Cooking

Cooking with someone can teach you a lot about them. No, this is not some socio-psychological advertisement of cooking as a way to heal abused children. When you think about it, home cooking is important. If you are seeking acceptance with a new group of people, it can be an easy way to win inroads to acceptance. 

Cooking is both traditional and innovative. When I was told the first time we were supposed to cook chicken together for lunch, I was game. I was sick as a dog, with my winter cold, and tired from chatting with Veronika until the early morning hours. How hard can chicken be? We woke up pretty early and Veronika made us an omelet. She was talking with her parents about the new house. Her parents left pretty quickly and we were just finishing our breakfast together.

“No problem” I thought as she trundled off to gather the potatoes, carrots and other ingredients out of storage. I was trying to look busy and wash our dishes, but she would not allow that. My job was just to be a guest, which by the way I am not particularly good at. The chicken had been thawing overnight and was about ready. Verča was telling about school and how it was nice to have a visitor, because the last few weeks had been lonely. Finals suck for everyone, just in case anyone was wondering.

 
In Czech, students can take a final exam several semesters after they took the class. Not only that, they can take the final for the same class up to three times before they chose the grade that they want. As systems go it seems to work for them. How you could run a 50,000 person university like where I went with people taking finals so out of time and still have the prerequisite system. Someone in the Czech Ministry of Education must be a genius at sorting these things out. They are not only is a genius, but must be a mind-reader with all of the people trying to swindle the system. It just seems a bit crazy to me, but if it works.

We started making lunch and then to take a nap. Yeah right, we were planning to “rest”. Sitting there at the bar we busily chopped vegetables and mashing potatoes. Verča really does know her way around a Czech kitchen. I was just helping out with some new ideas for Czech food. Apples in Czech food; do not seem so new. We were slicing and chopping apples and carrots to stuff under the skin of the chicken. Like all Czech cooking she used lots of sweet paprika and fennel.  She showed me how to make proper Czech kaše, mashed potatoes.

After halving the chicken with scissors, she and I stuffed it with apples and carrots. We closed the dutch oven and threw it in the oven. Juppi! Now that was all done it was time to take a nap. Sleeping next to her always makes me feel better. Even in the middle of the winter cold season. We received rave reviews for cooking when her folks returned from the “new house.”

The next time our culinary powers were joined it was no longer a battle for acceptance, but a test of luck. Had we not done so well the first time, we would have been off the hook this time, I think? Veronika and I are a team, even if we were playing hurt with an injured knee. We were up to this challenge. It was not about cooking, but doing something together. Our pork steaks, řizky, came out well in their Litovel and onion marinade. I think the best part was the look on her dad’s face when he ate the purple (plum, blumý) sauce on his potatoes. Better was her mom’s face when he asked for seconds. It was clear to me that Veronika and I were a good team at more than cooking.

Litovel

Litovel is Olomouc slang for beer. When you exit Olomouc’s train station, the Sigma Hotel is across the intersection from you. Maybe the 40 foot (13m) picture of a Litovel bottle on the side of the building would mean that maybe it was larger than life. I never did well picking the most effective marketing campaigns for the masses. In Prague, almost any kind of Czech beer can be purchased somewhere in town, except Litovel. I have searched high and low, it seems there is a conspiracy against Olomouc beer in Prague. I found it once in Julius Meinl on Vaclavak.

If there is a mid-week hankering for Jihlavan or even “Cerny Brouck”, Black Beetle, they are easy to come by in a pinch. You would probably sell your soul for a crate of Litovel before you found it in Prague. There are two important things to know when courting a Czech woman, her dog and her beer. The dog might be a cat, but probably not. Her beer well, that is almost as important as her mom’s need for a new liver. Not to imply, that Czechs drink a lot, but they drink more beer than anyone else. I joke that the trams will stop for a beer truck before a pohotovost, ambulance. Civil values are important to keep in any civil society.

It is nearly impossible not to see a family with exactly two children. Not so hard to imagine, but the spooky thing is that they are almost always a boy and a girl. Czech boys have skills. The family will often decide on a single beer of the house, but it is not uncommon to see the woman carrying two different cases of beer home.

A beautiful thing is the Czech women’s utter ignorance or denial of women’s liberation. You never hear any of the picky complaints, and never ever an utterance of the phrase, “…because I am the girl!” A Czech girl on the other hand, is different. She will carry a baby in one arm, pushing the carriage filled with groceries with a crate of beer in her free fingers walking across the cobble stones in spike heels while her male companion lazily eats french fries. She probably cleans the house meticulously and has a full-time job, as the great Yakov Smirnov once said, “What a country!”

After all of that, the least you can do is try to find out which store has her favorite beer. It would be ungentlemanly if you do not point it out to her, so she knows to stop on the way home.