Jun 292010
Count Your Beans

My Father’s father and grandfather and so forth for at least five generations back were orthodox Christian priests. They all attended the Academy of Theology where they studied history, geography, Old Church Slavic language, Latin, and Greek.  In addition to achieving academic success, they had to be  able to carry a tune, sing well, and [...]

It Never Rains in Southern California, and I'm Good with That!

Somehow it seems wrong to announce the arrival of  summer to Southern California. I am still not fully acclimated to my surroundings, and I think in “seasons”. I can always pretend the sky was not cerulean blue back in March, just like it was this morning. I have to justify the presence of my brown [...]

Jun 192010
All Shook Up

Sorry to disappoint the fans, but the King will not be taking the stage in this Pre-Fathers’ Day Drama. An employee’s father went berserk today at work, throwing us all off kilter and causing some outrageous emotional responses. He walked in riled up, with his daughter in tow. Unbeknownst to them,  she was scheduled for [...]

Milan Jovanovic's Recipe for Making a Sauerkraut is Different from Mine

I am not a big sports fan. Growing up, we always watched the Olympics, especially the winter games. We spent winter breaks on ski slopes fighting the ice patches and getting the adrenalin rushes from uninterrupted downhill runs. Alpine skiing held us glued to the TV sets while our heroes accomplished what we could only [...]

Friendship - It's What's for Dinner

I first met Mishko and Natasha when I was fifteen. In our group of seven or eight friends I was the youngest, and when everybody left to conquer the frontier that was the University of Belgrade, I was still in high school. They all returned home for the holidays and summer breaks, and I ventured [...]

Spending Thyme with a Real Spice Girl

Once upon a time, in my previous life, we had a nice house with a big expanse of grass sloping down towards the lake. A wooden fence separated us from the neighbors on the right and in front. Along the ā€œLā€ shape that fences formed, I had my father, a retired Ob-Gyn, turn the dirt [...]

Don't Forget To Bring Your Hatchet

My love affair with the chicken started later in my life. In the beginning of my gustatory adventures, I did not care for some amazing things: tomatoes, potatoes, all kinds of melons, smoked meats and chicken.  But I did not have a lot of choice in expressing my reluctance to eating undesirables; our household definitely [...]

Jun 092010
Russian Connection

Reading a post on ham salad on Simply Recipes got me thinking. Elise is talking about her parents trying to be frugal and offering tasty and nutritious meals to their children, without having to rob their piggy banks. Therefore potato salad, egg salad, ham salad… In our house, just like in almost every Serbian house [...]

Jun 062010

When I was growing up in Serbia, during the 70s and 80s, eating locally grown, seasonal food was not a matter of choice. That was the only choice we had. Not that anybody spent numerous sleepless nights pondering the reasons. We bought our bread and pastries freshly baked every morning. When rye bread became available, [...]

Don't eat all your steak or you can't do this:

I started this blog with a clear idea to emphasize Serbian food. But, so far, I’ve written about squid, which nobody in my town ate before the 80s, when a restaurant called “032″ (area code for my town) opened ā€“ oh, some adventurous souls who were exposed to the seafood life might have gotten a [...]

Ā© 2010 Svetlana Watkins Suffusion theme by Sayontan Sinha