Kolache

(Clockwise from top right: Savoury kolache fresh from the oven; sweet kolache with 2 toppings -- cottage cheese and strawberry; savoury kolache exposed; sweet kolache with 3 toppings -- far right has a prune filling)

My baking and cooking days haven't ceased -- if you are wondering about the lack of food posts of late. No Siree, I love food too much to have my work life quash my addiction for the sublime textures and tastes that good food offers. Plus, the era of google searches has brought food recipes (that I would otherwise have no access to) within a quick tip-tap on the keyboard.

Every now and again, I remember bits from my days in Houston where good food wasn't hard to find. I was hankering for savoury kolache in the style of the breakfast ones I used to have at a bakery called "The Kolache factory". A colleague/friend had introduced it to me in my early Houston living days these delightful  baby soft buns stuffed with scrambled eggs, jalapeno cheese and smokey sausage. The pillow-like pastries were worth the additional miles tagged onto my drive en route to work. I doubt if these are authentic stuffing found in a Czech Kolache but the person who infused Tex-Mex flavours to popularize these Eastern European pastries in the Southwest was genius.

So, I had to bake some Czechoslovakian-inspired kolache. I say 'inspired' only because I've never had the real McCoy in the country where it hails from, and if my Czech friend stumbled on this, she might think I was smoking some sort of herbal weed if my version differed greatly from hers. So, I protect my reporting integrity by saying that the recipe used yields kolache like the ones I've eaten plenty times in Houston.

They weren't difficult to make but like all good food, you can't rush through each step. The prunes had to soak, the fresh strawberries had to cook down into a jam all while waiting for the buttery yeast dough to rise. The filling and the dough were prepared and laid on baking trays the night before so that the following morning, all that had to be done was to spoon filling into each wide-mouthed dough parcels and leave them to bake for 25 minutes.

That Monday morning, my little people were the first to try the freshly baked sweet kolache which they tucked in between mouthfuls of cold milk. And the still warm savoury kolache stuffed with cheesy bratwurst, pickled jalapenos and hash brown were lovingly wrapped and placed in three lunch bags.

Lucky little buggers!