Celebratory Cheese
Nakládaný hermelín (marinated cheese) is the best thing on earth. The end. And it’s otherworldly with beer and brown bread. This I know. Yes, I also know that fresh is always better. But my spice cabinet begs to differ. And at 4:00 pm on a Sunday, it wins. Here’s how you make Nakládaný hermelín. Ingredients A few rounds of Camembert sliced garlic (2-3 cloves per cheese round) rosemary thyme

Launch Day
The Ghost in the Pantry is now up on DailyLit.com! To start receiving installments of the cookbook, just sign up here, and you’ll get a dose of Czech and American cooking in your inbox each day. Next up on here, I’m looking forward to doing one of my favorites, nakládaný hermelín cheese, which isn’t in the cookbook because few people make it at home. However, hermelín

Twenty-one
It’s too bad you can’t hold culinary seances. I don’t need any Blithe Spirit hijinks, but “Really? Ten eggs? No butter?” would do, for starters. A direct line to my great-grandmother’s baking spirit might settle what size eggs are critical for this recipe, and why it doesn’t require any butter or oil. On the other hand, since my great-grandmother was known not necessarily for precise measurements but for using every

Twenty
This is a tiny digression from family recipes, but it’s too good to pass up! Between a toy store and the cheerful Řehoř Samsa cafe in Prague’s Lucerna passageway lies a forbidding closet of a bar. With its cramped depths and (appropriately) volcanic-red lighting, Bar Ignis is hardly welcoming, unless you’re down on your luck–but it does have the most entertaining menu board I’ve ever seen. Clearly, there’s a frustrated novelist or poet with a warped sense of humor buried back there, somewhere…

Nineteen
This is one of the easiest (and most comforting, I think) fall dishes to cobble together when it’s pouring. (You probably know how to make it already!) No doubt you have apples and onions on hand, and there’s probably a pork chop or two stashed in the freezer. While the pork chops thaw, you can go back to your blanket, cup of tea, and the stack of books next to your bed. If you need to stall even more–and autumn is, in some ways, all about drawing things out–you can marinate the pork in olive oil, lemon juice, mustard, and a bit of vinegar. In the cookbook (coming soon from DailyLit!), I note that this is one