Rehovot

I'll look through the recipes I have, although this is something we usually go out to have... And based on my one experiment with one ballooning Knedliky That Ate My Kitchen, I usually just pick up pre-made knedliky. If I pick them up at all... (In my defense, I don't know many Czechs under 70 who make their own dumplings.) The dumplings stuffed with fruit are great, but I don't have much love for the sliced ones served with Vepro-knedlo-zelo and svickova... (They just seem spongy, to me; that's ok, it leaves more for the dumpling lovers of the world.) Cafe Louvre is usually where we go on the weekends. Their hot chocolate is out of this world. (I think it makes an appearance in Megan's blog from Prague.) It's so thick, you can stand your spoon in it.

I worked from home until 2:30 this afternoon and then had to run into town, so there was no big lunch effort. Once I got to town, I went into a branch of Rembrandt Donuts (nice marketing; I never feel guilty, coming out of there... ) and had a mozzarella, basil, and tomato pastry which was disappointing because there was no mozzarella to be found. I can vouch for their sweet pastries, though. Coming back through Wenceslas Square, I stopped in the Rokoko passageway, which leads to the Lucerna passageway and was built around 1912 (on top of 17th-century foundations). It's still got the Art Deco flavor and shine... Coffee Heaven is the Central European version of Starbucks (although there are now four Starbucks outposts in town). I had a Wild Berry Extreme, which involves yogurt, frozen berries, and milk. It's not sweet at all and (for a smoothie) is pretty good... If I stared down at a branch of a coffee shop all day, I'd get that glazed look, too... A colleague gave me some great homemade paprika, which I thought I'd use in Chicken Paprikash, so I stopped at the store and picked up chicken and sour cream for that. In the meantime, we're snacking on staroceske sunkovy salam (traditional Czech salami-style ham), rolls, and cheese. And, I promise you, salad. The long skinny rolls are beer rolls, topped with salt (and sometimes caraway seed); the other rolls are Kaiser rolls. More bread photos tomorrow... (I forgot to photograph the crumb before we started to devour the bread.) Ok, I'm off to do something with this glowing red paprika and the chicken. Dobrou chut'! Bon appetit.

Butchers' shops here have a love affair with the written word. Some shops use chalkboards; some write everything out on paper and tape it up; and some have permanent signs. Maybe this isn't unique to Prague, but, coming from North America, it threw me, the first time: meats and things at the deli counter are ordered in decagrams, not grams. Somehow, I always end up buying more, this way, since 10 deca just seems (sounds) smaller than 100 grams... Some things offered at this shop (above): frozen items, poultry, smoked meat, smoked fish, a selection of fish, dairy items, chicken meat, turkey meat, ...trout ( Wow, how did I miss that?!), carp, duck, shrimp, mussels. Gee, evidently I never took the time to actually read this, before... Bone-in ham (or ham from the bone) and ham fat...among other things. Cabajky sausages...fiery hot and an angry-looking red color. These might be Hungarian, but I'm not entirely sure. Bohemian ham in a tin that looks like the jacket for a historical novel.... Everything good, in one place...

I'm glad you're enjoying it. I love cafe culture, which is why I'm happy to be going to this Prague cafe history exhibit, tomorrow. The museum where the exhibit is showing is in the Karlin neighborhood (which was hit badly by the floods in 2002 but has since rebounded) and is about a two-minute walk from the Pivovarsky Klub, one of my favorite places, with great dark beer (and hundreds of specialty brews) and very, very hot sausages. I had big plans for cafe/bakery excursions, today, and then got swamped with work. I grabbed some rolls and ham for dinner, and am going to do some baking, later tonight. Contrary to appearances, I do like to cook...but it gets kind of crazy during the week with commuting (as you all know), so it's often easiest to eat out...

Both of those tea names looked exciting... (And if you're a darjeeling fan, the one you mentioned should be excellent.)And I'm going to try to use the word "figfop" on a regular basis.

For breakfast, I warmed up some sour-cherry and walnut bread pudding I'd made last week. After Easter, we had a ton of mazanec (Czech Easter bread that tastes like a close cousin of panettone) left over, so I cubed and toasted it in the oven, with some apricot jam...and then stirred in sour cherries, raisins soaked in rum, and walnuts, along with the usual bread-pudding basics of eggs, cream, and milk. Oh, and I added ricotta. Topped with yogurt and banana slices after coming out of the oven, it's not a half-bad breakfast. But watch out for the cherry pits! I have some work to do from home, this morning, and then I'm off to find these prize-winning bakeries: the Alchymist Cafe (in Letna) and Lemon Cafe (in Bubenec, which is on the western side of the city, past Mala Strana). Oh--about passageways: Prague is full of them, and they're great for shortcutting your way around downtown. The best part is, there are excellent quiet cafes and small pubs hiding in them. In the Lucerna pasaz, for example, where I was yesterday, there are at least two restaurants, three cafes, and one of my favorite pubs (named after Gregor Samsa ), which is also a bookstore. Across the street from the Lucerna passageway, there's the Svetozor pasaz, with the Ovocny Svetozor bakery and ice cream shop. At the first sign of spring, the line at the ice-cream window stretch all the way down the passageway. One Prague tradition is to get ice cream and go eat it in the Frantiskanska gardens, which are at the other end of the passageway. Late in the afternoon, the stained-glass window at the end of the Svetozor pasaz looks pretty amazing...and as colorful as the Ovocny Svetozor shop. There's also a to-go sushi place and one of the best Chinese restaurants in town, in the Svetozor passageway.

Here's what I ended up bringing home... Bananas, a square of green chocolate (sorry; impossible to see), Temple of Heaven tea and Yogi chai, and a bit of fresh pineapple bought on the way home from a fruit and veg stand in a passageway.

Right... I don't drink much anyway, so it was semi-plausible to me after one beer...

My husband arrived downtown from work around 5:30, and we went to go get a snack before the wine tasting. Once we got to the Paneria bakery--of which there seem to be approximately ten thousand branches in Prague alone --I realized that I had hit my snacking wall for the day. So he snacked for both of us... parek v rohliku (aka a pig in a blanket) and an apricot and strawberry pastry, the name of which I forget. We walked over to U Zavoje and discovered that 1) neither one of us had actually thought to make the reservations for the wine tasting, and 2) it was completely booked. So we walked over to Skolksa street, where there's a great tea shop with a few tables (very few; in fact, one) and had tea... We wanted Genmaicha, but they were out of it, so we had Gunpowder tea, instead. Tea cakes for sale... Teapots and cups... I usually buy tea and masala chai here, although it was very entertaining when I tried to buy chai for the first time, since the Czech word for tea is "caj" and is pronounced exactly like "chai"... Eventually, I read that masala chai is known as "yogi caj," here...and the blend at this tea shop is great. Plus, I'm a sucker for packaging...including these gift bags for tea. We were under strict instructions to pour the water from the thermos (not visible in the photo) into the cups, let it sit for three minutes, and then pour that into the tea pot and wait for thirty seconds. The first cup was great; the second, we didn't wait long enough for the water to cool, so it was bitter; and the third cup was perfect. Tea is a big deal, here... Tea for breakfast, tea with lunch, tea for kids, etc. (At work, there are at least two drawers full of tea...and another box on the microwave. It might not sound like much, but there are only about 30 people in the company.) So Prague has its share of teahouses, which are great fun and boast hundreds of varieties of tea. Tomorrow, I'm determined to hunt down two of the country's best bakeries as identified in last month's (Czech) Apetit. And there's a cake I want to bake...and I need to figure out what we're cooking for my father-in-law on the weekend, when we'll go cook at his place. Dobrou noc! Good night!

Incidentally, there's a shop in Letna called "POPCORN." I came back downtown and wanted to sit someplace and read for a while, so I went to the Lucerna pasaz (passageway) and had water and juice at the Cellarius wine shop (where I discovered they're selling armagnac plum paste in film-cannister-sized containers and am tempted to buy some). They also have one wine fridge dedicated to French cheeses. The windows in the background of the photo below belong to Cafe Lucerna, where we used to go. Cafe Lucerna looks out on the passageway (and on Czech artist David Cerny's parody statue of King Wenceslas on his horse). This is a great place to sit and watch people (and drink wine and eat cheese).

Erhartova cukrarna (the Erhart bakery/sweets shop), near the tree-lined neighborhood of Letna, in Prague 7 (about a ten-minute tram ride from the center), is really unique: the bakery was restored, this winter, to what it looked like in 1937 (in Functionalist/Modernist style, which echoes a lot of the buildings on the street where it's located), and everything about it is wholeheartedly Czech. I'd been dying to go there since it reopened, and since I'm now on vacation as of today, I did. That cylinder in the middle of the photo below (the one that looks like a barbershop pole) spins slowly, and those cake pictures sort of hypotize you right through the door... The top shelf holds decorated gingerbread cookies; the bottom, small Italian-style tartlets and cookies. Inside, there are two cases of dozens and dozens of cakes and small cookies; the cafe itself is pretty small, from what I could see, with about six tables and a host of red leather stools...so it's possible to squeeze in more pastry-loving people than you might expect, from looking at the outside. There were three smiling women in red aprons behind the counter when I went to order, and when I only ordered one pistachio cream puff, they exchanged worried looks. "Just ONE?" So I added a mignioni (a little tart with almond filling)...and espresso with milk. Honestly, I've never seen cookies or cakes like this (well, the Italian ones, anyway) anywhere else in Prague. The little cookies and cream puffs are sold by weight, and you could sit there all afternoon and pleasantly inhale a lot before it made a significant dent in your wallet. This little snack came to Kc54, or less than $3.50. If I still worked in this part of town, I would be in grave trouble. But I'll go visit often.

Thanks! I should have bought those. Next time. Funny you should ask about bakeries and patisseries... The Czech ones are coming up.

The Au Gourmand patisserie has about four branches in town; my husband and I usually go to the one in Old Town, on Dlouha. From quiches to iles flottantes, if you can find it in a Parisian patisserie, the chances are good that you can find it in one of the Au Gourmand branches. That third row of shelves contains nothing but jellies and jams. Quiches and croque-monsieurs... Since it was many hours after we'd been to Kavarna Adria--or only two hours --I had onion quiche. Tarte tatin and Black Forest Cake... That's $48 worth of lemon tart, right there. This place is on my list of cafes to visit when the weather is so awful that there's no need for a view outside. Onion quiche! Deceptively light tasting and with great pastry crust.

Espresso, cappuccino, strudel, and potato pancakes, came to Kc154, or about $9.75. (Rounded to include tip, it was 170, about $10.75.) We wanted to check out an organic-foods shop in the Palladium shopping center, so we headed down to the patro gurman--the gourmet floor. The lowest level of this shopping center has a deli, a seafood shop, a branch of the French cafe and patisserie Au Gourmand, and shops for tea, coffee, and chocolate. Here are some shots from the Biooo store. (For "bio", read "organic.") I mostly took this because I'm not sure what takuan is... Good news: you can find umeboshi here. Can you see the writing on this package? The last word is "Bugs." My friend was standing a few feet away and asked, "Oh, are those sunflower seeds?" "I don't think so," I said. I bought two tiny bars of "Green Kiss" green chocolate...which really does look green and tastes like green tea.

I met a good friend for coffee, this morning, on Jungmannovo namesti (Jungmannovo Square) at Kavarna Adria, which just reopened a couple of months ago. It's only a block from Vaclavske namesti (Wenceslas Square), but it's hidden well... We hadn't been there before and had to wandered around the lobby of Palac Adria (built in the 1920s and with a great cubist-style facade) for a while before we found the stairs leading up to the second floor and the cafe. My friend had the bramboracky (potato pancakes). (I forgot to ask her what they were topped with.) I had jablkovy zavin (apple strudel); this strudel was full of nuts and grated apples, with a buttery crust. Each cafe seems to have its own strudel recipe. This one is very different from the one at Cafe Savoy, on the other side of the river... Theirs has a lighter strudel dough and the apples are sliced. Everyone here tells me that really good strudel dough should be so thin you can read a newspaper through it. I have no hope of reproducing that at home, so I'm happy to bounce from cafe to cafe in pursuit of the best strudel. My cooking-genius work colleague makes a delicious sour cherry and poppyseed strudel. If the sun is shining on your strudel, it must be a good omen... We also had cappuccino and espresso with milk. There were other people there, really...

The bread is part of the marinated-cheese dish, so it's served with it. But in restaurants, you typically have to pay for it. In some places, you just pay for however many rolls or pretzels you eat. In my favorite restaurant here, Kogo, if you're just there having drinks and appetizers, no bread for you... But we always get it, because the bread is fantastic--what it would be like if sopapillas existed, baked, in Italy.

I was out all day...eating...in the name of research. At the moment, I'm sorting through photos from today and snacking on some chocolate-peanut spread on toast, called "Nugeta." It's not as good as Nutella...but good in an emergency, and I'm starving.

I have today off, so I slept in. Mr. R. had to fend for himself for breakfast, but here's what I had... The sherry in the background is for a Spanish almond and golden-raisin cake I'm hoping to make, later this week. I'm meeting a friend for coffee, this morning... This evening, there's a wine tasting at U Zavoje, which should be fun. The U Zavoje passageway* is right off Old Town Square, and it conceals a wine bar, restaurant, cheese shop , and cafe. *Remind me to tell you more about Prague's passageways! The sign reads, "Fast food Soups Quiche Salads Smoked salmon Cheeses Fresh sandwiches" Here's what's on the calendar... I hope I get to all these places, today. I'd better start moving.

Thanks, TongoRad, you're absolutely right. I goofed; a ten degree beer is about 4% alcohol and a twelve degree one, 5%. 13% alcohol sounded weird as I was writing it, but, then again, many weird things seem reasonable to me after one pint. Thanks, and let me know where to send the beer.

Hi, Megan! Hmm, this is a great question. I'm not sure I can answer it fully, but here goes. Probably the biggest news currently (to my view) in the Czech restaurant world is that, as of last month, the country now boasts a restaurant with a Michelin star: Allegro, in the Prague Four Seasons. Allegro's chef is Italian. Aromi, Brasserie M, and Le Terroir also received Bib Gourmand awards. The first is a neighborhood place in upscale Vinohrady (with good fish); Brasserie M is in Nove mesto (New Town) and seems to have the monopoly on reliable classic French dishes. I have fond memories of Aromi as the place where friends and I would occasionally (*very* occasionally) go for long lunches (back when I was teaching and had free time). The other big news was the arrival in early spring of Gordon Ramsay's MazePrague, in the Hilton (Old Town). Jason Atherton and Philip Carmichael head the kitchen. In general, I think the trend at upscale restaurants here is to try to incorporate more inventive European, American, Asian, and East Asian trends and styles, but I don't think anyone is channeling Ferran Adria. It's just my opinion, but the kind of experimenting and equipment involved in the cutting-edge stuff in Western Europe is considered extremely expensive by central European standards... On the other hand, Czechs now travel a lot, and they expect international trends to be mirrored in Prague--including food trends. The average pub, on the other hand, doesn't seem to be changing its menu all that much... But cookbooks from nearly every cuisine you can think of seem to sell very well, here; there are also dozens of cooking magazines (I'm hooked on the Czech edition of Bon Appetit, which has a Spanish and Thai focus, this month); and a greater variety of ingredients (and ingredients of better quality) are now available to the average home cook... That all adds up to a demand for more diverse offerings at restaurants, I think. I'll sleep on it and let you know if I come up with anything else. By the way, folks, for great photos of Prague and of Prague eats, check out Megan's posts from Prague.

It is pretty small. I can't really fit baking sheets into it; I have to wedge them in at an angle. Luckily for me, God invented baking paper. They're the cords from the lights under the cabinets. I look at them and think, "Gee, is this to code? Or am I going to get zapped (and that's 220 volts, not 110) while doing the dishes? What a way to go." It's one of a few kitchen fix-it projects...

For dinner, we (my colleague, Mr. Rehovot and his colleague, and I) went to the Tynska literary cafe. My colleague and I were starving after a 45-minute commute from work into the center... This place is difficult to find. If you miss that door in the middle, you'll just wander around Old Town Square for hours, dreaming of relatively cheap beer. Bernard dark beer, 13 degrees. (13% alcohol.) You can order beer just by ordering in degrees: "desitku" is 10 degrees (10% alcohol), "dvanactku" is 12 degrees (12% alcohol). (My husband and his friend were drinking dainty little half-pints of 10-degree Pilsner but then switched to pints of dark beer when my friend and I showed up and ordered them.) Nakladny hermelin: Czech Brie marinated in vinegar and oil, with red peppers, onions, and (occasionally) bay leaves. The Brie rounds are sliced in half horizontally and spread with some spicy chile paste. My friend pointed out that there are as many ways of preparing this as there are pubs. Served with baskets of Sumavska bread to sop up all the sauce. This is what you see after you emerge from the cafe and walk for about two minutes. You can probably gather that dinner is not that big a deal, here; the main meal is lunch. (A friend once asked me what the biggest cultural difference was between me and my husband; I told her, "Dinner," which took some explaining. In the U.S., dinner is an institution; here, lunch is the institution. We negotiated a happy compromise and do American-style dinner (that is, what I think of as dinner--meat, fresh veg/salad, grain/bread) during the week and Czech-style lunch (what my husband thinks of as lunch--meat, fresh veg/salad, grain/bread). It just took some adjusting on both of our parts. Ok, it took a lot of adjusting. It's surprising how much cultural baggage you can fit on a placemat.

Some catching up: Morning snack... Hazelnut cookies. (Underneath, it says, "Good morning!" I like a snack that greets you.) These also exist in chocolate, plain, and with dried fruits. Ground up, they make a great cheesecake base. Off to the supermarket, during lunch! I tell myself the walk is good exercise, but I mainly go to gaze lovingly at the chocolate and convince myself that I can't last until 5:00 pm without some. Right to left: horcice (mustard for grilled meats--and there's a tube of horseradish mustard tucked in the back), Kozacka mustard ("Cossack" mustard--incredibly hot), and kren (horseradish). Misa ice-cream bars. Chocolate-covered icy cream cheese. Nearly every kid (big and small) in the park seems to have one of these, in summertime. Russian ice cream, popular for as long as my husband can remember. (It's two waffle cookies/wafers with ice cream in the middle, aka an ice cream sandwich.) Magnum ice cream bars, including the Colombia cappuccino one... Chocolate-covered, plum-filled gingerbread. Afternoon snack. The more I think about it, the better it tasted. Dinner, coming right up.

Hello, I'm back from dinner... First, breakfast... Bananas + yogurt + granola + blackberry jam + honey. The granola is half rolled oats and half dried-fruit muesli, spiked with nuts, ginger, nutmeg, and ground flax seeds. If the jar of granola ever looks empty, I throw in something. In lieu of a sourdough starter, I guess I have a granola starter. That's white yogurt from Moravian Valasska (Wallachia), near the Slovakia border. We used to use white "selsky" yogurt, and I can't really tell the two kinds apart--but my husband can. That black oozing goop is really homemade blackberry jam from family in Austria... My aunt-in-law, provider of jam and all culinary advice, makes great apricot jam from the trees in her backyard in the Wachau Valley (where Bailoni apricot liqueur is made). There's definitely coffee in there. I have to leave for work by 7:45 am...not nearly enough time for waking up over a long, slow cup of coffee and the paper.

Yes, indeed. Beer tonight; wine tomorrow.Lather, rinse, repeat.