Svacina Project

It would be unthinkable to be fascinated with the foodways of your own culture, but not like the food. I genuinely love a lot of Texas-Czech foods and there aren't many that I come across normally that I would turn down. There is something elemental about sausage and sauerkraut... the tang of the cabbage and the richness of the pork. It's truly one of my favorite things to eat, if done right. Add noodles to it and it's the perfect comfort food. And have you ever bought an apricot kolach from Weikel's early in the morning fresh out of the oven? Who would not want to eat one every day for breakfast? And the list goes on to include chicken noodle soup at our extended family Christmas gathering... a rich broth with homemade noodles from Mrs. Bujnoch in Hallettsville served with chicken salad sandwiches on white bread. I have to take a styrofoam, Saran Wrap-covered plate full to eat in the car on the way back to Austin. I love cold salmon and potato salad on Christmas Eve,...

Babies like sausage by the lake - sand and all.  I love picnics. Once you get all the work out of the way, it's once of the most enjoyable ways to share a meal. We live near Lake Austin with the entrance to a neighborhood lakeside park 50 yards from our back door. It's a shady, friendly, breezy spot to spend an afternoon, watching the kids play in the lake and sitting at a picnic table having a cold beer. Because our house is so close, we can run up for supplies we forgot or carry down hot food we made on the stove. For one Sunday afternoon meal, we tested a couple of family recipes to accompany a link of sausage my Dad gave me... my great aunt Louise's green beans with a dill sauce and my grandmother Irene Orsak's cole slaw.  My Dad's deer processed by City Meat Market in Schulenburg with pork and  lots of garlic and black pepper  into the tastiest sausage we ever ate. My experience with green beans in Texas-Czech cuisine has been limited to them be...

Just got photographs from my friend Lori Najvar taken during the Texas-Czech culinary tour that my Dad and I lead on June 1st for the annual conference of the International Association of Culinary Professionals , which happened in Austin this year. It makes me feel  exhausted and satisfied thinking about the day. An enthusiastic, curious, and patient group of attendees proved that Texas-Czech culture has sex appeal, sort of. I'm still amazed 23 people had enough interest to not just go on the tour, but PAY to go on the tour. And I wonder how many more people there are like that out in the world. Almost all of the attendees were from out of state, but we had a Texas Czech, a Texas German, and a relocated Nebraska Czech, too.  My goal for the tour was to relay as much as I could about Texas-Czech foodways on the bus ride punctuated with edible examples at the best places I could find on the easiest/quickest route through Fayette and Lavaca Counties. I wanted peopl...

A dang respectable klobasnik. Last week, at my sister's beach house, I made a second attempt at kolaches and klobasniky. This time I used my grandmother's recipe, which came from her sister Bessie (Morkovsky) Kocian. It was a family affair with my sister and me and five children ages 2 to 14 all handling the dough. After much procrastinating throughout the morning and everyone asking each other if they REALLY wanted to do it, we began close to lunchtime, deciding that we needed kolaches for svacina. My oldest son (12) and my sister's oldest son (14) took a break from burying each other in the sand to mix up the dough. The 2, 3, and 6 years olds simply wanted to play with it PlayDough-style (or eat it raw... eeeuuwww.) My pastry chef significant other only came in to the kitchen to approve the quality of the risen dough and then moved back to the couch and the flat screen TV, which I took as a compliment. I'd brought leftover fillings and posipka from our first at...

Two weekends ago, I traveled to Hallettsville with my partner and toddler for the annual reunion of the Morkovskys (my maternal grandmother's maiden name) at the KC Hall. I've always loved reunions, but the reasons have changed over time. As a child, reunions were about running wild in big halls with little parental oversight. As a young adult, they were about staying connected to first cousins and still s eeing those great-aunts and uncles. Now they're about showing off your children (when you can catch them.) All my great aunts and uncles on my mom's side have passed, so I attended the reunion to visit my aunts and uncles and grandmother. She is the only member of her generation still living (out off 11). She was the baby, born in 1915, so all my cousins come to see HER. Below is a photo of her watching a home movie of her own father taken in 1946 at a Morkovsky reunion in San Antonio. Amazing. M y brother and I had a collection of home movies digitized by...

I have never made kolaches that I could call my own. I've helped other people, watched demonstrators, read a hundred recipes, and eaten countless pastries. Since my partner is a well-known pastry chef, you think I would have taken advantage of his knowledge and skill some time in the last four years of our relationship, but I hadn't... until yesterday. I'm not even sure how the topic came up, but when it did he declared that making kolaches was what he wanted to do with his Father's Day, God bless him. We approached the project from polar opposite viewpoints, but both wanted the same thing... a beautiful, delicious kolach. I brought decades of baggage as a Texas-Czech that thought she knew how it must be done (but had never done it). He brought decades of baggage as a professional pastry chef who thought he knew how it must be done (but had never done it.) I made the traditional fillings - cream cheese and apricot - but the apricot wasn't sweet enough. He mad...

Yesterday, I was at the annual Orsak reunion outside of Ganado, TX on Lake Texana... hot as blazes and we worried about alligators eating our small children, but we let them get in the water anyway. There are so many reasons to go to a family reunion that outweigh the difficulty of driving 8 hours out of 24 with a 2-year-old. For example, I hope my kids will be imprinted with the importance of keeping family ties tied. Also, going makes my Dad happy. We got to see my 91-year-old grandmother that lives north of Dallas. And I found out that another one of my relatives plays the accordion, Don Orsak, who strolled around the hall playing sweet waltzes and polkas that would make my grandmother spontaneously shuffle around in a circle dancing with herself and a smile on her face. Then there's the food... tables and bowls and mounds and boxes and roasters and tin-foil-covered cardboard trays full of it. This year there was a really good spread; mostly homemade and with lots of variet...