Sour beef

When I was growing up, my parents would sometimes make traditional Czech foods. One of them that I enjoyed was sour beef and dumplings. We only ate it a couple of times per year because it's pretty time-intensive to make.

My dad came to visit last weekend and brought me a couple of servings that he'd frozen. (He makes it a lot more often now that he's retired again.) I was more than a little concerned that it might be the kind of food that you had to eat while growing up in order to stomach, let alone love, but Steph liked it a lot. I didn't take a picture because, well, it's not the most attractive-looking dinner.

I don't have my dad's recipe yet, but I Googled the phrase last night and found a few, none of which look like they're the one our family uses. I also found information about some restaurants in Baltimore that serve it. The Czech word for dumplings is spelled knedlicky; it's pronounced KLED-neek in my family. Most people seem to make small individual dumplings, whereas we make large ones and then slice them.

My Czech vocabulary is very small, and I have difficulty locating the correct spellings of the few words I do know because they aren't phonetic. A number of years ago my cousins and I compared the Czech words we knew from our dads, and we discovered we knew different ones. They know the word for mashed potatoes, for example, while I know the words for facial hair, pacifier, and tail (as in "dog following you around," not "appendage on the back of animals."

Cucumber salad recipe

When my mom gave me her cucumber salad recipe, I didn't have any paper at hand, so it's scrawled on the back of a fast-food napkin. I thought I'd blog it because that way the dog can't chew it up.

Cucumber Salad

cucumber, peeled and sliced
2 Tbsp. vinegar
2 tsp. sugar
4 Tbsp. water
Pepper to taste

Combine wet ingredients. Add cucumber. Adjust proportions to taste.

Chicken soup

I'm not feeling well, so I thought I'd have some chicken soup for lunch. Campbell's Chunky Chicken with White and Wild Rice doesn't hold a candle to my dad's chicken rice soup. Unfortunately, I don't know how to make my dad's soup, and we don't have any in the freezer. I'll have to get his recipe -- he's told me several times how he makes it, but I haven't written it down.

Soup from a can always seems to have a certain taste (maybe it's the preservatives?), with the exception of Campbell's Italian Wedding soup. Homemade soup just tastes better.

Sauerkraut recipe

My dad's sauerkraut recipe, slightly edited. It was handed down to him from my grandmother. We're the only family I know who eats sauerkraut with the turkey dinner at Thanksgiving and Christmas.

Sauerkraut copy 11/11/91

About 1# fresh pork, cut in small pieces
2 cups water
1/2 cup vinegar
Salt and sugar (a little pepper)

Boil pork and mix about 1 3/4 hrs.

1 onion
1 32-oz jar sauerkraut (Vlasic Polish sauerkraut with caraway seeds -- Polish is very important)
1 scant tablespoon caraway seeds (if sauerkraut doesn’t have them)
2 oz margarine
2 tablespoons flour

Add sauerkraut (Vlasic Polish with caraway seeds), caraway seed (1 scant tablespoon). Saute 1 onion in 2 oz margarine. Add 2 tablespoons flour and mix (don’t brown); then add to meat and kraut and let boil about 1/2 hour.

Cookies

I just found out that Crisco has introduced a shortening without trans fat. I can make my M&M cookies again!

However, it's odd that the nutrition label pictured says that the shortening is not a significant source of calories from fat.

Over the weekend, I looked at the nutrition poster at Wendy's and found out that their fries have no trans fat, either. (I had a side salad instead of fries on Saturday, but now I'll know where I should get fries in the future.) The nutrition section of their site says that fries have half a gram of trans fat per serving, though. I'm not sure which information to believe.