Well, thanks to Melissa, I now have my daily dose of puppy cuteness at www.dailypuppy.com. I highly recommend you bookmark, visit and enjoy it.
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It's Casimir Pulaski Day here in Chicago, celebrating a Revolutionary War hero. Kids are out of school, local government offices are closed, but we get mail. I keep on thinking about the Sufjan Stevens song all morning. I'm glad it made the cut for the album. It's a strange Chicago holiday that I will always closely link with my time here.
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I've been quiet here lately, and I apologize. My most recent news that's kept me away from the internet is that my grandmother, Susan Holub died on February 25. She was 96 years old, and it was not all that unexpected, but of course I'm filled with regret over not seeing her more and pressing her for stories and recipes. I'm proud that I live near where she was originally born (Gary, IN) and that so much Slovak culture is preserved in Chicago through descendants of what could very well be cousins of mine from the steel mills of Indiana at the turn of the last century.
So far I've spent many hours trying to get some of her signature dishes made, which is hard b/c she wrote so little down. But, I've made her poppy seed bread and I've tried my hand at pierogis and kolache (which we've always just called "granny cookies") and I hope to get better. I'm trying to decide whether to track down Czech restaurants to visit or to try Polish ones in order to get my fix of food like what she would make. I guess probably both. Russian Tea Time downtown has some very similar cabbage rolls.
I think it's probably a good thing that both sides of my family are so tightly intertwined with food in our history, since you can always have food physically in your hands even after someone is gone and you still have a very tangible reminder of them. But, as always, you know that there is no one who can make it "just as" that person did, and even if you get close, that small fact will always be there. I hope I can always do them justice in the kitchen, in my own small way.