Cooktocelebrate (2024)

06/08/2024

Two Huts in Pai- rain, mountains, jungle, peace but no quiet 😀

04/08/2023

Rhapsody in Blue

31/07/2023

A lot of water

Wachirathan Waterfalls , Thailand

28/07/2023

When in Munnar, it's tea, tea, tea!

28/07/2023

When in India, cook and learn. Hot, hot, hot!

05/03/2023

Organic sourdough

Workshops coming soon in The Hague
Warsztaty w Hadze juz wkrótce

12/02/2023

It's almost St Valentine's Day and for this occasion I am making strawberry chocolate mousse and blonde chocolate and verbena mousse cakes and single portion desserts with the same flavours.

Need some desserts to celebrate, let me know!

12/02/2023

It's almost St Valentine's Day and for this occasion I am making strawberry chocolate mousse and blonde chocolate and verbena mousse cakes and single portion desserts with the same flavours.

Need some desserts to celebrate, let me know!

07/08/2022

Almost there..

One of my personal wonders

We are on holidays until 22 August.

# bestkeptsecret

02/08/2022

Golden girls
Valentyna Kryva

20/07/2022

I grew up thinking Polish cuisine was world famous. I was always told that the great “pierogi” , “canned ham” (yep, I know..) and borsch were internationally recognised Polish wonders.

It was nice to think that then and ask no questions 😃. Years later, travelling and sampling dishes from other countries, I saw some cracks in this painted picture. Needless to say, the glory of my country's food and the actual glory of say, French or Italian cuisine created sharp contrast. Even my kind husband once asked me, “How many Polish cuisine restaurants do you know abroad?”. Hmm… Indeed, there was something to investigate here.

So where does this myth come from? Growing up in communist Poland, I mostly saw pierogi and other traditional inexpensive dishes made by women in my family (no men I knew cooked then. My grandfather tried once, but it is a separate story.). And they were delicious. Exquisite even. Restaurants, if frequented, offered food that was just a bit more of the same of what I already knew. But surely, one cannot build such reputation from these few things. Hmm.. something was amiss here.

Mom came to help. In an effort to educate my ignorant (of Polish culinary glory) husband, she gave him an encyclopaedia of Polish cuisine for Christmas. It’s not a light reading. Light as in weight as the book covers 2400 traditional and modern recipes..

So what did I miss all those years? To begin with, my husband, who is French, took immediate shine to it as he discovered that roughly 40% of it comes from France :) :). Potato gratin very much like gratin dauphinoise being one notable example. Perfect mix of local produce with fantastic technique.

So I delved into the topic and discovered that the communists tried their bloody best to destroy all the truly magnificent recipes and dishes that once graced the Polish tables. I had this aha moment then and a bitter sweet wave of nostalgia for something I never even knew. How strange is this?

So what did I do? Of course I started cooking and baking 🥳

Naturally, I also found cheesecake. This is my favourite recipe.

15/07/2022

Vegan cheesecake and the laws of acceptance

I have always cooked and baked. Nothing serious, nothing fancy, but always taste-, flavour- and health-oriented. Then I had my burnout in 2018.

This unfortunate/fortunate event took a while to manifest and hit me like a heat-wave flattening everything out.

My mind was always overworked, constantly buzzing with thoughts, good thoughts, bad thoughts. It never stopped. Even at the middle of the night, it would just switch on making my mind race. On and on. For a while I felt I had no free-will.

To free myself from this constant noise, I occupied my hands. Long , long time ago, my wise Granny said to me: If you are troubled by your body, occupy your mind. If you are troubled by your mind, occupy your body.

So this is what I did. I started tasting food differently. I started cooking and baking. I kept my hands busy. This in turn stimulated my constant thirst for knowledge and understanding. So books. I bought about 300 of them and with some minor exception, I read them all. I used recipes from some of them. The books mostly served to understand and improvise afterwards.

What followed then was a period of a very , very happy eaters in my family and friends as mommy spent a good few hours a day cooking from the Michelin chefs books.. good times of intense, intense concentration and adequate ex*****on.

The negative aspect of such intensity was a quest for perfection. There was always something that could have been improved. The tastes were fine, I think. My palate is in training, but I like to think that I rather understand flavours and flavour combinations (just my immodest take on it here). But the visual aspect was a different matter. If the edges were not perfect, one too many bubbles of air visible, the cut not at the right angle..there was always a reason for self-criticism.

This picture is a perfect/imperfect example. Back then I thought it only showed how imperfect and unprofessional this cheesecake was..

Today, I remember how absolutely delicious it was- sweet, tangy, creamy and crunchy- yum. And the picture? Today it looks pretty lovely to me.

14/07/2022

My Granny's mini babas

My Granny, amongst many other things, was a master baker. She didn't have a particularly large repertoire. She mostly baked our family's birthday cakes (torty), shortbread cookies and yeast cakes (babki). I don't know why she didn't bake more often. She was probably too busy running the whole house, working, studying, helping others with languages. But this also made the cakes even more special. It was a waiting game, and it was well worth the wait.

We would only get her fragrant cookies upon arrival and with tea, birthday cakes on our birthdays naturally, and her famous yeast cakes for special family gatherings.

One of my earliest culinary memory is actually a memory of a smell. When entering my grandparents' house, a visitor was enveloped in a sweet vanilla-cookie smell and greeted by the beaming smile of the best of men, Grandfather. I know where the smell came from. To the right of the entrance stood a tall, narrow, white wooden cabinet. It was right next to the door to the kitchen. The cabinet had a tiny key that locked all the baking treasurers neatly stacked on the many shelves. All the special ingredients and already baked cookies were there. When Granny had to take something from the cabinet, there was a whiff of that vanilla-cookie cloud entering the house- the most delicious smell of all.

Needless to say, my cakes or cookies don't taste the same, but each time I bake them I go back in time.

If I concentrate and don't focus on missing my Granny, I can still smell it and get a piece of my childhood back.

Tesknie za Toba Babciu.

So here, I replicated my Granny's recipe but gave it my own twist. First, the cakes are tiny. Second, I added pecans for extra crunch.

14/07/2022

Epic summer

Summer fruit at their best with Valrhona chocolate mousses

07/07/2022

Another beautiful collaboration with

Dinner for the Belgian Embassy in the Hague.

Enremet :mango, passion fruit, white chocolate, Thai basil and caramelised grapefruit

Cooktocelebrate

06/08/2024

04/08/2023

31/07/2023

28/07/2023

28/07/2023

05/03/2023

12/02/2023

12/02/2023

07/08/2022

02/08/2022

20/07/2022

15/07/2022

14/07/2022

14/07/2022

07/07/2022

Address

Website

Alerts

Contact The Business

Shortcuts

Share