Flavorful Louisiana Gumbo
May 152011
Dec 032010
Early Monday morning the College Kritter took off from Long Beach airport, joining a crowd of half-asleep college students dragging their turkey-stuffed bodies back to dorm rooms and bad cafeteria food. Perky, clean-shaven businessmen fell into the flying fold, hands gripping their third Starbucks of the day more protectively than their boarding passes. Her purple [...]
Nov 262010
Every single year, I make a pledge to approach the month of November prepared, ready to tackle every challenge it issues, armed with experience and predicting the ensuing chaos. But this time, again, it took me by surprise. It ambushed me. November skulked at a safe distance behind a harvest moon, hung meaninglessly from the [...]
Nov 242010
I have never been to Africa. I listened, entranced, to the stories of wonder my parents’ friends told about working on the dams in Zambia, or building the roads in Zimbabwe, tracing afterwords on the globe the meridians that led me to those exotic countries. In elementary school, I cried silent tears of angry resignation [...]
Oct 162010
In April of 2008, we decided to move to California. Losing our house to a foreclosure became a certainty after months of trying to make up for the lost income. Our Serbian friends Dragana and Milan moved to Orange County two years before us, and put a lot of effort into convincing us that relocating [...]
Oct 052010
“Every night, just before you close your eyes and drift off to sleep, rewind your day and think about it. Ask yourself questions: What did I learn? Whom did I help? In which way did I make myself a better person? Will my day have an impact, no matter how minuscule, on the world?” I [...]
Sep 192010
A few I years back, I came across a Time magazine photo gallery entitled What the World Eats, from the book Hungry Planet. Photographer, Peter Menzel, and writer, Faith D’Alusio (a husband and wife team), documented weekly food expenditures for thirty families all over the world. The photos showed each family with all the food [...]
I ate my first taco at a bowling alley in Highland, Michigan, in 1986, while accompanying my ex-husband’s sister and her friends to the meeting of their bowling league. And I did not care for it at all. I found out later that taco meat is highly seasoned with cumin and at the time I [...]
Jul 172010
When I was four years old, I got the mumps. Father was a physician, but the remedy did not come from a pharmacy. Instead of reluctantly ingesting grape-flavored syrup or being force-fed pink gel antibiotics, my neck, jaws, and cheeks were enveloped in smoked, thickly sliced ribbons of bacon, and wrapped with a bandana tied [...]
Jul 142010
When I was growing up in Serbia, nuts were seldom used in savory dishes, but mostly in pastries, cakes, tortes, or crepes. Times have changed and I can see the big-city dwellers using peanuts as a result of the Thai influence, but my town would rebel for sure. Peanut butter is an adventure when you [...]
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