Ever since I started elementary school, my family spent two weeks of winter break in the mountains, where we had an adorable, miniature, and very rustic cabin. Everything we needed, we had to pack into the trunk of Father’s Fiat 1300; there were no stores and the narrow, mountain road was often buried under the [...]
When I look back in time of my childhood, I have to be in awe of Mother and Njanja for all the baking they did, almost on daily basis. I cannot remember a single day that we did not have something sweet to round up our meal and to snack on. I definitely took [...]
According to my family tree, I am a hundred percent Serbian. I am lenient and allow for a trace of Turkish, Hungarian and Austrian genetic input. But as hard as I search, I cannot find an atom of Irish anywhere in my bloodline. But we are approaching St. Patrick’s Day and the only way for [...]
We did not celebrate Valentine’s Day in Serbia when I was growing up. So my first February on the new continent, I strolled through the aisles of the grocery stores in a western suburb of Detroit, and gazed in amazement at the piles of chocolates, pink and red hearts, red roses, and enormous helium balloons. [...]
Something miraculous occurs to me every time I taste a combination of hazelnuts and chocolate. I fall into a sensory overload, remembering the days of my childhood when I felt comforted and safe, as the warm smell of roasted nuts greeted me at the kitchen door, and adventurous summers of my early teenage years when [...]
I encountered sweet potatoes at my first Thanksgiving, a few months after I moved to the U.S. I watched from the sidelines as my ex-husband, his sister and her boyfriend woke up with the first rays of sun to start the vigorous and detailed preparation for this, for me an unknown holiday. Roasted turkey and [...]
I did not taste Tiramisù when I majored in Italian and went religiously to every Italian restaurant in our capital city of Belgrade; I did not ask about it when I spent a month in Italy, traveling from Rome to Abruzzo and then back to Rome with my friend Stefania, staying with her family and [...]
I’ve heard the phrase “As American as baseball and apple pie” many times as a child, watching old black-and-white American movies and enjoying translated comics that ended up in Politikin Zabavnik, my favorite magazine that came out on Fridays. I was not familiar with baseball and as far as I was concerned, Americans were [...]
I was born in March when the only flowers bold enough to face the cruel northern winds and ice storms of seemingly interminable winter were snowdrops, dark stems and leaves fearlessly piercing the frigid surface supporting three delicate, shy white petals staring submissively at the snow-covered ground. Farmers markets displayed meager offerings, early spring produce ripened in [...]
I was in my early twenties when I first encountered the All-American Cookie. Where I came from, mothers and grandmothers turned their noses disdainfully at a cake that had less than four layers, many of my friends in grade school had hands-on experience with Swiss meringue, and cookies definitely came from a box bought at [...]
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