There was no kindergarten when I was growing up in Yugoslavia, and my first attempts at socializing started at the ripe age of five in preschool. While most of my classmates in senior grade were veterans, jaded and resilient, skillful at banter and repartee, as well as avoiding elbow nudges in the lunch line, I [...]
When you are a child, your family is like a fortress, protected from the outside world by this invisible wall of habits and routines. Every day, I left my house in the morning and spent several hours in school with other children who belonged to seemingly similar, but in essence very different tribes. Just because [...]
Most of my childhood memories are firmly tied to a yellow house built in the beginning of twentieth century in the Central European style. It had a double set of marble stairs flanked by a smooth stone handrail and a decorative balustrade. The two porches atop the stairs were connected with a big concrete slab [...]
There are smells wafting from the kitchen window that can steal my soul during one breath and never release it: hazelnuts toasting in the oven; onions warming up in a sautee pan, slowly surrendering their sharpness and becoming sweet; garlic clove rubbed against the craggy surface of a brushetta; rows of red peppers roasting on [...]
It’s time for another monthly Recipe Swap, the first of the year. Christianna from Burwell General Store started it more than a year ago, getting the idea from All-Day Singin’ and Dinner on the Ground, an old cookbook and hymnal she unearthed at a flea market. Every month a group of food bloggers gets the assignment [...]
Before I left for college and departed my parents’ nest for good, unaware that the flight away would be final, my family moved three times, which would make us pretty nomadic in Serbian terms. Upon graduating from Medical school, Father started working in Novi Pazar, the city that paid his tuition and reserved his services [...]
In fifth grade, we had to choose if we were going to learn English or Russian. Under Mother’s tutelage, I had already started studying German, and I knew how to count to ten in a dozen languages, thanks to a wonderful children’s weekly magazine called Politikin Zabavnik. I picked English, even though my parents’ best [...]
My hometown in Serbia is nestled snugly at the foot of the hills, protected from the harsh winds that blow from the Alps, lulled into a false sense of security. And any road you take out will lead you to more hills and more horizons interrupted by gentle green curves or sharp peaks piercing the [...]
When I was a child in Serbia, if you wanted a cookie, you would have to go to the store and buy them in a factory wrapped box. There were crispy, square butter cookies, ring-shaped and not too sweet tea cookies, hazelnut and mocha flavored wafer cookies, thin cookies shaped like leaves and clovers with [...]
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