Svacina Project

On a recent trip to my local farmers’ market, the words “Czech sausage” jumped out at me from Richardson Farms’ chalkboard sign in front of their booth. Richardson Farms is near Rockdale, but they sell their meats, poultry, and grains at several farmers markets around the state and at a few brick and mortar markets in Austin. Richardson Farms’ makes fresh pork sausage, which means it’s not cured. Though fresh sausage can be stuffed into a casing or loose, I think of fresh Czech sausage as specifically loose, and then cooked by pan frying it. What makes the sausage “Czech” according the always-super-nice guys working the Richardson Farm’s booth?... garlic. Lots of it. I bought a pound, so excited to find the flavors of Czech Texas creeping across party lines, but staying authentic to it’s origins. My younger son at Austin's Sunset Valley Farmers Market run by the Sustainable Food Center. This find coincided with reading some pages in Robert Skrabanek’s book We’re Czechs in

Photo by Lori Najvar. The last week in July, I launched a home baking business called Old School Kolaches,  offering pans of made from scratch kolaches, delivered to customers' doors. I got laid off in April and in reaction to scrolling endlessly through disheartening job boards at 50 years old, I decided I'd try doing something I'm good at and passionate about that might also pay some of my bills (work and love don't always go together unfortunately.) It remains to be seen whether this can be instead of or in additional to a standard 9 to 5 job for me. Austin, though it's the state capitol, is a wasteland when it comes to traditional kolaches. The one place I went to here that had decent kolaches closed down only weeks ago. There are instead two kolache bakery  chains , countless donut shops that offer hotdogs wrapped in croissants or tasteless dough and call them kolaches, or one hipster beer and kolaches place that "elevates the classic Central Texas C