Sunny Side Up

Sometimes it's easy to overlook the basics when it comes to food. Especially week day mornings, when you don't want to even pretend to think while you're hustling children into clothes, making breakfast, getting everyone out the door on time.

Weekends though, I like to experiment when I cook. So when The Wednesday Chef posted a recipe for the perfect fried egg, I decided to try Wednesday's sunny side ups for breakfast Saturday.

And they were good.

A cinch to cook.

Tasty even for the four year old who likes all food just so.

Here's how:

1. Melt a lump of butter in a pan over low heat.
2. Crack your eggs into little bowls and then slide them into the pan. You can also crack them directly into the pan, but then your yolk will get bubbles in it. This might not bother you, but if you have a perfectionist in the family, or a four year old, go for the little bowls.
3. Cover your pan with a lid.
4. Leave the heat on low, and let your eggs cook for 3 to 3.5 minutes, depending on how runny you like your yolk.
5. Slide your eggs from pan to plate and enjoy!

Thanks to popular demand, I made them on Sunday too. Caroline modeled them for me this morning, along with her toast and tea.

Working on our cookie technique

I found spring-themed cookie cutters in our local dm Monday, and they made their way home with me along with the usual tonnage of goods required to run a baby. Caroline ran in the door shortly afterwards. Faster than you can say Strč prst skrz krk she had her homework done, a few paintings hung up to dry and the cookie cutters washed. At 5:30 she pointed out that she had even spoken civilly to the baby several times without being reminded. With such overwhelming evidence of goodness in front of me, I agreed to quit work for the day and we made cookies from a mix I found hidden in the back of a cabinet.

Sugar cookies need to cool before they are decorated, so it wasn't until yesterday that we decorated them. We as in C, our babysitter, and myself. Or more truthfully, I whisked together the icing, set out sprinkles galore, ate a cookie to taste test the icing and ran to a meeting, leaving C pouring sparkles with abandon while Marie carefully starred a butterfly. We all liked the green lamb with its rather evil pink eyes. Its dialogue with the red rabbit (sitting in a field of green just to lambie's left) was quite remarkable for a spring lamb.

The cookies have disappeared by now due to their proximity to the main cook in the house and his sweet tooth, but this weekend I've promised C to pull out our baking cookbook and make another batch from scratch. She wants to make enough this time for all her class AND Dada too.

Strč prst skrz krk = a Czech tongue twister famous for its lack of vowels. We're working on our Czech pronunciation here at Kolokolo as C will go to Czech first grade next year and a tongue twister is a fun way to wrap up a practice session. This one means "stick your finger through your throat".

Spring arrives at kolo kolo

This weekend we made jam. Strawberries, mixed with sugar and lemon and stirred into a bubbly froth of jam. Strawberries, lifted from their paintbox of color in the windows of our greengrocer, a red so red the purple pink radish in the next box vibrated ever so slightly out of key.

I started the jam first thing Saturday morning, before coffee and after tea, after peanut butter toast but before Caroline woke up. I can’t make pancakes in the morning without burning them, but pouring a kilo of sugar into a pan, squeezing 2 lemons and mashing a pound of berries I can do. While I stirred (over low heat until all the sugar is absorbed, and then over high), Will washed our empty jam jars from last summer’s grocery spree in France and made more toast to test out the first sampling.

"Jam is ready when a spoonful of liquid gels when dropped onto a cool plate," the recipe said.

The next drop met bread. The first jar disappeared in two days.

Our babysitters don’t quite trust my cooking, and this morning Teta waved off an offer of a taste with a reminder that she was on a diet. "13 days and 5 kilos so far!" she said. She’s eating rohlik and grilled chicken, and as much iceberg lettuce as she wants. On occasion she'll drink coffee too.

But she made Caroline toast for breakfast and conceded to use the jam. It wasn’t peanut butter, after all, and we didn’t have anything else in the pantry. (Our sitters feel that peanut butter should only be consumed by Americans over the age of consent). Caroline ate all her toast and asked for more, and then Teta asked me, was it was possible I had made this jam, it had such a nice smell and what was the recipe? Teta, here’s the recipe for you - it goes well with rohliky too.

Photos of fall

A few weeks ago, Nerd's Eye View sent me to a super recipe for plum dumplings over at Mausi. When my plum supply was replenished (it is the year of the plum, I'm told) we ate many many many until C was sick of the sight of them. When I came home from work one day, I found a plum dumpling surprise awaiting us, thanks to a long nap and a very kind babysitter! C had no problem eating these. We rolled them in breadcrumbs and powdered sugar and they were very good. But I still want to try the German recipe for comparison.

Our courtyard - the new Vermont for seasonal foilage tours?

Plum days

Seven years after moving to Prague, I’m wearing my first pair of Czech bought jeans today. Okay, so they were about double the price I would have spent in the U.S. for a pair of jeans. And one day post purchase, the decorative rivets have started to decorate our floors. But these jeans did come from a shop a mere block from our flat, were hemmed to just the right length and as a finishing touch, came with a beaded key chain, courtesy of the shop owner’s sister.

Most importantly, however, these jeans fit. They fit! After twelve weeks of counting the numbers in the food I eat, I have counted myself down to the size I was before I moved to Prague. This is mostly a good thing, but it means that I no longer fit into any of the clothes that hang in my closet, and I shuffle around walking like a rumpled penguin. Having to hitch up my trousers every five minutes almost made me revert back to eating cookies in the afternoon. Thus, the rivetless jeans.

The hardest part about all of this counting wasn’t telling myself I didn’t want to eat something but telling other people. You try explaining to your daughter’s grandmotherly baby sitter that, no you still think several slices of homemade gingerbread aren’t on the menu for you today, even if you stand up to eat them.

I seem to have finally persuaded her. Today, to celebrate the new pair of jeans, our sitter arrived carrying a giant paper bucket from KFC.

It was full of plums. Does anyone know a good recipe for plum jam? Or maybe a compote recipe would do. We've got about a hundred and fifty here ready to cook, at last count.

The grapes of August

This season’s grapes have arrived, and the boxes outside the fruit and veggie stores all along our street are dripping with them. Walking home from work on Friday I saw the green and thought "the fox and the grapes", and imagined an illustration for Caroline’s room, and then my stomach rumbled and I abandoned foxes and remembered a chicken recipe my grandmother used to make. Epicurious came through as it usually does and miraculously so did our grocery store.

It was a delicious early fall dinner, just perfect for celebrating the grapes, looking forward to the new wine that is nearly ready to pour and enjoying a delicious Ryzlink from a few years ago.

Chicken and Grapes
2 tablespoons unsalted butter
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 whole chicken breast, halved and pounded flat
1 shallot, minced
1 garlic clove, minced
2 teaspoons all-purpose flour (mouka hladka)
1/3 cup Riesling/Ryzlink
1/2 cup chicken broth
2 teaspoons fresh lemon juice (juice from 1 lemon)
1/8 teaspoon dried thyme, crumbled
1/4 pound green grapes, halved crosswise and seeded (about 3/4 cups)

For the instructions, check out the recipe at epicurious.

Recipes for my brother (Easy linguini)

Remember those college days when a dorm meal of ramen noodles, cottage cheese and salsa represented the height of your creative cooking? Then you graduated to an apartment and started making pasta in earnest, with real noodles, and sauce in a jar, maybe some slightly plasticky parmesan to sprinkle over everything.

I remember. I ate that meal at least three times a week for several years, interspersed with music recital food (honestly gained by attending the recitals) and dinner at fancy Nashville restaurants (courtesy of my dating circuit). I can’t stand spaghetti noodles any more, but we still eat pasta, and I keep finding new sauce recipes that are so tasty they must be tried again.

Here’s one from last night, modified from an epicurious recipe to match what I could find on the walk home from work yesterday. Modified also for my brother, who has just embarked on apartment living. Happy cooking Bro!

Linguini (it is so much tastier than spaghetti after all)
Red onions, chopped into bits (3), garlic works too (6 cloves)
Olive oil
Pancetta or English bacon or regular bacon (as you wish, but at least 4 slices)
Red pepper flakes (two good shakes)
Sun dried tomatoes in oil, cut into bits. (1/2 cup)
Cherry tomatoes halved or larger vine tomatoes, chopped (2 cups of cherry or 3 tomatoes)
Parmesan or Romano or Pecorino, grated (2 cups)
Salt to taste

Follow instructions on packet for linguini. Test when near done to keep that al dente taste. Don’t bother throwing pasta on the wall to test it, your teeth are much smarter than the wall. When done, pour into collander to drain water, then return drained pasta to pot.

Mix oil from sun dried tomatoes with olive oil, enough to cover the bottom of the frying pan. Heat on medium until hot, but not smoking. If it smokes, carefully throw oil away and start again. Add onion bits. Cook for longer than you think, until they are soft and nearly translucent. Add pancetta or bacon, saute (stir but not incessantly) for 4 minutes or until starting to crisp.
Add tomatoes of both sorts, saute for 4 minutes.

Pour frying pan contents into drained linguini. Stir together. Add most of cheese to pot, stir to coat the linguini. Salt to taste. Serve, then sprinkle the rest of the cheese on top. Consider adding basil if you’ve got it growing on your patio.

If you don’t have the red pepper flakes or dried tomatoes, no worries, it works anyway.

Tools for the distracted chef

Peeling ginger for dinner yesterday, I thought of the catchy names TV cooks use to describe themselves - the iron chef, the vegan chef, the naked chef. If I had a cooking show, what would my modifier moniker be? Moderate, messy, mayhem-causing....hmm. I stopped peeling and held the ginger to my nose like a spicy garni, knife set aside and forgotten, while I tried to untie my homemade mental knot.

Then it came to me. Distracted! I’d be the distracted chef!

I like to believe I come by this condition naturally. My paternal grandmother, after all, is famous in the family for reading novels while she cooked for her four children and husband, remarkably only burning the rice a few times. I used to read too, until that grim day when my favorite copy of Ali and Nino almost caught fire when I leaned too close to a burner while stirring and reading (and sniffing, I’d hit a sad part).

Just because I’ve banned books in the kitchen doesn’t mean I actually focus there now. In the middle of slicing veggies for dinner I’ll pop into the living room to build a tower with Caroline, when I double check a recipe on the computer I can never resist peeking into my email, or as happened yesterday, I‘ll stop and ponder a thought and get, yes, distracted. Recipe time estimates - "30 minutes tops!" "45 not including baking time" - never seem to apply to the recipes in our collection, at least when I’m at the counter.

To keep from having to call myself the "truly awful cook," or "the burnt and tasteless meals chef," I’ve come up with some strategies for manouevering somewhat successfully through dinner each night. For all you distracted chefs out there, here they are...

Gather before go: Before I start cooking I’ll arrange all the ingredients on the counter, mixing sauces and catching chopped garlic and ginger in small bowls, balancing larger ingredients on Caroline’s rainbow of plastic plates. It takes a while to get it all ready, but once everything is set out, running through a recipe is infinitely easier and I’m not so likely to forget an ingredient.

Automate: Because I’ve continued our family‘s tradition of eating rice nearly once a day, I love the rice cooker we bought last year at one of the local Vietnamese markets. Pour in the rice, click the button and it’s onto the next chore. Even Will, our counter space hoarder, is a cooker convert, and I always know that even if I let the pork saute too long, or forget a crucial ingredient in a casserole, at least the rice will be fluffy, hot and ready to eat come supper time.

Post in plain view and time everything: My current favorite tool is the stainless steel splashback I recently propped up behind the stove. Besides giving us something rewardingly shiny to polish once a week, the splashback keeps a timer in reach and recipes at eye level while cooking. So many of our recipes come from epicurious these days, I just print out what we’re cooking, make notes, and post each page on the splashback with the magnets we bought with the timer. The timer I set at each recipe step, so that it can count down to "earth to Julia, come back and cook!" And I do, really I do.

Filed under: cooking

Find a turkey, track down that yam: Thanksgiving in Prague

Turkey, sweet potatoes, pumpkin pie, cranberry sauce, and American football. Thanksgiving staples in the U.S., exotic imports in Prague.

Celebrating Thanksgiving abroad, you don't just hop in the car and make a grocery run round about Wednesday night. My friends who spend the holiday in France every year import their own sweet potatoes and hope they don’t go bad in transit. They’ve developed a relationship with a butcher in Versailles who helps them to a turkey, only grumbling a bit about the odd pagan American holiday that requires the roasting of a sacrificial bird, complete. Here in Prague I draw up my list and start to track down the sturdier goods in late October.

For pumpkin this year, we drove out to the countryside and picked our own at the Czech Camphill; you can find pumpkin at Makro too (a European Sam’s Club) and at certain health food stores and green grocers around town. Turkey I ordered from our favorite British butcher, but friends of ours swear by a poultry factory out in the countryside that raises turkeys to sell by the part. They’re happy to sell a whole one too, maybe even prefer it because it saves them time.

After years of having to resort to overpriced jellied cranberry sauce from Tesco, available only in the winter and tasting of aluminum can, you can now walk into almost any Czech hypermart or local grocery store and find dried cranberries - brusinky in Czech - to use to make your own sauce. And for ready-made sauce, the selection is even better. For fun this year, our friend Marjorie, the star cook and host of this Thursday’s Thanksgiving, is setting out a sampler buffet of cranberry sauces, from Ocean Spray to Marks and Spencer’s best.

Sweet potatoes (pataty) are hardest to find. On our first reconnoiter, we checked out one of the giant Vietnamese markets on the border of town. I bought spring rolls, lemon grass, Vietnamese mint, rice and a very pungent fish sauce for almost nothing; unfortunately the Vietnamese yams we found were purple on the inside and more starch than sugar, no good for Thanksgiving sweet potatoes. Next we hiked to Fruit de France, a luxury vegetable and foreign food importer. The prices were so high we decided to save their stock as a last resort, and were rescued from having to spend five euros a kilo by Marjorie who called every Makro in town, tracked sweet potatoes down to one store in Pruhonice, and then bought five kilos for the same five euro we would have spent on one, because bulk is how Makro sells pataty, and Prague cellars (previously used for coal) make the perfect cold storage space.

You might justly remark that all this effort seems hardly worth it for groceries that are comfort food basics in the U.S. Red currents taste great with the local duck, make some apple strudel instead! But celebrating a national holiday abroad is different from living it in its native space. You don't want to rebel against your holiday's traditions because it doesn't exist here. There are no specials of the same old stuff in the grocery store, no time off and long weekend, no thousands of travelers disembarking all at once to reassemble their family circles. Thanksgiving is something we create from scratch, digging into our memories for the most basic elements we can find to build a day and a celebration around - turkey, sweet potatoes, pumpkin pie, cranberry sauce.

And I’ll bring a football for afterwards, to toss back and forth down the hall with its high ceiling standing in for sky.

If anybody wants more specific directions on where to pick up stuff, just email me at juliaprague at yahoo dot com.

Filed under: Prague holidays provisions

Turkey time: the bird arrived early this year

Since we’re going to be hosting Christmas in a month, Will and I decided to start laying in provisions, and practicing a few of the bigger meals. Last week I ordered a turkey from our local butcher, and Saturday afternoon we got down to the business of cooking it. Besides the usual grossness of having to handle a very large carcass, and the less usual - sawing its very long neck off, plucking out forgotten feathers, and tying its legs into compromising positions to fit our European-sized oven - the process turned out to be easier than we thought it would be, and the turkey tastier. I give most of the credit to the turkey (who was alive on Thursday and never frozen) and to the butter that we massaged under its skin, and then basted with at each hour.

Here's the turkey recipe, in case anyone is wondering. A nice and easy way to cook a bird, but we can't recommend the gravy.

Filed under: holidays turkey cooking