she gi...

The sea. Always the sea. If you look at Portugal's history it's always about the beauty of our surrounding coasts, and all the dreams of faraway lands that come with it. The exhibition “ Encompassing the Globe: Portugal and the World in the 16th and 17th Centuries ” is about that too. Or as Holland Cotter put it in the NY Times : A version of the Internet was invented in Portugal 500 years ago by a bunch of sailors with names like Pedro, Vasco and Bartolomeu. The technology was crude. Links were unstable. Response time was glacial. (A message sent on their network might take a year to land.) kinda of faster today. Portuguese people have historically been influenced by so many cultures that is not surprising our food shows a large variety of flavours, with exotic spices from India or Brazil playing their role, and of course fish being a staple. Although bacalhau (cod fish) and sardines are the most popular choices from the sea, stuffed squid accompanied by boiled potatoes are...

Perhaps it was my recent trip to New York that made me grab Jed Rubenfeld's book The interpretation of murder again. The story is based on real facts and takes place across Manhattan in the beginning of the 20th century during Sigmund Freud’s only visit to America with his protégé Carl Yung. The famous analyst is asked to help with a patient to solve a mysterious crime. The Interpretation of Murder leads readers through New York high society, as well a few dark places and some homey ones. At some point, Rose - Brill's wife (Freud's translator in America) - serves an Waldorf salad to her guests without great success... This salad first appearance was at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in 1893 and became an american classic, with more versions than chefs. According to some, this apple celery salad with grapes and nuts was created by the well-known French chef Auguste Escoffier as a gift to Oscar Tschirky , the hotel's chef and his good friend. Waldorf Salad Lightly adapted f...