Recipes

This is one of my recurring ramblings: why do we see so little shellfish in Russian restaurants outside of Russia? Oh sure, you can have seafood fettuccine, lobster bisque, snails in garlic sauce, …

Recent visits to Yugo restaurants like Kafana left me craving more grilled meat. Something slightly different from my usual Caucasian and Central Asian kebab experiments, yet not completely unrelated — after all, the …

Bryndzové halušky can be called Slovakia’s national dish without too much debate. This dish of potato spaetzle/gnocchi topped with a sheep’s milk cheese sauce and fried bacon is available in every other Slovak restaurant, …

I’ve said in the past that if you want to avoid crowds, the Monday after Thanksgiving is a good day to fish on the Salmon River. Well, here’s another quiet day to …

Spring has now sprung in earnest, but tell me, what foods can possibly mark the beginning of spring in a world where you can buy bad strawberries all year round, and even the …

There are few places where duck is as ubiquitous a culinary staple as in Central Europe, in particular Germany, Hungary, Czech Republic, and Slovakia (the other places would be France, China, and …

The last entry in my series of national dishes was Kazakhstan’s beshbarmak. This time, we’re hopping to the Baltic to try Latvian piragi. Naming a single national dish for a whole country is a …

I love baklava. The thin, nutty layers saturated with fragrant syrup take me back to a warm night in a caravanserai in Baku’s Old City, drinking herbal tea and dark Azerbaijani cognac. …

In most people’s consciousness, Eastern Europe does not evoke delicious seafood dishes. Apart from caviar or smoked fish (which most people actually eat rarely), the images that come to mind tend to be of thick brown meat …

While there are many countries where horse meat is available and consumed occasionally (sometimes unbeknownst to the consumers), Kazakhstan is one of the few places where it’s one of the major meats in …