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bake off bake along, week 7
hey friends. as some of you may have gathered, i’m participating in the 2+ month bake off bake along, a cooking and baking challenge where participants bake along with the BBC program, the great british bake off. i know some of you, dear readers, may not all be not digging all of the attention to baking on this here expat lifestyle blog of mine, but i assure you… i am starting to see the light at the end of the baking tunnel! this is the seventh week, which takes us into the dreaded victorian week. and hoo boy. i am not using dreaded lightly. as soon as i watched the…
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lately, september
time for coffee chat & catching up! + last weekend (above) was so beautiful and warm that something particularly summery was in order… and what is more summery than a picnic! just to throw a big middle finger to fall and be all, hey, it’s not time for you yet… back off. (alright, i know autumn is creeping on us and i do actually embrace it!) + a strange a wonderful phenomenon has occurred with the changing of the weather into autumn and getting out the cold weather coats for the first time: MONEY! there have been two recent instances within a recent one week span of pulling out a good…
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the bake off bake along, week 6
week 6 of the bake-off brings us to pastry week! we had to pick from a frangipane tart, flaounas (a cypriot cheese pastry), or a gazillion vol-au-vents (puff pastry hors d’ourves). though i really wanted to give the flaounas a go because they looked delicious, i happened to be the recent recipient of a bag of apples. it’s apple season! so i knew it was apple frangipane tart time. there is no way i could find almond paste, key ingredient of a frangipane, in czech grocery stores. they do have loads of marzipan, because central europe, but in the end, i actually made by own. first i decided to make…
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sweating to the oldies: athens
athens in july would be fine, i thought. it will be fun, i thought. alright, actually no, that’s a lie. every piece of travel information i have ever received actually says “avoid athens in high summer”. but it’s tough to pass through an exciting european capital without wanting to spend a few days there getting to know it. we took the blue star ferry from santorini to athens, which is an eight hour journey. i chose the ferry because we had flown in, and the price of flights, by the time i actually went to go buy them, had sky-rocketed. (buyearlybuyearly) but also, what’s not to like about the idea…
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at summer’s end
so, it’s time to face the cold hard facts that my whirlwind summer of wonder has come to a close. and oddly, i’m pretty okay with it. it has been the hottest and longest feeling summer of my life, and earliest as i technically count it starting when we flew to the united states in late may, for upon our arrival, it was the warmest, most delicious purple evening on fidalgo island and the marine breezes blew in and i was all, “ahhhhhhh, i’m home”. of course, after months of heatwave and knowing all too well what it feels like for sweat to drip down your back (yuk), i am…
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the bake off bake along, week 5
i almost can’t believe i’ve already baked along with the great british bake off for five weeks running. then again, one thing i’ve never been is a quitter, so…… this week is alternative ingredients week, something i rather have experience with. from time to time i’ll bake something vegan or sugar-less, preferring to use honey as my substitute. so when i saw that the first challenge was a sugarless cake, i needn’t see anything more. i knew it had to be a honey cake, and what better than a czech medovnik? i think i felt a little bit like ugne this week, choosing the most ambitious project of mine…
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this must be just like living in (czech) paradise
you know that song, by david lee roth? about a year ago, alex and i heard this song playing loudly on one of those perfect warm early june evenings at dusk and, feeling pretty high on life, we changed the words to “czech paradise”. now we sing it early and often, so it seemed only appropriate to title this post this as we have just recently returned from a relaxing end of summer hoorah in the real czech paradise or český ráj, a national reserve located smack in the center of northern czech republic, just over an hour northeast of prague.the journey took what seemed like no time at all,…
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how i travel often (on a teacher’s budget)
it’s not a secret that ESL (english as a second language) teachers in europe aren’t the wealthiest lot (although i have heard a different story about asia– that’s where you can really rake in the $$). no, for us here on the european continent, the job is a labor of love, but one that puts us very near many intriguing and interesting new places to visit. my travel list is always a mile long and it never ends. a day after returning from a trip, i am already thinking of the next destination! in my three years abroad (yep, i just hit big three! hooray!), besides getting acclimated, settled, and…
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best summer prague day (along the vltava)
as prague is still sort of a winter city to me (scowls, trams, winter coats, and the smell of svařák come to mind) i wanted to make an effort to change that and get to know its lovely summer self this month a bit better. and it has come to my attention that hangin’ by the vltava river for the day is a very good way to spend a breezy summer day. start, for example, at náplavka on a saturday morning… of the markets i’ve seen, náplavka has something reeeeal special, which explains its popularity. the best vegetables that this hot weather could produce, fresh-squeezed juices, some seeeeriously delicious looking single-origin…
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the bake off bake along, week 4
it’s dessert week! after i watched the fourth episode of the great british bake off, i was at a loss. (even more so when i saw the preview for the following week! ahhhh) the spanischer windtorte seemed like something i really ought to attempt because it comes from a country very near where i live right now… and i’m just into that kind of thing. however, we were just about to leave on a long weekend holiday away and i couldn’t bear the thought of the torte just sitting there for four days. crème brûlée it was to be. now, custard and i have a history. at a relatively early age, i became…
