It’s a sweltering July afternoon and even though the back door is open wide, only the scorching dry summer heat comes into the kitchen. Mother is standing by the gas stove, flipping thinly sliced zucchini just as they turn golden brown. A tray sits on the counter, filled with a few layers of the uncooked [...]
For a few years, we have been facing some tough times. At moments, the panic would strike and I would not be able to breathe from anxiety, helpless, ambushed by an existential crisis that completely blocked my view. I felt like a rabbit caught suddenly and without a warning in bright headlights, unable to move, [...]
Once a month I play Bunco with a very diverse group of women. In my previous life across the ocean, I enjoyed playing cards and board games with my friends and I am still very passionate about sharing a few leisurely hours in a relaxed and lets-pretend-to-be-competitive atmosphere. First time around I was a complete [...]
We did not have Super Bowl in Serbia and the phenomenon of preparing special foods for that day was a novel one. But eager to socialize with people who loved to cook and eat, I frequently joined my friends with excitement, even though I still did not understand the rules of American football and have [...]
This month I am a part of a team that promotes a cookbook written by one of our own, Faith Gorsky of An Edible Mosaic. Middle-Eastern food is like a trip home to me, and I felt a connection to Faith as she wrote about her culinary experiences after she married a Syrian man and [...]
This month’s Recipe Swap, started by Christianna Rheinhard of Burwell General Store, features a Russian Salad, a side dish very close to my homesick Serbian heart. When I was growing up, you did not dare invite people over for a dinner or a celebration in the Fall or Winter without offering an immense bowl filled [...]
My sister has a hyper-sensitive nose. She makes a face when she spies a wedge of pecorino Romano and she can identify the tiniest amounts of any goat product, no matter how fresh and pristine. “It smells like a musk ox!”, she would yell and that became our war cry, a kind of a goat [...]
When I was four months old, our family friend and one of the towns best pediatricians, Dr. Herzog, asked Mother if she had fed me meat yet. As I was her first, we used each other as guinea pigs and she struggled to find the proper balance of foods that would satisfy my voracious appetite [...]
Mother firmly believed that each member of the family should contribute to the household chores. While she attacked the majority of the monotonous, routine, everyday tasks by herself, she assigned cameo roles to all of us. Father was in charge of lugging home huge sacks of flour and sugar, cartons of oil, and flats of [...]
As a child I quieted my nomadic spirit by immersing myself in books and traveling vicariously through various lands and various times. I could not accept the static of my life and hoped that some genius would invent a time machine and liberate me from the shackles of my existence. I was a sensitive child, [...]
| © 2010 Svetlana Watkins | Suffusion theme by Sayontan Sinha |
follow:
Recent Comments