Something new, something old

Ta-da! Welcome to my new design! I've been fiddling with it for a couple of days, and.. isn't it nice? I'm so in love with it. Which is very ego, I know.

The biggest new thing is the recipe index, which you'll find in the sidebar. I need some input here - is it working well? And do you want different categories, or are these.. workable? I don't really know. Also, if you find any bugs or mistakes, as I'm sadly sure you will, please report them to me. And I'll agonize for a couple of hours to fix them. I can deal with html reasonably well, but I ended up banging my head against the big wall that is css. Luckily, my darling husband is a bit better at that stuff. Handy.

Ok, enough with that. A while ago, I was tagged by Farmgirl to talk about five childhood memories. Here we go:

1. Pelmeeni
My dad is Estonian, and thus I have a few culinary inheritances from there. Not much, mind you, we never did cook much Estonian, but the Pelmeeni.. Oh. I'll do a separate post about it, tomorrow. It's totally worthy.

2. Grandma's mushroom soup
When I was a kid, I wouldn't eat split pea soup. And yet, split pea soup is something we had every two or three weeks, always on Thursdays and always with pancakes afterwards. My grandma, who lived with us when I was little (and always cooked) always made me a different soup. I can remember two - tomato and mushroom. I have no idea how she made them. They were tasty, creamy.. excellent. But I don't have the recipes, and I guess I never will. I also remember watching her cook, I loved that.

3. Making stuff with my brother
My brother is eight years older than me. He's great with kids, and he was a great brother to grow up with. We had a lot of fun in the kitchen. I remember a few things - egg toddy (beat an egg with sugar for a very long time, eat with a spoon.), making chocolate balls with extra salted butter, and his signature pasta which I still make. (It's Campbell's mushroom soup from a can, just added to freshly boiled pasta, and sometimes with the addition of bacon.

4. More pepper, please
I went through a phase where I'd have tons of black pepper on everything. I mostly remember it from McDonalds, adding ten little sachets of black pepper into a tiny little paper cup of ketchup. Stir. Eat. Mm. Crunchy. (Hrm, I still do this now and then. But with less pepper, and thus, less crunch.)

5. Setting the table
And I always did it wrong. Or my way, as I thought of it, but still wrong. In Sweden, and I guess in Europe in general, people eat with their knife in the right hand, fork in left. Except I don't. At all. I could never manage that, I am much more comfortable the other way around. So I'd usually set the table the way *I* preferred it.

How this meme works. I'll tag four more people - you obviously don't have to take part if you don't feel like it.

Dagmar at A Cat in the Kitchen

Linda at At Our Table

Johanna at The Passionate Cook

Niki at Esurientes

If you are tagged, here's what you do: Remove the blog at #1 from the following list and bump every one up one place; add your blog’s name in the #5 spot; link to each of the other blogs for the desired cross-pollination effect.

1. Secrets & Lies
2. Do or Do Not
3. BeautyJoyFood
4. Farmgirl Fare
5. Anne's Food

Next: select new friends to tag and add to the pollen count.
Then create a post listing your own five food memories.